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Bangkok
2000
121 x 155 cm
Color Print



Hongkong
2000 – 2001
121 x 155 cm
Color Print



Shanghai
2001
121 x 155 cm
Color Print




2001
121 x 155 cm
Color Print




Peter Bialobrzeski

Peter Bialobrzeski was born in 1961 in Wolfsburg, Germany. He studied at the University of Braunschweig, majoring in politics (1982-1984), at the London College of Printing, London, majoring in photography (1991 – 1992), and the Folkwangschule - University of Essen, taking a diploma in Photography and Design (1988 – 1993). He has held various solo exhibitions, such as “Photographs” at the LA Galerie, Frankfurt, Germany (2005); “Neon Tigers” at Museum der Arbeit, Hamburg (2004 - 2005); "Neon Tigers" at the Laurence Miller Gallery New York, USA (2004); “All This Useless Beauty” at the Galerie Albrecht, München (2003); “xxxholy-Journeys into the spiritual heart of India”, Kunstverein Glückstadt (2001) and at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg and the laif Galerie, Cologne (2000).

When Europeans think “city,” they think about the European city with its medieval town squares. Today those historic centers are almost museums, admired by visitors from all over the world.

Especially Asian tourists from the rising megalopolises of the east are surprised. These places with its century-old housing look almost surreal to them, like a dream, or something out of Alice in Wonderland. In the Asian experience, the city reinvents itself again and again; rapidly changing the skyline from one decade to the next.

When we look at Southeast Asian megacities we see two different models of rapid growth: totally planned like in Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen; or, largely uncontrolled like in Bangkok.

There are no existing role models for those concepts of the city. Looking at the Metropolises of the Asian Tiger States, one can't help to be reminded of the computer game “Sim City” in which a virtual city is constructed using certain parameters.

The well-known German photographer Peter Bialobrzeski examines in his new set of images “Neon Tigers” six Asian Metropolises. In his large-scale color prints he turns Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Shenzhen into one virtual Megacity.

It is as if there is almost no reference to the real. Those pictures resemble stage props out of the Blade Runner or fiction turns into pictures fantasies of William Gibson.

Bialobrzeski's photographs are charged with plenty, often contradictory, semiotic hints. One feels transported into the dream world of movie-architect gone nuts: The beauty of the absurd competes with the knowledge that an irreversible change of inner city life is on view. (Artist's Statement)

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