Tricking memory, remaking the city: Trompe l’oeil and the visual transformation of a historic city in China: Chengdu

Abstract

This article discusses how Chinese cities are transforming in visually radical ways to reconfigure their historic memories. In the midst of ‘creative city campaigns’ sweeping over China, which emphasize the discovery and exploitation of the creative-historic-cultural elements of urban pasts, Chengdu, one of China’s ‘New First-tier Cities’, epitomizes the pivotal role that visual culture plays in facilitating urban change. Grounded in critical analysis of both indigenous urban-making strategies within China and Chinese cities’ borrowing of western visual practices, this article investigates how Chengdu, as an emerging metropolis in globalizing China, introduces trompe l’oeil-style photographic installations on the site of its famous Kuanzhai Alleys (Kuanzhai xiangzi) transformation project. Urban planners in Chengdu take advantage of trompe l’oeil (‘trick-the-eye’), a post-Renaissance Western artistic innovation, to blur the boundaries between memory and reality. By transforming a vernacular architectural heritage site in Chengdu into a modern interactive cultural Disneyland, urban planners create embodied interactivity on the current tourist site of the Kuanzhai Alleys. While tourists indulge in the enchanting pleasure of a bygone urban past revived through visual tricks on the site, the people of Chengdu criticize the transformed district for failing to represent the authentic memories of the city. By revealing how the Kuanzhai Alleys becomes a site of contested urban experiences, the article probes the role of artistic creations in mediating memory and reality, the past and the present in fast-changing Chinese cities.