It was May of this year when Argentinian photographer Leonardo Diaz found himself in Specters, a dive bar in Shanghai’s Jing’an neighbourhood. It’s a messy joint, with motorcycles suspended from the ceiling and silhouettes of rock greats plastered across the walls, but it also turned out to be a watering hole for some of the city’s most colourful young characters.
“I was instantly attracted to them,” Diaz explains of his first encounters with what he has since dubbed Shanghai’s ‘pseudo-neo-punk’ subculture. “In all my years of living in China, I’d never seen such colour and aesthetics before. It was a breath of fresh air.”
One of the most densely populated areas in the world, ‘fresh air’ has more than one meaning in the context of Shanghai. The city was roughly the size of London back in 1990, and has tripled in population in the decades since. This rapid industrialisation is partly what makes these portraits so striking: with their dyed hair, Western clothes and numerous piercings, this new generation is injecting a sense of identity into a city that’s practically grown faster than they have. “China has changed a lot over these past few years”, Diaz explains. “Older generations had to work so hard for so long. Now, young people in China are enjoying a more relaxed way of life. They’ve been raised in a completely different world”.
Indeed, as Diaz began to encounter more and more of these young ‘neo-punks’ – some in underground clubs and bars throughout the city, others in chance run-ins on the street – he began to witness this societal transition first-hand. “Most of them work in art-related jobs,” he tells Dazed. “One made piercings, another worked in photography. Some of them worked in the nighttime industry. The creative scene is growing in China”.
Far from the monolithic black box that Western news reports often present China as, Diaz‘s experience of Shanghai was vibrant and friendly. He talks of the city’s diverse architecture, from its traditional Chinese lane houses to its towering modern buildings, and even to smatterings of British designs from an age gone by. Jing‘an, the area he encountered many of these characters, had a prominent international community and they would often approach him first, striking up conversations about football. “I think that the outsider’s perception of China might be wrong. I don’t think it is that homogenous anymore,“ Diaz tells Dazed. “People were always kind and warm to me.“
Most importantly, despite connecting their aesthetics to the punk scene more familiar in the West, Diaz also emphasises that this movement of young people appears genuinely new and unique. “They have their own way,” he says. It’s a maelstrom of cultural influences that defies any current label, blending Berlin club-esque harnesses and American football jerseys with more traditional Chinese red and blue pigments.
As this emerging youth movement continues to express themselves and their experiences of Chinese modernity, ‘pseudo-neo-punk’ may not be the lasting descriptor of their subculture. What does appear to be here to stay, however, is the new perspectives that this generation can provide to culture at large.
Check the gallery above for Diaz’s full range of portraits.
