Exhibition View of NOWHERE - Imagining the Global City, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, 2025.
From July 11 to August 31, 2025, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre presents NOWHERE - Imagining the Global City. Curated by Bas Vroege, it collects photographer Frank van der Salm’s work of the past 30 years. The image of a consumer-oriented, imaginary metropolis rises from the travelling exhibition. Frank van der Salm’s images question about the reality they represent. They form the image of a city that, all of a sudden, simultaneously seems to be everywhere and nowhere: both now here and nowhere.
Exhibition View of NOWHERE - Imagining the Global City, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, 2025.
Van der Salm’s work lies a fascination with the evolving identity of cities in an age of rapid urbanization and digital mediation. Global urban architecture seems to have become a homogeneous, miniature “Lego” city in Van der Salm’s large-format photographs with unique composition, depth of field, rich colors and texture. NOWHERE shows a world in which “Instagrammability” is first and foremost; in which the new reality is dictated by the seductive image that may (later) be made from it.
At the entrance of the exhibition, Van der Salm’s photographs in Dubai, San Diego and Albuquerque respectively in 1998 and 2008 are exhibited. His interest in how humans create artificial places is reflected in a flower shop filled with brightly colored artificial bouquets of flowers in Dubai, urban miniatures exhibited at a museum in San Diego, and the different appearances of Dubai and Albuquerque in the face of rapid urbanization. From the perspective of visual production, architecture, design and urban landscapes, directed by the mechanisms of global big business are revealed: “The same antiseptic beauty, all over the world.”
Frank van der Salm, Bouquet, 2008 ©Frank van der Salm
Frank van der Salm, Landscape, 1998 ©Frank van der Salm
Frank van der Salm, Site, 2008 ©Frank van der Salm
Bas Vroege, who experimented with artificial intelligence, has assumed the curatorial work for “MultipliCity” echoing the motifs of “authenticity and artificiality” behind Van der Salm’s oeuvre. The video wall in the exhibition, which serves as the prologue to the exhibition, is a videographical installation generated by AI from the raw data of Van der Salm’s photographic works over 30 years. In 2020, Frank van der Salm tagged each of the (then) 241 images in his oeuvre using a total of 41 terms, ranging from 24/7 to alienation or greed. Each one of them was allocated a score between 0.0 and 1.0. AI researcher Gjorgji Strezoski fed the images and accompanying data into the University of Amsterdam’s supercomputer. Data designer Boyd Rotgans (RNDR) and composer Henry Vega turned the 41-dimensional data space into an imaginary journey along the motifs of Frank van der Salm.
Exhibition View of NOWHERE - Imagining the Global City, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, 2025.
The dynamic and shocking images in “MultipliCity” remind us that these images themselves are also immaterial. Through the intervention of artificial intelligence technology, it tries to question the subjectivity of creation and the originality of artworks. Through the experimental use of artificial intelligence technology, Bas Vroege once again reveals the critical theme in Van der Salm’s work: images interrogate each other about the “reality” they represent, and together they construct a seemingly ubiquitous urban landscape but nowhere to be found.
Exhibition View of MultipliCity, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, 2025.
Another highlight of the exhibition is the photographic works related to Chinese cityscapes. Filmed in Shenzhen in 2016, “Entr'acte” captures the in-between moment: where the future is already in motion, but not yet realised. Close by Shenzhen grew rapidly into a sprawling megacity. From above, the river marks the boundary between Shenzhen’s high-rise expansion on the right and the still-undeveloped Hong Kong territory on the left. The contrast is stark: booming construction versus agricultural quietude. Photography here serves as a bridge between current reality and what lies ahead.
Frank van der Salm, Entr'acte, 2016 ©Frank van der Salm
The “Momentum” filmed in the same city in the same year presents a layered view: a museum reconstruction of Deng Xiaoping’s workspace overlaid with Van der Salm’s photograph of the actual site, now printed as wallpaper. This visual re-enactment blurs authenticity and replication, reflecting how Shenzhen—a manufactured city—turns imagery into reality. And the artist tries to question, what defines a city?
