Flowers Gallery Hong Kong is pleased to announce Edward Burtynsky: China in Africa, opening 23 May 2025. The exhibition explores China’s evolving role in global manufacturing, from the transformation of its domestic production systems to the expansion of its industrial footprint across the African continent. Captured between 2018 and late 2024, the works in this show continue Burtynsky’s decades-long engagement with the infrastructures of extraction, energy, and logistics, offering a visual record of China’s pivotal influence on the contemporary industrial landscape.

With a deep historical understanding of twentieth-century industrial processes, Burtynsky uses his aerial and wide-angle lens perspective to create sweeping images that reveal the scale of industrial development and its impacton the environment. Inside China, a new generation of robotics and vast battery assembly lines stretch across the frame, as seen in Burtynsky’s 2023 photographs of the BYD manufacturing facility in Jiangsu Province – a major producer of lithium batteries for electric vehicles. In works such as BYD Manufacturing Facility #2, Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, China, 2023, rows of yellow components and minimal human presence signal a shift toward automation and the industrial scale of the energy transition.

Private View: Thursday, 22 May, 6–8 pm

Artist Talk & Film Screening: Friday, 23 May at M+ Museum

Gallery address: 49 Tung Street, Sheung Wan