Chinese visual artists have responded to urbanization in China in different ways. By now, the fact of its ultra-rapid urbanization is well known. Thomas Campanella (2008: 14) wrote that, ‘There were fewer than 200 cities in China in the late 1970s; today, there are nearly 700. […] Forty-six Chinese cities passed the one-million mark since 1992, making for a national total of 102 cities with more than a million residents. In the United States, we have all of nine such cities.’ This process is ongoing. Indeed, a 2014 plan foresees 100 million farmers moving into cities by 2020 (Johnson 2014). Although Campanella's focus is on architecture, he cannot avoid noting huge upheaval, pointing out that ‘[i]n Shanghai alone, redevelopment projects in the 1990s displaced more people than thirty years of urban renewal in the United States’ (2008: 15). Qin Shao (2013) even calls the frequent process of compulsory demolition against the will of the householder as part of urban development ‘domicide.’

The social, economic, material, and especially emotional and psychological impact of urbanization on almost every Chinese person's life has made it a frequent feature of cultural production, including in the visual arts. Soon after Tiananmen and the intensification of marketization in the early 1990s, a new wave of independent film-making shifted away from the epic history and exotic borderlands favoured by many so-called ‘Fifth Generation’ films to focus on rapidly changing contemporary city life (Zhang 2007; Berry, Lu, and Rofel 2010).