Ou Ning is well aware of the effects of the mainland's rampant urbanisation. As construction workers toil outside his gleaming new office block in central Beijing, his non-profit Shao Foundation is curating an exhibition about the social costs of development.
Jia Zhangke: 24 City showcases the memorabilia of workers from state-owned Factory 420, in Chengdu, which in 2006 was sold to property developers who plan to transform it into a luxury real-estate project named 24 City. Jia directed a docudrama of the same name that recorded workers' memories of the plant, and during filming the crew collected the items that are on display in the show.
The factory was originally relocated with its staff from Shenyang in Liaoning province to Chengdu in Sichuan province in the late 1950s, at the height of political tensions with the Soviet Union.
Factory 420 became a virtual city in its own right, with 30,000 workers and housing, a hospital, schools and even a soda plant for 100,000 people.
Ou sets the exhibition's tone by recreating Factory 420's weishengqiang walls, the lower half of which are painted green (a common colour scheme in mainland factories in the 1980s). It's an apt backdrop for the lightbox photo collages of workers who contributed memorabilia from the plant and described life there.
The show also features unused footage from the film 24 City, notably an interview with a worker who was injured in a factory accident and another with a worker sent to study in Italy in the 1980s.