Today multiple-identity is becoming a trend. Following Zhang Yimou, his former partner Zeng Li, stage designer for "Turandot," opens his solo photo exhibition on urbanization at Three on the Bund in Shanghai.

Titled "An Epoch of Yu Gong," Zeng has been investigating China's urbanization for many years with his camera. From the advent of his photographic creation, he devised a diverse methodology for his oeuvre.

Born in 1961, Zeng grew up in Liuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. He remembers its mountains and also its new factories. After high school, Zeng attended the Central Drama Academy in Beijing, where he studied stage design.

After graduating in 1987, Zeng worked with the Beijing People's Art Theater and earned acclaim as one of China's leading stage and costume designers.

He attracted international attention in 1997 through his stage design for Zhang Yimou's production of "Turandot" in Florence and then in Beijing. He again collaborated with the celebrated film director on a ballet version of "Raise the Red Lantern" in 2001.

As China's creative community is unusually close-knit, Zeng has also been involved in projects with the leading artists and architects of his generation. He participated, for example, in the "Bunker" group exhibition that artist Cai Guoqiang organized in 2004 in a complex of military bunkers on Kinmen Island in Taiwan.

But the visual richness of Zeng's major career experience does not prepare visitors for the austerity and the quiet reserve of his photos, which reveal a very different side of his artistic temperament.

Traveling regularly by bus and bicycle back and forth to his studio, Zeng says: "I could not help but observe the accelerating pace with which many of Beijing's traditional residential neighborhoods were disappearing."

This urge became even more pressing in 2002, when Beijing was chosen to host the 2008 Olympics. Zeng realized that many of the historic yet badly dilapidated areas of the old city would be demolished in an effort to spruce up the city's image for the benefit of foreign visitors and the world media.

In his photos, Zeng does not highlight the most architecturally important or innovative buildings, but creates a visual archive of the residential structures that were the most typical of their kind.

His photos usually employ a straight-on viewpoint and avoid unusual camera angels or dramatic compositions.

The depopulated industrial zones, abandoned factories, and shut-down blast furnaces suggest Zeng's fascination with China's epic rise to industrial superpower in less than half a century.

"Now I will take my camera to the countryside to record the momentous changes in a powerful wave of 21st-century modernization in agricultural regions," says Zeng.

Perhaps for him, the countryside is another stage for him to "design and capture."

Date: through December 10, 11am-11pm
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