Hiding in New York No. 7 — Made in China, 2012. Photo: courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art, © Liu Bolin

Liu Bolin’s images invite a game akin to Where’s Waldo?. In some of the Chinese artist’s incredible photos, it’s clear where he is standing; in others, like the one above, it’s much harder to spot the outline of his body at all. It’s for this that Bolin has been called “The Invisible Man.”

Liu Bolin: The invisible manIn today’s TED Talk, Bolin shares the meaning behind these images — that they are a way to examine the relationship between culture and its development, and to speak for those who are rendered invisible by the Chinese government, by consumer culture or simply by the circumstances of history.

“From the beginning, this series has a protesting, reflective and uncompromising spirit,” says Bolin.  “I think that in art, an artist’s attitude is the most important element. If an artwork is to touch someone, it must be the result of not only technique, but also the artist’s thinking and struggles in life.”

In this talk, Bolin shows us the very first image in the series, taken in November of 2005. He reveals many, many more images too, giving a peak into his process of being painted into the background — which can take anywhere from 3 to 4 hours to 3 to 4 days. The talk ends with a timelapse, showing how Bolin disappeared into the TED stage. Watch the talk now »

Meanwhile, in this gallery, Bolin shares many more of his fantastical and powerful images, courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art.

Hiding in the City No. 92 — Temple of Heaven, 2010. Photo: courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art, © Liu Bolin

Teatro alla Scala, 2010. Photo: courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art, © Liu Bolin

Hiding in the City — Mobile Phone, 2012. Photo: courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art, © Liu Bolin

Hiding in the City No. 91 — Great Wall, 2010. Photo: courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art, © Liu Bolin

Hiding in the City — Family Photo, 2012. Photo: courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art, © Liu Bolin

Hiding in the City No. 86 — Bird’s Nest, 2009. Photo: courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art, © Liu Bolin

Hiding in the City No. 16 and No. 17 — People’s Policeman, 2006. Photo: courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art, © Liu Bolin

Dragon Series — Panel 3 of 9, 2010. Photo: courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art, © Liu Bolin

Hiding in the City No. 71 — Bulldozer, 2008. Photo: courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art, © Liu Bolin

Hiding in the City No. 94 — In The Woods, 2010. Photo: courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art, © Liu Bolin

Read a Q&A with Bolin from TED2013, in which he talks a bit more about his process »

For more information on Liu Bolin, and to see much more of his work, head to his site at Eli Klein Fine Art »

ShaoLan: Learn to read Chinese ... with ease!Her solution? A method she calls “Chineasy.” To achieve basic literacy, Hsueh says, you need only know 1,000 characters, and the top 200 allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature. Chineasy involves pairing characters with facial expressions, body movements and images that conjure up words in English.

In her talk, Hsueh moves through eight foundational characters, describing mnemonic devices and showing artful depictions. “Open your mouth as wide as possible until it’s square,” she says. Are you doing it? Voila, the character for mouth: 口. Hsueh shows a graphic her team has designed of a person going for a walk, based on the character for person: 人. Fire is the character for person with what look like two arms waving, as if the person is engulfed in flames and yelling, “Help!”: 火. Hsueh also takes us through tree (木), mountain (山), sun (日), moon (月), and door (門), which “looks like a pair of saloon doors in the Wild West.”

These eight characters “are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters,” Hsueh explains. Using Chineasy’s simple, beautiful illustrations, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to many other words and phrases. In this talk, Hsueh takes us through almost 30 characters; here, some more examples based on those foundational eight.

1. In her talk, Hsueh shows the Chinese character for person, 人, which looks like a person strolling along. Multiply by two, and you’ve got the character for everyone:
   .
2. In her talk, Hsueh shows us how combining fire (火) and mountain (山) gives us a volcano (火山). What happens when we add a mouth (口) to a volcano? Think about it: the mouth of a volcano is … a crater!
   .
3. Hsueh shows us that the character for big (大) looks like a person (人) with her arms outstretched, as if to say, “Sooooo big!” Combine those two, and you get adult (大人):’
   .
4. Write two suns (日) side by side and you get the character for “bright”: 昍. On her Facebook page, Hsueh writes, “I promise you, this is a character that will impress your Chinese friends. This is such a rare character that 99 percent of Chinese native speakers/readers would struggle to tell you what it is, never mind how to pronounce it.”
   .
5. Here’s a really clever one that Hsueh brings up in her talk: the character for “to dodge” or “to avoid” is composed of a person (人) inside a door (門), as if the person is sneaking out! 閃 What she adds on her Facebook page is that this character has a second meaning, “flash.” As she explains, “this person is sneaking out at such speed that the shape of him dashing resembles a streak of light.”
   

