Separating the strands of a 'work in progress'

In 2007, Urban China - primarily an architecture magazine published from Beijing, but essentially an attempt to chart China's progress toward modernization at breakneck speed - was invited to participate at the Kassel Documenta 12. It responded to the call of this somewhat quirky and extremely avant-garde show of contemporary art and design, held every five years in Germany, by trying to figure out the answers to three questions lobbed at it.

These were highly philosophical questions raised by the Documenta, which did not elicit answers that could be spontaneous or absolute. But editor Jiang Jun and his crack team of writers brainstormed and arrived at certain responses.

The answer to "Is modernity our antiquity?" lay in China's socialistic new village which, Jiang points out, had its roots "in the stratocratic government of the 1900s", even though the process seemed to have started in the wake of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).