Title : One-to-One Scale: an observation of urban transformation in popular China In modern-day China, the scale models being shown in urban planning museums symbolize what Chinese culture has become. A culture obsessed by the idea of progress, denying its past without granting concession to the human beings that must quickly adapt to the implementation of an enormous machine. The museological hygienic is at odds with the brutal reality of the outside world. Bruy wants to show this malaise by inviting us to travel to the heart of urban areas where it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between illusion and reality.
Antoine Bruy’s idea for the â€One-to-One Scale†project was born when he discovered model
buildings displayed in urban planning museums in China. Cliché monuments, as he calls the
scale size pasteboards, epitomize today’s Chinese culture. Boasting a disconnected hygienic,
they crystallize dreams and means and illustrate the oblivion of an eyes-wide-open nation
towards its future, one that is turning a surprisingly blind eye to its past. These museums
deny demolition and construction processes while replicating humans as laughable figurines,
duplicating existing developments and freezing evolution. These are brutal and relentless
changes to which human beings are forced to adapt to.
Antoine Bruy’s artistic ambition is to compare gigantic Pharaoh-like constructions to lifeless
miniatures, and people on the streets to plastic figurines, to better display the ambiguity
of this culture. Inspired by photographers such as Edward Burtynsky, Stephen Struth,
Nadav Kander and Sze Tsung Leong, the documentary “One-to-One Scale†gives us images
impossible to measure in true scale - human scale or miniature - creating the impression of
an improbable, surreal landscape. Questions remain; can there still be a culture, an identity,
a vision of society and a place for the individual when progress becomes the only driving
force defining history, ingesting it, destroying it, perpetually rebuilding it?