PARKS ( CHENGDU )
Dion Bierdrager
Words and images by Dion Bierdrager.
For a city of more than 20 million people, Chengdu felt unexpectedly quiet. Nearly every car is electric. Cyclists move through wide streets. People drink tea outside small shops, unhurried.
The parks are where the city’s daily life becomes visible. People arrive in the morning and stay through the afternoon. Retirees dance in traditional clothes to music from the Xinjiang region, cosplayers pose between bamboo trees, card games seem to have been going for hours, a woman feeds her baby on a bench, old men stand still in the smoke of their own cigarettes.
Chengdu receives fewer than 1,200 hours of sunlight a year, with perhaps only ten to twenty truly clear days. When the sun appeared, the energy shifted, and people seemed to move differently. The parks were full regardless, but light, when it came, changed the register of everything. I recognised something in this. Coming from the Netherlands, another grey country, another sky that disappoints more than it delivers, I know how a clear day changes what you do, how you move, who you talk to.
These photographs were made in that in-between light, sometimes warm, sometimes not. Within a shared public space where different generations and communities briefly overlapped, all brought together by the same scarce thing.
Dion Bierdrager
Through his personal work, Dion delves into the impact of urbanization on both landscapes and communities, the significance of what we call “home”, and the complexities of our relations with the natural world.
With a critical yet curious perspective, he explores the intricate relationship between humanity and its environment – be it urban or rural, using his emotions and intuition to guide him in the creative process. By blending traditional printing techniques with a keen sense of color and light, he creates painterly images that are imbued with a sense of intimacy and warmth.
Dion earned his BA from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and is currently based between Amsterdam and Seoul.
