Shangri-La

Shangri-La is a 2005 video installation documenting various attempts to recreate its fictional, eponymous subject, in the real-life Shangri-La, a town in China’s Yunnan province renamed in 2002 to attract tourism. By hiring local non-actors and using the existing economies to reproduce symbols such as the sacred snow mountain, the project reflects on the link between tourism, site specific artistic practices and documentary practices. These situations, shot in a hand-held and documentary fashion, are often rendered surrealist, as when one sees a mirror-faceted mountain being driven across the barren landscape. In some way, the growth in Shangri-la can be seen as a microcosm of China itself. The capitalist industry of tourism props up a facade of the utopian socialist ideology, giving China it’s unknown and unmapped blank slate to project it’s fantasies and desires. As any touristic destination is made of locals and foreigners, the question of not ever knowing another person’s perspective, lingers just below the surface of every interaction.