Jennifer 8. Lee hunts for General TsoIn this TED Talk, journalist Jennifer 8. Lee shares the origins of some of America’s favorite “Chinese” food, and takes us on a culinary tour of Chinese restaurants around the world — whose menus often do not resemble those of restaurants in China.

This week’s TEDWeekends on the Huffington Post explores culinary cross-cultural evolutions, with great essays about the origins of our associations between cuisines and cultures. Below, find three great essays to pique your interest. And make you hungry.

Jennifer 8. Lee: Made in the USA… Chinese Food

When a dish really hits a nerve with the American palate, it can take off across the entire country, facilitated by food vendors’ freedom to copy good ideas. We saw it happen with General Tso’s chicken. We’re seeing it happen with other Asian-influenced culinary creations too…

When I was researching my book on Chinese food in America, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, it puzzled me why Korean cuisine (unlike many of its Asian brethren) had not gone mainstream yet.

Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian and Vietnamese restaurants had all hit critical mass, with footholds in suburban towns. But Korean cuisine remained mostly ensconced within Korean-American communities, with an occasional lone outpost defiantly offering bibimbap. This puzzled me, because Korean savory barbecued meats — short ribs, grilled marinated beef — should be widely appealing to an American palate, which never met a barbecue recipe it didn’t like. But Korean restaurants basically remained serving Korean clientele, with the occasional Chinese family, like mine, that celebrated our Thanksgivings there. Read the full essay »

Fabio Parasecoli: General Tso Chicken: An Immigrant Life Saga

When I was studying Asian languages in Italy, back in the 1980s, the few Chinese restaurants open in my native city of Rome only served two kinds of desserts: fried fruit and fried ice cream — the unlikely creation that Jennifer 8. Lee singles out in her TED Talk about Chinese American food. When I moved to Beijing to pursue my studies, I soon discovered that these crunchy treats are unheard of in China. Chinese cooks in Italy likely came up with the concoctions to meet the expectations of Italian customers.

Fried ice cream, just like the General Tso’s Chicken, highlight the role of immigrants in facilitating the global circulation of culinary traditions, and in shaping the food of their host communities. These two examples show how moving populations have practiced the adaptation, assimilation, and appropriation of foreign or unfamiliar flavors, dishes, techniques, and behaviors all around the world. Culinary exchanges have been taking place for a very long time in the most remote corners of the globe, and they were not always peaceful and enjoyable. Lee reminds us that nineteenth century Asian immigrants to the U.S. were disparaged for eating rice, instead of more civilized fare. Sicilian cuisine still echoes the food traditions of the Islamic communities that once ruled the Mediterranean island in the Middle Ages. Roti became a common dish in many Caribbean locations after farmers were brought from India to work in the sugarcane plantations after the abolition of slavery. Read the full essay »

Theodore Johnson: African Americans and the Watermelon Stereotype

A photo of my expecting mother eating a slice of watermelon is a family favorite. She attributes my lifelong disdain for the fruit to the fact that she ate it every day while pregnant with me. I carry this story in the form of an oval, deep green blemish on my left hand. It’s true — I’m a black man with a watermelon for a birthmark.

In many countries and cultures around the world, this would be unremarkable. But in the United States, where watermelon is associated with historic African-American stereotypes, my birthmark takes on a more complex symbolism. Just as the undesirable leftovers of farm animals, such as pig intestines and feet, are linked to the slave diet, watermelon is the food most associated with the 19th and 20th century depictions of blacks as lazy simpletons. Read the full essay »

It’s a bootleg copy of one of our most popular Netflix shows, a curated collection called “Sex, Secrets and Love.” You can watch this collection yourself on Netflix Streaming, or find it on DailyMotion. Or, if you’d prefer a hard copy, did you know: You can order up a DVD of your favorite six TED Talks through our DVD on Demand service. And as with this bootleg above, you can make your own cover art …

Photo: Jason Wishnow. The text at right begins: Are you going to die for love? Are you going to lie or cheat for love?

It’s hard not to get a lump in your throat when you read about the grueling conditions in Chinese factories. It’s hard not to feel guilt about those working 70 hours a week in Foxconn factories where iPhones and iPads are assembled, or to feel shocked at revelations that workers in toy factories regularly receive fines for going to the bathroom without permission.

