Looking Back is Moving Forward: Wang Wei's Railway Heritage Investigation and Preservation
Looking back is moving forward — Wang Wei Railway heritage investigation and protection
Introduction
In January 2022, when Beijing and Zhangjiakou were about to host the Winter Olympic Games, the Beijing-Zhang high-speed railway starting station Xizhimen Station East platform was included in the municipal cultural protection unit of Beijing in August 2021, which is the 30th cultural relic building protected by Wang Wei through submitting the "Application for identification of immovable Cultural relics". After a few months, the East platform that had accompanied Xizhimen station for more than 100 years disappeared and was replaced by a parking lot. The demolition behavior caused the concern and thinking of Wang Wei, who studied the railway history and the compulsory protection work.
Railway, a means of transportation invented by human beings during the Industrial Revolution, has made great contributions to the human world, changing and creating a new way of people's life. Considering the consideration of humanistic and social values, the railway is not only a means of transportation, but also a combination of the railway itself and the people, things, history and events around it, becoming the carrier of civilization and culture. In the more than 200 years of railway history, regardless of any political interpretation or judgment made by books or the media, the railway is still a modern tool that has guided mankind since the 19th century.
In the 19th century, for agrarian China, the railway was an import, a symbol of industrial civilization. Chinese people's cognition of railway has also changed with the extension of railway, from the Yihetuan "black smoke monster", means of aggression, to the royal use, coordination of national defense, and then to the stabilization of territory, means of transportation, it can be said that these all prove that railway in China has always been unable to get rid of political influence, which has led to its abnormal development at different times. Objectively, the railway once had a strong impact on the peasant consciousness and peasant economy of the Chinese people at that time, which was so strong as to destroy the impact, but promoted the modernization process. This is followed by the exposed problems, such as the Chinese people to accept foreign material civilization quickly, to accept spiritual civilization and spiritual civilization is relatively slow. As there are only relatively advanced artifacts, but no matching perfect institutional culture, extreme utilitarianism and egoistic thinking fill the whole society, and crazy dilapidated new, urban expansion and "face" projects, resulting in the disappearance of those buildings bearing history and humanity.
From the end of World War II to the 1970s, Britain and the United States carried out national transformation and industrial changes, roads and aviation were increasingly developed, and a large number of railways were dismantled. At the same time, when the trend of postmodernism widely appeared in the modern period of habit of "big demolition and construction", people found the real humanistic value of railway, but a lot of precious railway heritage has disappeared. The wave of conservation continues, and the railway heritage is being repurraised for educational and tourist purposes. In 1950, the Tawyn Railway in Wales became the first heritage railway in the world to be rescued and operated entirely by volunteers, marking the beginning of the global railway protection initiative. As a result, many heritage railways and trains have been revived.
At present, China in the process of modernization is in a period of rapid development, equivalent to the Western "modern", but has not yet entered the more humanistic characteristics of the "post-modern". This has led to the embarrassing situation of China's railway heritage. Chinese people have failed to consciously avoid the detours made by Britain and the United States. Instead of using the railway heritage as a carrier of humanity and history, they just use it as a tool and throw it away after use. Therefore, China's railway heritage is dying out at a faster rate, and the number of fully protected remains is decreasing year by year. Only the railway heritage that is officially considered representative can be protected, and most of them only retain the buildings or vehicles on the material level, failing to continue their spiritual attributes and uses. As a result, the United Kingdom and the United States recovered and retired steam locomotives from China for dynamic preservation. It can be seen that modernization is not only the possession of advanced technology such as high-speed rail, but more importantly, the possession of a modern civilized mind. Otherwise, all the "transformation" for the purpose of economic development will eventually become a regret of cultural regression.
In the past 17 years, Wang Wei has found that the speed of the cultural preservation is far less than the speed of the demolition of the railway heritage, and even the speed of the record is faster than the speed of their disappearance, and the photos taken when they were young have been forced to become "documents". In the face of reality, Wang Wei unwittingly embarked on the road of social documentary photography, while spreading the status quo of railway literature and security, positively affecting the fate of the subject in a "activism" way, so that it can develop in a healthy direction.
Write at the end, through this exhibition
I hope you can pick up your camera and use social documentary photography to positively affect the fate of the subject!
Look forward to watching you, do your best to leave precious spiritual wealth for future generations!
To those visiting the exhibition, awaken your civic awareness, engage positively with society, and dare to expose and critique reality—only then will you have the opportunity to change it!
