“They say the crane is China’s national bird,” wrote Sim Chi Yin, who took over _The New Yorker’s Instagram feed last week from Beijing, where construction is happening at a breakneck speed. The photo-centric app is one of the few Western social-media platforms that is not blocked in China, allowing us this glimpse of Sim’s experience of the megalopolis. Dizzying development and unruly traffic (which allows Sim to ride her scooter without a license and, she admits, occasionally on the sidewalk) are juxtaposed with scenes of everyday life.
Sim, who has lived in the Chinese capital for the past six years, is originally from Singapore, and she noted that her Chinese friends like to remind her that a single district of Beijing is larger than her entire home country. Since Sim speaks Mandarin fluently and is ethnically Chinese, she easily slips into Chinese culture. “Looking and sounding local, I blend in, but a big camera can be a giveaway sometimes …. In a place like China, where, very generally speaking, people can be shy or suspicious, it can be hard to shoot up close and candid. With the phone, it was possible to shoot right under their noses.”
On Saturday, Sim clocked an air-quality index of three hundred and three, which, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, “represents air quality so hazardous that everyone may experience serious effects.” And yet twenty million people call Beijing home, with ever more migrants streaming into the city from the provinces.
The week of Instagramming left Sim reflective. “It’s made me think: Who are the consumers of photography and of journalism today? And who consumes this form of near-instantaneous, digital media? Should I be filing, sharing pictures minutes after I shot them—don’t they need to sit for a while for a proper edit? Who is our audience? What do they see—is it different from what we see?” Here’s a selection of Sim’s photographs from the week.
