November 20, 2025–April 5, 2026
It’s not incidental that the first institutional exhibition to retrospectively appraise the built environment of Mao-era China is staged not in mainland China or Hong Kong, but in Montréal. “How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979” assembles archival publications, photographs, correspondence, personal items, and models alongside contemporary works and design objects from the holdings of co-organizer M+ and historical materials from the CCA. Rather than establishing a hierarchy between these materials that privileges original authorship, curator Shirley Surya lets them operate in proximity.
The exhibition begins in 1949, when China proclaimed the People’s Republic and overthrew what revolutionary discourse called the “three mountains” of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism. My parents, born the same year, belong to a generation shaped by a political and material reality no longer accessible as a system. I, born a year after the exhibition concludes, grew up within the built environment it places under scrutiny: familiar in form, yet newly estranged by its translation into history. Upon entering, I found myself inside a field of magnetic vectors, in which competing ways of knowing—architectural, artistic, institutional, linguistic, and ideological—pulled against one another without settling into resolution.
Before the exhibition proper begins, a shallow portico of three walls sets its terms. On the left, the French and English titles appear in bold black type in the foreground, while the Chinese title recedes behind them in an outlined, hollow font. This stages a linguistic proposition from the outset: some languages speak with authority; others persist as presence rather than address. To the right hangs a photograph of the east entrance colonnade of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, designed and constructed in 1958–59 as part of the socialist state-building project. Looking up, the same colonnade reappears overhead as a ribbed ceiling, later resurfacing as the armature for interview videos and as the structural logic for seating and display. This recursive quotation reads less as homage than as translation—a monument once meant to consolidate ideological certainty, scaled down to human proportion and reanimated as exhibition infrastructure. Further along, a diagrammatic timeline traces key dates, projects, and movements from 1912 through 1979, embedding political slogans alongside historical events and foregrounding ideology as an inescapable design condition within a centrally planned state.
Across the exhibition’s three thematic sections (“Agency,” “Industry,” and “Style”) translation becomes a quiet but decisive operative. The conditions of material scarcity, collective organization, and centralized planning that Euro-American accounts of modernity would typically treat as prohibitive are shown instead to have generated inventive and differentiated forms of architectural agency. This inversion is articulated most precisely in Chinese. “Agency” appears not as 能动力, which locates initiative within the individual subject, but as 推动力, an external force naming pressure, propulsion, and systemic momentum. Likewise, “industry” is translated not as 工业, but as 生产, folding manufacturing, construction, housing, and everyday life into a single productive field. These shifts do more than nuance meaning; they carry the socialist idiom of the period itself, echoing the language through which architecture was understood not as an autonomous discipline but as part of a total social system. What emerges is not a correction to modernity, but sustained pressure on its singular path—one in which constraint becomes generative rather than limiting.
Within the exhibition’s wide range of materials, Jianzhu xuebao (Architectural Journal, 1954 – present) plays an anchoring role. As the only academic architectural journal of the period, it served as a central platform for professional discourse, and in the exhibition it appears both as original copies and reproduced pages. In the absence of those original architectural drawings and plans which remain within inaccessible state archives, the journal operates as a scaffold through which projects are encountered, debated and reframed. Its pages are often more revealing than pristine drawings, registering architecture not as finished form but as mediated practice.
Operating in a different register, Manhua (Cartoons), the satirical political magazine published between 1950 and 1960, works through graphic wit rather than retrospective critique. In these cartoons, the built environment is inseparable from social commentary, while political slogans are absorbed, distorted, or tested visually. When reinserted into the exhibition—most pointedly within the title walls for “Agency,” “Industry,” and “Style”—these images do not illustrate architecture so much as reconstitute a social moment. In the exhibition’s presentation of these Chinese-language publications, textual content is largely untranslated and often recedes for non-Chinese readers, allowing documentation to register less as argument than as visual trace. This gap is not resolved by the exhibition but held in place, recalling the historical distance that first drew me to the show: a moment that can be reactivated, but not fully translated.
If “How Modern” resists letting contemporary perspectives collapse its historical material into hindsight, Wang Tuo’s Intensity in Ten Cities (2025) deliberately folds the present back into history. Commissioned by M+ and the CCA, these films interwoven with oral histories run alongside the exhibition rather than illustrating it. Architectural sites appear not as evidence to be stabilized but as lived environments, inhabited in the present and recalled through testimony. A speculative narrative linking two generations of lesbian relationships unfolds across these sites, while real interviews with architects, researchers, and residents anchor fiction in lived memory. As the work enters both institutions’ collections—particularly the CCA’s, where material from this period remains scarce—it leaves open a final, productive question: what kind of architectural history persists when mediation, narration, and experience stand in for the archive itself?
