m97 Gallery is pleased to present "NEON PARADISE" a solo exhibition of photography works by German artist Peter Bialobrzeski. Exhibiting works in China for the very first time from his acclaimed "Neon Tigers" work as well as his most recent "Paradise Now" works, Bialobrzeski’s photographs depict the urban landscape and concrete jungles in metropolises across Southeast Asia. Spanning nearly a decade, these two bodies of work are the perfect juxtapositions and bookends to Bialobrzeski’s work in Asia. “Neon Tigers” illustrates the infrastructure boom and high rises of Asia’s megacities, while “Paradise Now” shows the intermingling of nature and the man-made neon luminescence in a subtle and startling balance of lush greenery and neon phosphorescence. The artist will be in Shanghai for the exhibition opening. Peter Bialobrzeski’s works have been exhibited around the world from New York to Hamburg to Mumbai and are in both public and private collections. "Neon Paradise" at m97 Gallery will be the artist’s first exhibition in Shanghai.

With support from the Goethe Institute Shanghai.

Paradise Now features fragments of nature - some staged, others untouched and unaffected by urban growth - located on the periphery of the artificially lit infrastructure of Asian metropolises. Unlike daylight, the lights of the big city do not go in any particular direction. Artificial suns made of sodium lamps, automobile headlights, and illuminated skyscrapers form a kind of “vernacular light” that causes this urban “super greenery” to oscillate between hyperrealistic and surrealistic. The photographs celebrate the lush growth as a sign of hope, yet provoke the question of whether we can still responsibly account for this kind of illumination given the prognosticated climate catastrophe. Never before have our cities been so bright, never before have people been able to look at urban greenery in this way. It is the rapid growth of cities that has allowed this kind of illumination for this brief period in the early twenty-first century ... Most of the photos in Paradise Now were taken between October 2007 and March 2008 in Hanoi, Jakarta, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore.