Collecting the Ashes of Time: The Temporality and Materiality of Industrial Ruins in Wang Bing's West of the Tracks

The enigmatic and evocative characteristics of ruins (for example, ruined monuments, gardens, tombs, or steles) and the visual representations of ruins by painting, photography, and cinema, have been explored and elucidated by philosophers, theorists, art historians, and film scholars over decades or even centuries. The romantic tendency to aestheticize ruins in terms of their innate beauty as objects of venerable decay (Schonle, 2006: 649-669; Makarius, 2004: 81, 84, 108) has been contested by Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, 1977) in the modern period, since war catastrophes and human disasters which have resulted in vast ruins in the 20th Century make the aesthetic appreciation of ruins problematic.