The City

The city where I once lived is called Jinan in China, and it is the capital of Shandong province. In 2008, the population of the city reached approximately 5.5 million. It is not only a huge number on a statistical table, but also some actual feelings that permeate our daily life such as the crowded street, traffic jam, dirty air and so on.

The picture above was taken in my apartment when I was living in Jinan. At that day, it was a quite fine day and we hadn’t seen such a good weather for a very long time. Then, I thought about it. Why does city make us so hard to see a good weather in our daily life? Can it be changed? Therefore, I transferred this picture into my computer and edited it by Photo Shop. It should be a very nice picture, but I adjusted the contrast and added some filters in order to make this picture more sharp and dirty. In my point of view, a city should be squalid and cowered. People living in the city would feel depressive and anxious, so that I made this picture like contractible eyeshot. When people see this picture, they will feel hopeless and worry about the situation about our environment, which is the purpose of making this picture.

Sometimes, I wondered about why so many people from the countryside wanted to get involved into a life like this. Is this because here we can get more opportunities for jobs or just want to change our living conditions? Then I doubted who should be responsible for our environment, and how can we prevent this from happening instead of dealing with the aftereffects of damaging the environment. While I think those questions should be answered by our government and the whole society, and the solution will be much more complicated than we think.