As you might have read, fireworks set off by employees of Chinese state broadcaster CCTV destroyed sparked a fire that destroyed the adjacent, Rem Koolhaas–designed Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Hotel statement here, report here.
Following the fire, Chinese authorities decreed that no photos or video of the fire be posted to the Internet. A decree that people pretty plainly ignored. There are even kind-of terrible macros that use the fire.
Doesn't the official versus the popular response mirror the distance between the destroyed building (hyperstylized contemporary Western architecture) and the fire's cause (traditional holiday Chinese fireworks display)? There is a play between modern and antiquated in both fire and response that to my mind captures the state of China today. That subtext was the subject of a piece by Cai Fei that I liked when I saw it in Dallas.
Cao Fei, RMB City, 2007.
With sincere regrets to the family of the firefighter who died in the blaze; a minor aesthetic observation in the face of a tragedy is only that, and not the point to take away.
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