Wang Bing

Traces, 2014

In 2005, while doing preparatory on his film, The Ditch, Wang Bing travelled to the Gobi Desert, to the exact same places where thousands of people lived and died in the “re-education-through-labour” camps set up by the communist regime in the late fifties. He shot the site with a 35 mm camera for about one hour, with scenes of desert and abandoned bones – a landscape doomed to disappear. Now digitized and revised, these images provide excellent evidence of the events of those times, which have been virtually buried until now.