As the artist puts it, “With time and space no longer directly related, the creative space between document and creation has become one of the key elements in both my photography and videos. Image makers like myself are at the centre of this intriguing paradox of adding more images and reflecting on a society that’s built upon images at the same time. To incorporate this notion in the centre of artistic practice is essential.” Fiction also means producing the real. Shot inside Paramount Studios, “Paramount”(2013) explores how cinema blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality. An ordinary office lobby could belong to any financial district, but within this controlled set, it becomes a projection screen for imagined narratives.
“The Strip”(2013) is a three-hour exposure taken by the artist when he drove along the Strip of Las Vegas Boulevard. In this long-exposure image, neon becomes the main subject and agent of transformation. Light hides the gritty reality behind the promise of endless pleasure. Like photography itself, the city invites us to believe in a manipulated version of reality.
Frank van der Salm, The Strip, 2013 ©Frank van der Salm
In some of his works, the artist explores the relationship between reality and fiction by photographing models and replicas that connect cities with specific histories, as he stated, “Master, original and copy have become the same and reality as a concept solely exists in the images that are produced. The urban landscape incorporates our new perception of ‘the real’ and triggers the need to relate to the out of place, the unconnected and the diffuse.” In an outdated amusement park near Guangzhou, Van der Salm entered a 1:1 model of a Chinese space control room. “Control”(2008) reflects the tension between appearance and reality. “The Next Level”(2016) examines the unfiltered spaces born from this rapid expansion. The image shows a gaming arcade entrance on a ground floor, bursting with clashing materials and neon lights. Not designed but improvised, it’s a chaotic non-space mirroring the city’s pace. This environment reflects a culture of instant gratification, economic improvisation, and fleeting aesthetics. Like a video game, Shenzhen is a city in constant, synthetic motion.
Frank van der Salm, Control, 2008 ©Frank van der Salm
Frank van der Salm, The Next Level, 2016 ©Frank van der Salm
In the artist’s view, in a “consumer-oriented society”, his ability of metaphorical conception is enough to manipulate reality, which makes the boundaries among images, cities and nature increasingly blurred. CERN, Europe’s oldest scientific joint-venture, probes the universe’s origins with radio waves, mathematics, and data. Science here must also sell its vision — translating the invisible into visual forms via graphics, photography, and video. In “Signal”(2019), pristine night mountains meet the oldest representation of invisible muons constantly hitting Earth on a pixelated computer screen. It’s a collision of the cosmic and the everyday, the metaphysical and the material of life. “Landschaft” (2019) sells an idealized vision of nature, sustainability, and national pride, promoting tourism and Swiss-made products alike. This landscape, endlessly reproduced, becomes more symbolic than real. “Landschaft” (in German literally: “creation of land”) blurs the line between natural wonder and commercial fantasy—posing the question: is this nature, or a curated experience? A money machine, or a modern-day Olympus?
Frank van der Salm, Signal, 2019 ©Frank van der Salm
Frank van der Salm, Landschaft, 2019 ©Frank van der Salm
Photographed at the entrance of a tunnel under Victoria Harbour, “Link”(2004) reflects on Hong Kong’s blend of East and West. Sparse colours and empty lanes evoke the clean minimalism of architectural models. Logos of gas companies and toll stickers hint at consumerism, yet the scene feels paused. Photography here becomes a connector between fiction and function.
As Frank van der Salm stated, “When advertising equals models equals structure equals reality, it’s the transformation of authenticity and it’s manifestations that is more truthful to the human condition than the objects it depicts: the non-human scale of the global city, zapping through the diversity of the subject matter, aesthetically pleasing or ‘problematically beautiful’, seemingly devoid of human presence. It is the creation of ‘SimCity’, a plausible and sometimes disruptive microcosm of our contemporary existence. It is now and here, we recognise it, we relate to it in connecting the dots.” Based on this, what the artist has recorded is not the place, but the time.
Frank van der Salm, Link, 2004 ©Frank van der Salm
About the Exhibition
Dates: July 11 to August 31, 2025Venue: Three Shadows Photography Art CentreCourtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, edited by CAFA ART INFO.
