Shanghai Planet

About the Photographer

Blasco, Isidro

Spanish, b. 1962 Madrid

Isidro Blasco assembles photographic sculptures using pictures of urban architecture and common building materials. His large-scale installations and three-dimensional wall-hangings offer a raw, fragmented vision of city life where construction is a dominant theme.

The piece Shanghai Planet (2008) transforms Shanghai’s dense cityscape into a circular, planet-like configuration. A distinctive skyline forms the perimeter of the work, but the center of the construction looks unfinished with a hole revealing a wooden, underlying structure. The rapid modernization of Shanghai has brought the city new skyscrapers and up-to-date storefronts, but also construction sites and pits dug for new buildings. The half-built assembly of Blasco’s piece becomes metaphoric for a patchwork transformation that is still ongoing in urban China. Pictures of other cities, such as New York and Madrid, encircle “Shanghai Planet”. Notable skyscrapers rise from each city’s surface and distinguish one metropolis from another. China's growth has coincided with the expansion of international, multi-continental trade. Blasco depicts the world’s urban centers as a cluster of satellites, suggesting that globalization has fragmented the earth into a network of distanced destinations centered around Shanghai.

Isidro Blasco was born in Madrid, Spain in 1962, and has lived in New York City since 1996. He has received numerous grants and fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in Visual Arts (2000-2001) and the Rockefeller Foundation grant for residency at Bellagio, Italy (2001-2002). His work is held publicly at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York among others.