Urban stars will shine. In all their artificial opulence, they beckon, as you are enamored by the sight.
The sight of a glorious fabric of modernization.
A fabric of overzealous fashionistas, breathtaking heights, blinding nightlights, and glamorous billboards to preach the sexiest of all post-modern religions: consumerism.
And they consume, construct, contrive.
And they breed your greed in a crowded river of international currency, for you to brand yourself with everlasting youth in a syringe.
We who reside beyond the ancient walls of the Forbidden City experience modernization at the speed of the subway train. The simultaneous birth and death of buildings have rendered us a society which thrives on its obsession to abstract, transform, destroy and multiply.
Accompanied by paranoia and despair rooted in the endless pursuit for wealth and lost time.
Have the capitalist machines and the communist decadents found the means to coexist? Have we chosen the paradoxical path of globalization in the name of national pride?
We must put an end to such dehumanizing transience and superficial abstractions.
We must stop celebrating the death of conventions.
It is our duty to redefine the meaning modernity in the context of our own history and evolution.
We shall no longer boundlessly, shamelessly, embrace this contamination of Western pop culture as the Eastern ideal.
(inserted 12-page manifesto)
This landscape of paranoia is fabricated by the hyperactive fusion of technology, pop culture, capitalism as well as the remnants of a communist State structure. It is through architecture, the science, knowledge and understanding of a society can be distilled into a concentrated, concrete form. And buildings and spaces are capable of arousing natural social relationships, and invoking healthy psychological awareness.
We carry the task of terminating this progressive impoverishment of an ancient architectural style.
We must employ historical certainties of realism in favor of this ambiguous abstraction, used as brutal instruments of dehumanization.
In a complex system of beauty and decay, physical and psychological, material and spiritual, we need to find that one moment of clarity that defines the meaning of our existence.
