The Monte Clark Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Greg Girard.

PHANTOM SHANGHAI
Photographs by Greg Girard
May 5 — June 12, 2005

Opening reception: Thursday, May 5th, at 6:00pm
Artist in attendance.

The Monte Clark Gallery is pleased to announce Phantom Shanghai, photographer Greg Girard’s first exhibition in Canada. Girard was born and raised in Vancouver but has been living in Asia since 1983 where he has worked extensively as a photojournalist for magazines such as Time and Newsweek. Since 1983 he has pursued personal projects such as his study of the Kowloon Walled City which culminated in the book City of Darkness (1993).

In 1994 Girard began photographing in Shenzhen, just across Hong Kong’s border with China, a city of millions that grew from a village in just a decade. Here he began to study the transformation of the Chinese landscape from agriculture to industry, farmland to city. In his series Factory Girls, Girard registered the exodus of young migrants, largely young women, from the countryside to the factories of China’s Special Economic Zones. Since 1998, Girard has lived in Shanghai. Shanghai had been little changed physically since Mao established the People’s Republic in 1949, but in the mid-nineteen nineties the city began an accelerated program of industrial and economic development. Girard’s ongoing photo series Phantom Shanghai depicts the effects of this transformation in a style that balances lyricism and anthropology.

Girard has lectured and exhibited internationally. Recent exhibitions include the Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju, South Korea, 1997; Cities of the Twenty-first Century, The Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 2000, and the traveling exhibition Cities on the Move presented at the Hayward Gallery, London, 1999, and Kiasma, Helsinki, 2001.

In 2002 Girard co-founded the picture agency documentChina, an online archive of contemporary photography from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. : www.documentchina.com

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