Karl Lemieux traveled to China with Swedish sound artist and composer BJ Nilsen and a small crew to film Yujiapu, a ghost town located in the Binhai New Region of Tianjin, China. Yujiapu is a huge real estate project that was developed in the style of Manhattan in New York and cost more than 200 billion yuan (the equivalent of almost 40 billion Canadian dollars). The project was interrupted and the city remained uninhabited for almost six years. This film is made up of aerial shots which capture the landscape from the heights. He uses the lines and frames of skyscrapers to create abstract elements that project a spectral dimension of urbanity, to which is added the essential contribution of BJ Nilsen's sound work.
This version is a pre-cut or study of the original video material, which was used to make the 35mm CinémaScope vertical film of the same name.
Credits
Technical information
Documentation
Yujiapu (2017) was presented as a 9 minutes installation in 35mm (CinémaScope - vertical) and a 30 minutes performance on six 16mm projectors.