The wrinkles of the city. Shanghai

For memory can stumble and fall, disappear any minute as the elder leave us, JR shows us that it is important not to forget what the elder have to pass to the young ones. Without judging, JR just gives us bits of History pages in an artistic, yet poetic, social and above all human way.
JR takes his Wrinkles of the City project to Shanghai where the last century has been full of ups and downs : from the Japanese occupation, the establishment of the Communist Party, The Liberation, World War II, the end of the foreign concessions, the victory of Mao Zedong over the General Tchang Kaï-Chek's troops, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward to the actual development of the city ...
JR is a photographer who works on the borders of art and activism. To him the streets are one big art gallery and the city is the playground for gigantic shows. Since 2001, from Paris to Los Angeles via Montfermeil-Clichy-sous-Bois in France or Jerusalem, JR has presented many of his giant pasted photos in illicit street shows.
In 2004, he worked on his 28 millimeters series, for which the first chapter was called Portrait of a generation even made the New York Times cover. The giant portraits of young people from the Paris suburbs were then shown in their very own towns and then brought back, to raise consciousness, to the center of Paris.
After that in 2007 he added a second chapter to the series : 28 millimeters - Face2Face, Israelis and Palestinians - Portrait of twin brothers. JR made portraits of Israelis and Palestinians who had the same job to show them literally face to face on both sides of the separation / security wall in Israel. Then from 2007 JR initiates his project Women Are Heroes that is displayed from 2008. Women Are Heroes has also been the subject of a film made by JR, selected at Cannes Film Festival for the Critics' Week in association with the Official Selection.
Since then, JR has started a new series of works The Wrinkles of the City, imprinting the cities' memories through the testimony of their elder inhabitants. Each pasted portraits is like a layer, thick of paper and glue, which is superimposed on the facades. The superimposition of the portraits and their wrinkles shows the city's creases, highlights traces of history, sometimes in a painful way for a city that also looses certain aspect of its own youth..