China in the images of Olivo Barbieri, made over thirty years, from 1989 to 2019, and gathered here for the first time in an organic volume: a kaleidoscope in constant mutation, like a Rubik’s cube caught a moment before it is solved. Far from documentary intent, the images capture the polarities of a country of happily ambiguous nature: frenzy and emptiness, postmodernity and archaism, horror vacui and horror pleni. It could also be said of Barbieri’s plural photography and its “double gaze”, in which the natural has always been in dialogue with the artificial, the human with the metamorphic, illusion with truth, in the passage towards a “hypermodern” society.