But as Leslie T. Chang, the author of the book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, explains in this talk from TEDGlobal 2012, those emotions obscure a larger point — that factory workers aren’t simply toiling to provide cheap products to the West. They are also toiling to make products for their own people, as well as to change their personal circumstances.

“We, the beneficiaries of globalization seem to exploit these victims with every purchase we make and the injustice feels embedded in the products themselves,” Chang says. “This simple narrative equating Western demand and Chinese suffering is appealing … but it’s also inaccurate and disrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways … By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets, we have rendered the individuals on the other ends into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone.”

In China, more than 150 million workers — 1/3 of them women — have left villages to work in factories, hotels and construction sites. So who are these women? Chang spent two years in Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta, interviewing assembly line workers to learn what their lives are like and how they process their experiences.

To hear more about what Chang found, listen to her moving talk. Below, see photos and bios of the two young women Chang got to know best during her research.

Name: Lu Qingmin
Age: 26
Hometown: Yangshan Village, Hubei Province
Current job: Purchaser in a factory making construction cranes
Past jobs: Assembly-line worker in electronics factory; clerk in mobile-phone factory; human-resources clerk in rubber factory; human-resources clerk in handbag factory; purchasing assistant in hardware factory
Ambition: “A person should have some ambition while she is young, so that in old age she can look back on her life and feel that it was not lived to no purpose.”
Quote: “Desire is eternally unsatisfied. Don’t you think so?”

Name: Wu Chunming
Age: 37
Hometown: Jiugongqiao Township, Hunan Province
Current job: Signing up franchisees for a chain of traditional-style teahouses; private-equity investments.
Past jobs: Assembly-line worker in toy factory; selling health products; sales training for company selling funeral plots; selling Tibetan medicine; newspaper reporter; selling building materials; running building-materials wholesale company; running plastic-injection molding machine company; selling life insurance; selling feminine-hygiene and children’s products; selling imported wine, cosmetics, and air fresheners; selling synthetic leather for shoes
Ambition: “I want to keep raising the quality of my life. I want to find new kinds of happiness.”
Quote: “We were born into the world poor through no fault of our own. But to die poor is a sin.”

As Chang sums it up, “It is globalization — this chain that begins in the Chinese farming village and ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feet — that has changed the way these millions of people work, marry, live and think. … When you talk to workers, they don’t say, ‘I want better hot water in the showers, I want a nicer room, I want a TV set.’ It would be nice to have those things, but that’s not why they’re in the city. From their perspective, where they’re coming from is much worse and where they’re going is much better.”

Below, in a TED Blog exclusive recorded at TED2010, Sankar explains how his company, Palantir Technologies, helped create software to solve a mystery: Who hacked the Dalai Lama’s email?

Here is the story.

In 2008, an unnamed country received an email from China warning them not to host the Dalai Lama for a scheduled visit. The email was startling for a single reason: The upcoming visit was not public knowledge yet. And so the country brought in a team of data experts to find out where the message had come from and how this sensitive info had been leaked. The team used Palantir’s data analysis tools to help crack the case.

As it turns out, the Dalai Lama’s email had been targeted by spies using a practice known as “spear-fishing” — in which hackers do research on a specific person to create an email that looks like it came from someone they know well. The email includes an attachment that, if opened, gives hackers access to the target’s computer without their knowledge. As Sankar explains, hackers can not only read your email, export documents and send emails as you — they can even turn on your webcam and hear every word you say.

In this case, the hackers had downloaded negotiation documents off the Dalai Lama’s computer.

“These guys literally took the goods while sitting at home in their pajamas,” says Sankar in the talk.

But in the hands of a team of human data experts, Palantir’s technology helped showed something even more sinister at work. About 1,300 computers in 103 countries had been infected in the same way. The computers belonged to both individuals and companies with interests in Southeast Asia. And this network had existed for a shocking two years before it was made visible.

It’s a story that should warn us all to be very careful when it comes to opening attachments.

When it comes to the internet, the Chinese government may have taken inspiration from the Great Wall of China and created the largest digital boundary in the world, blocking 500 million users from accessing the global-standard social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. But blogger Michael Anti, whose real name is Jing Zhao, explains in a vivid talk given at TEDGlobal 2012 that the internet landscape of the world’s most populous country is far more complicated than that simple story. Chinese innovators have copycatted popular Western social media sites. While we have Google, China has Baidu. While we have Facebook, China has RenRen. While we have Twitter, China has Weibo — and 300 million microbloggers using it, as 140 characters allows for a full paragraph to be written in Chinese.

