SMALL BUSINESS RECONSTRUCTED
Photography, Model Building, Installation, 2009 onward
In the project SMALL BUSINESS RECONSTRUCTED, Jo focused his attentions on Chinese street kitchens. These kitchens are typically open late into the night and serve itinerant workers, migrants recently arrived from rural areas and the residents of traditional “Hutong” neighbourhoods. To begin, Jo documented scenes with such kitchens in photos and then, once back in his studio, he painstakingly recreated these scenes, down to the smallest detail, as miniature, scale models. Jo explains his aim with this approach: “The interesting aspect of this for me is the tension created between the apparent perfection of the models and the improvised reality of the street kitchens themselves.”
SMALL BUSINESS RECONSTRUCTED has been exhibited on its own in Leipzig, Essen, Berlin and in the Norwegian design centre at Dale i Sunnfjord.
“Anti-idyll in HD: Zarth’s miniatures serve as a means to explore the world of contemporary China, a reality which one suspects may be providing us with a glimpse at our own future. There the endless drive for efficiency has been coupled with a return to the ideas of urban modernism, a form which many in the ‘old’ world thought had been consigned to the dust bin of history.”
(Robert Schimke in the exhibit catalogue)