Ordos

How I ended up in Ordos is already half the story. I am friends with a Berlin art dealer who represents some of the most important contemporary Chinese artists. Not long ago this art dealer asked me to travel to Beijing and take portraits of his artists. At a dinner there I met a Chinese collector who had become very wealthy in trading natural resources. He invited me to his home, told me that he had built a museum for modern art in the middle of the desert, and two days later I was already sitting in the airplane on my way to Inner Mongolia. That is how I ended up in Ordos. Ordos lies eight hundred kilometers northwest of Beijing, and it is part of a major plan to establish urban centers in the sparsely settled, underdeveloped provinces of China. There is a great amount of rural flight in China; people are crowding into the cities, and Beijing and Shanghai are on the verge of merging into a conglomerate. For this reason new cities are springing up everywhere, and one of them is Ordos. The city is planned to hold four or five million people at some point, but now Ordos is mostly inhabited by the workers who are building it. The museum was one of the first buildings to be finished. It is situated on a hill, a nested building with broad windows. Although I knew that this patron of the arts had his private collection on view here, I was surprised to see not only Chinese but also western artists: Jörg Immendorff, Stephan Balkenhol, Katharina Sieverding. I spent a whole day in Ordos. When I returned to Beijing, the collector asked me if I would document the construction of the city. The landscape surrounding Ordos consists for the most part of steppe, on the edge of the Gobi Desert. The sky is white, the air clear and clean. In winter it is very cold and in summer hot and dry, the light glistening. Well into the nineteenfifties mostly only nomads lived here, but the land is rich in natural resources, and today the province of Inner Mongolia is one of the wealthiest in China.