In his talk, Anti looks at some of the fascinating ways in which social media are changing Chinese life, and shifting the balance of power in the country. For example, after local authorities tried to cover up a train crash in Wenzhou in 2011, people took to social media sites to criticize the move. With more than 10 million messages about the cover-up visible for all to read, an official investigation was eventually launched. Anti also explains that on Weibo, people regularly tweet their misfortunes, waiting for them to be picked up by popular micobloggers and shared widely.

So what exactly is huge on ChinaNet? Below, a look at 8 popular memes, many political in tone and others the Chinese equivalent of Keyboard Cat.

Free CGC

When Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng escaped from house arrest this spring, this meme — a send-up of a Kentucky Fried Chicken ad — began spreading across the Chinese internet. Why? Because while his name, and even his initials, were blocked by the government, the image got through the country’s censors. The spreading of the meme has been called “guerrilla activism.” [Christian Science Monitor]

Dress the Nude

China Central Television inspired this hilarious meme when they aired a broadcast about an exhibit at the National Museum of China … and blurred the genitals on Michaelangelo’s famous David. Ever since, internet users have poked fun at the “anti-vulgarism campaign” by putting clothes on famous nude works of art. [Ministry of Tofu]

Singing Schoolchildren

The song “Shang Bu Qi” has become something of an anthem of the Chinese internet. So when this video appeared on Youku — the Chinese version of YouTube — featuring a bus full of schoolchildren singing the song, it instantly went viral. [China Smack]

Dark Glasses Portraits

Another show of support for Chen Guangcheng, Chinese internet users snapped photos of themselves wearing the blind activist’s signature sunglasses. [Christian Science Monitor]

The Salt Panic Incident

In 2011, China was very fearful of radiation following the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan. When chatter began that salt could fight the effects, thanks to its iodine content, people began buying stores out of salt. And images of empty salt shelves became all the rage on the internet. [China Whisper]

Grass Mud Horse

These alpacas might look cute and fuzzy, but they are an example of a highly political meme in China. Grass mud horse, or Cao Ni Ma, first appeared in January 2009 as a symbol of anti-censorship sentiment in this video. Earlier this month, the alpaca symbol was seen on many signs in a protest in Hong Kong as Chinese President Hu Jintao celebrated the 15th anniversary of the city’s handover to China. On the internet, July 1 was officially dubbed “Grass Mud Horse Day,” as high numbers of people posted alpaca images. [Tea Leaf Nation, NY Times]

Sunflower seeds

Similarly, the sunflower seed has become an online symbol for artist Ai Weiwei, whose name and likeness where quickly scrubbed from the Chinese internet when he was detained in 2011. (Watch the talk Ai Weiwei made for TED2011, just weeks before he was put under arrest in China and his studio destroyed.) As supporters realized that Weiwei’s nicknames, and even puns related to him, were also being blocked, they channeled his famous sunflower fields installation at the Tate Modern as a form of protest. [Fast Company]

Pu-Wen-Er

For this highly popular meme, three photos are cobbled together — one representing the “ordinary youth,” another representing the “artistic youth” and finally the “idiotic youth.” The meme became so popular so quickly that gained a Chinese acronym, 普文二. [Ministry of Tofu]

The TED Blog would like to extend special thanks to An Xiao Mina, whose research on Chinese memes formed the framework for many of the articles above. Watch her speak at MIT’s Personal Democracy Forum and read her piece in The Atlantic, comparing the Chen Guangcheng meme above to the Trayvon Martin hoodie meme. And check out her column on Chinese political and social memes at 88-Bar.com.

A sick brick

“I want to make my friends understand: China is too complicated,” begins Michael Anti. “You can’t tell a one-size story.” According to some, China is a brick, helping the world economy. According to others, it’s a sick country, with no access to Facebook. (The second phrase was as claimed in the Facebook IPO papers.)

“If you’re a fan of Game of Thrones, you know how important a wall is for an old kingdom. It prevents the weird things from the north,” says Anti. China also had a wall to prevent invaders. But now, he says, it has a great firewall, the biggest in the world. That wall works to separate China from the world, and also separates Chinese internally, into sections.

