Flowers Gallery Hong Kong presents Edward Burtynsky: China in Africa. The exhibition explores China’s evolving role in global manufacturing, from the transformation of its domestic production systems to the expansion of its industrial footprint across the African continent.
The works in this show, captured between 2018 and late 2024, continue Burtynsky’s decades-long engagement with the infrastructures of extraction, energy, and logistics. They offer a visual record of China’s pivotal influence on the contemporary industrial landscape.
Burtynsky uses his aerial and wide-angle lens perspective to create sweeping images that reveal the scale of industrial development and its impact on the environment. Inside China, a new generation of robotics and vast battery-assembly lines stretch across the frame, as seen in Burtynsky’s 2023 photographs of the BYD manufacturing facility in Jiangsu Province, a major producer of lithium batteries for electric vehicles. In works such as BYD Manufacturing Facility #2, Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, China, 2023, rows of yellow components and minimal human presence signal a shift toward automation and the industrial scale of the energy transition.
This transformation is contrasted with scenes photographed in Ethiopia and Namibia, where Chinese-owned rail crossings, warehouses, and apparel factories reflect a different phase of industrialisation: slower-paced, less mechanised, and still reliant on manual labour. Now, two decades on from Burtynsky’s earlier documentation of China’s rise as the world’s manufacturing engine, the pace of globalisation has accelerated, and the country’s influence across the African continent is profound.
The exhibition offers a glimpse into this evolving relationship, capturing the infrastructure and mega-factories established by Chinese companies and the broader impact of these collaborations on African landscapes and labour systems.
The exhibition coincides with a special event at M+ Museum, Hong Kong, on Friday, 23 May: a screening of Manufactured Landscapes, the acclaimed 2006 documentary by Jennifer Baichwal that follows Burtynsky through industrial sites across China. Shot on Super 16 mm film, the documentary captures the vast scale of China’s rapid development—from sprawling factories to the monumental Three Gorges Dam—and extends the narrative of Burtynsky’s photographic work into moving image. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Edward Burtynsky and Ikko Yokoyama, Lead Curator of Design and Architecture at M+, where three of Burtynsky’s works are currently on view in the group exhibition Making It Matter as part of the museum’s permanent collection.
From 19 June – 28 September 2025, the International Center of Photography (ICP) will present The Great Acceleration, the first solo institutional exhibition of Edward Burtynsky’s work in New York City in over twenty years. Curated by David Campany, the exhibition will reveal the depth of his investigation into the human alteration of natural landscapes around the world.\
Edward Burtynsky : China in Africa
May 23 – July 12, 2025
Flowers Gallery Hong Kong
49 Tung St, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
www.flowersgallery.com
