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This thesis examines the digital photo composites of Chinese artist Yang Yongliang (b. 1980, Shanghai) from 2007-2012 by selecting three distinct series that focus on three cities. This thesis approaches Yang’s Shanghai-based digital landscape prints (shuma shanshui), his 2012 series A Bowl of Taipei, and his 2010 series Greece, Greece and investigates how they relate to Asian art history, contemporary art discourse, and urban theories, including Rem Koolhaas’s 1995 essay “The Generic City.” This thesis moves beyond the simple binaries with which Yang’s works are often described – past versus present, nature versus city, tradition versus modernity – dichotomies similar to those used to characterize recent urbanization in most major cities, as observed in Koolhaas’s writing. This thesis argues that Yang’s works inhabit multiple positions simultaneously and offer new potentials for expanding beyond the generic city.

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The scholarly interest is the sway singular architectures can have on the collective aesthetic of a generic city: How to exploit this capacity and better orchestrate an impact? The obsession is with Singapore — a city Rem Koolhaas describes as “all foreground and no background,” without geometry, fabric or legible urban form that physically defines the city’s aesthetics. Singapore is necessarily a sum of its architectures, and is still waiting for a greater aesthetic to emerge from its heterogeneous collection. The initiative: to revitalize the former Malayan rail lands, a site spanning the full width of the country. The plan follows Singapore’s recent practice: building distinct, free-style architectures on shifting sands — only this time anchored by a formless, yet permanent and straightforward high-speed axis that induces continuity and reinforces the island’s status as a singular, cohesive entity. Only extreme differentiation, held in tension by the thinnest infrastructural line, can induce a forthright sense of direction in a capitalist city that must necessarily adopt multiple architectural solutions.

This thesis presents a critical reading on the apartment blocks transformed by urban programs in Kizilay urban core. The ultimate aim is to understand the transformative relationships of city and architecture within divergent conceptual levels through an analysis of generic building and processes of building consumption.

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