In the past 15 years, Anti says, there have been non-stop cat and mouse games between authorities and the netizens. There are 500 million internet users in China. Even if it were totally isolated from the world, the internet there is still booming. He shows how there are versions of every service Westerners are familiar with: Google, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are all replaced by equivalents. The government blocks all the international services, and clones spring up inside. The policy is simple: clone and block. This fulfills two needs: to satisfy people’s need for social media, but also the need to keep the server in Beijing.

Some leaders, says Anti, haven’t understood this. Mubarak shut down the internet, so people had no choice but to go to the street. In Tunisia, the government allowed Facebook, and didn’t keep control of the servers.

Booming even with censorship

But the firewall and control of the servers doesn’t mean that social media isn’t powerful within China. In July 2011, there was a train wreck in the city of Wenzhou. Immediately afterward, authorities tried to keep quiet, “to literally bury the train.” In response, there were 10 million criticisms on social media platforms. The minister was fired and jailed.

One of the reasons that Chinese tweets have so much power, says Anti, is that they have three times the information volume as English tweets — 140 characters is a paragraph in Chinese. Furthermore, Weibo, the Twitter equivalent, is actually more like Facebook than Twitter, allowing comments and other ways of interacting. With 300 million users, it’s the biggest media platform in China. According to Anti, “It has become the media platform. Anything not mentioned in Weibo does not appear to have occurred for the Chinese public.”

Anti says that this is enabling the people to have strong voices, because they are able to tweet their stories. Call it “a Weibo petition.” Some stories are picked up and re-tweeted by popular online personalities — reporters, lawyers, actors — while others put pressure on local government. It’s becoming a real public sphere.

But there is a flip side. Weibo has a sophisticated censorship system. You can’t post the name of the president of the country, or even search for the surname of the top leaders. If you mention words like “get together” or “meet up” in a post, it might be automatically data-mined, recorded or sent to a pool for analyzing. So why is it sometimes successful?

A complicated picture

Something important is happening in the cat and mouse game, says Anti. There is the big cat — the central government — but also local cats, the local government. The central government tries very hard to control the local governments, which have no access to the data. Again, the servers are all in Beijing.

The most interesting question about the train crash is not why there were 10 million critical posts, but why in the first five days the central government allowed a window of free speech. Simple, says Anti, it was “because even the top leaders were fed up with this guy. They wanted an excuse to punish him. This kind of freedom is targeted.”

Social media has become a political tool of the governing party. This is new technology, but is culturally an update of the cultural revolution, which destroyed every local government.

We are the mouse, says Anti, and the mouse should always fight with the cats. And this fight isn’t restricted to China. In the West there were attempts to restrict internet freedoms, cats with names like SOPA and PIPA. Anti reminds us that “Facebook and Google claim they are friends of the mouse, but sometimes we see they are dating the cats.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Think about the things you use every day — and about the people who make them. Leslie Chang is a journalist who has spent years in China to talk to the workers who make the products we use, voices that have been missing from much of the discussion about labor, global markets and exploitation.

“This is a conversation that often brings up a lot of guilt,” she says. A common part of the conversation is the question, ”What’s wrong with a world where a person working on an iPhone assembly line can’t afford to buy one?” Chinese factories are equated with guilt over our compulsive overconsumption. But, says Chang, this is misleading and inaccurate.

In fact, Chang says, it’s actually rather self-centered to imagine that we’ve willed into being this world where people work in horrible conditions to make us our things. Workers themselves don’t just go into factories to feed the world’s needs, they do it to earn money, to learn new skills and to see the world. What’s missing in all of our conversations is the voices of the workers themselves. She quotes from some of the workers she spoke with, all women 18 or 19 years old:

• “My mother tells me to go home and get married, but if I get married now I can only marry an ordinary worker, so I’m not in a hurry.”
• “When I went home for the New Year, everyone said I had changed. They asked me what have you done to change so much. I said I studied and worked hard. If you tell them more they won’t understand.”
• “Now after I get off work, I study English because in the future our customers won’t just be Chinese, so we need to learn more languages.”

She went to the city of Dongguan, talking to those workers. They talked about many things, but barely mentioned were the living conditions, which were still better than their home villages. Interestingly, the workers never talked about the products they made, and couldn’t describe what they were. Marx saw this as the tragedy of the workers, the alienation from the products they fashion — unlike artisans of the past.

“But just because a worker spends her time making a piece of something, does not mean that she becomes a piece of something.” The workers, Chang found, don’t care about the products they make. They care about other things: how much can they save, how long should they stay, how much they need to get married, to buy a car or apartment, or to put a child through school.

