New Culture Movement新文化运动 (2001-2006)

In Han Bing's "New Culture Movement" series, laborer, families, and even school children, stand in front of half-constructed homes, construction sites, and schoolyards, bricks hefted in hand like little red books. Although repudiated by the "upwardly mobile" urban society as "backward," the lowly brick is still the best most rural families can expect. With their painfully limited means, rural families must often decide between a marriage home or higher education for their son (daughters rarely get either)—signaling the rise of a new culture of construction at the expense of education, a fixation on private possession, an almost desperate attempt to cordon off a private space to call one's own, and the perhaps illusory dream of becoming part of the propertied class in a "society of modest prosperity" that denies their claims of membership—betraying the distance between the official fantasies of China's modernity and the majority's experience of it.

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