Chang’an Boulevard

This film is a record of Chang’an Boulevard, captured in a sequence of measured distances along its entire 45 kilometers. At each measured increment, the artist records a single, one-minute-long frame. The whole film is composed of 608 one-minute segments. The length of the film is 10 hours and 13 minutes.
Beijing, the capital of China for over 600 years, has a prime architectural orientation and order to its urban fabric. The structure of the city is bisected by Chang’an Boulevard along its east-west axis. After 1949, this boulevard and the heart of the city, Tiananmen Square, became China’s main cultural political center and landmark.
The film records the city through the transformation of its urban landscape. The work reveals Beijing as an organic whole, capturing the city's rhythms, social structure, cityscape, socialist planned economy, capitalist market and political power center as pieces of a multi-layered urban collage. (Ai Weiwei Studio)