The workers have an abstract relationship with the product of their labor. One, named Lin, once gave her a Coach change purse. Chang expected it to be a knockoff, but it turned out to be real. Lin’s factory was making them, and they were handed out as gifts to Lin’s whole family. But those bags have a curious currency. They’re not worthless, but they are not worth anything close to their retail price, since a worker in Dongguan doen’t know anyone who wants to buy one. ”What would Marx have made of these workers? Their relationship to their work is far more complicated, and funny, than imagined.” And yet, she says, “his view persists, a tendency to see the workers as faceless masks.”

Chang has watched Lin over several years. She worked in several factories, and then in a purchasing department. She married another worker, gave birth to two children, and bought a used Buick for herself and an apartment for her parents. Recently, she went back to get a job in another purchasing department. Lin told her, ”A person should have some ambition when she is young, so when she is old she can look back on her life and feel that it was not lived to no purpose.”

There are 150 million such workers like her in China, one-third of them women — making th the largest migration in history. “The migration has changed the way these people live and marry and work and think. Very few of them want to go back to the way things were.”

When Chang first went to interview the workers, she worried that they wouldn’t talk with her, or that the scene would be terrible. “Instead, I found young women who were brave and funny and generous.”

She’s kept the purse that Lin gave her as a reminder that “The things you imagine sitting in your office or your library are not how you find them when you go out into the world.”

After the talk, Chris Anderson asked her the question, “If you had one minute with Apple’s head of manufacturing, what would you say?”

“One minute?” she asked back. “The thing about the workers is how self-motivated and resourceful they are.” What they want most is education. They’ll take classes at night. And so, “If you really want to help these workers, start small, focused classes. When you talk to workers, that’s what they say — they don’t want hot water or shorter hours, but education.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

"Manufactured landscapes" is based on the work of photographer — and 2005 TED Prize winner (watch his speech) — Ed Burtynsky, whose camera has captured stunning images of man-transformed landscapes around the world.

Burtynsky is not much interested in micro: his focus is on vastness, on the scale of the environmental scars and transformations brought forth by industry, energy production and transportation. The documentary (trailer) is a hybrid: it’s a meditation that makes very little use of words, leaving it to images and
situational sounds and noises to tell the story, and at the same time a
convincing illustration of the monstrosity of today’s global trade.
Although Baichwal shows images from Canada, California and Bangladesh
– and makes generous use of Burtynsky’s TEDPrize speech — the movie’s
main character is China, the "manufacture to the world": there,
Burtynsky, followed by Baichwal’s cameras, has shot factories, huge
container ports, quarries, the Three Gorges Dam, electronics
graveyards, the rapid urbanization of Shanghai. (Another great movie, recently, has shown some of this within a fictional frame: Gianni Amelio’s "The Missing Star").

Burtynsky’s work (see his books) can be unsettling. He extracts beautiful, sometimes poetic images from outrageous alterations and destructions of the environment. He calls himself an artist — not a reporter — and refrains from judging what he photographs or from politicizing it,
wanting, as he said at TED, to "make people think harder about our
planet’s future" without suggesting them a direction. As the film goes
I find myself thinking of painters: Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian,
Salvador Dalì because, respectively, Burtynsky’s photos of a computer
components dump, the stacks of containers in the port of Tianjin, and
the lunar shipbreaking beach of Chittagong (Bangladesh) oddly remind of
their artworks.

The photographer has a rationale for aestheticizing this devastation: that’s a way to gain access.
Most of what Burtynsky photographs is on private land: "My work is
mostly negotiation, with some photography thrown in", he said half-jokingly at the
premiere in San Francisco. There is a scene in the movie where he is
shown with his assistants and an interpreter trying to talk Chinese
officials into opening the gates to a neverending coal yard, and the
key sentence is "we will make it beautiful". Asked how he convinced
factory managers to gather all their thousands of employees on a street
for the picture that makes the poster of the movie (see image),
Burtynsky explained that what Westerners see as a robotization of
workers, the Chinese proudly consider an organizational and industrial
achievement.

This discrepancy echoes throughout the documentary. It powerfully reminds us
that "stuff" doesn’t just happen, that it comes from somewhere,
although we tend to forget or ignore it (thought of the impact of the
extraction industry lately?) And it illustrates how, as we transform
nature, we redefine who we are and our relationship to the planet.