The photographs collected here are scarcely art, but are artfully deceptive. They may give a hint of China's world, mostly cityscapes from various parts of the country. It will be no more than a hint, and to a traveler may often prove false. Everyone with a camera is seduced by the photogenic moment, and commonly that moment has little to do with the other 86,399 seconds in a day. The first temptation in China is to photograph an old man carrying two buckets on a bamboo pole, a building with a swoopy roof and a three wheeled taxi. Well, you can find those, but you can also find hundreds (thousands?) of square kilometers of ugly concrete housing blocks as well as some extremely modern architecture, traffic jams, and numberless very ordinary people in ordinary clothes whom you would never dream of photographing. Enjoy.

Thor May
Wuhan, PRC, April 2000