Shenzhen
— — a skyline that wasn't there a generation ago.
Not only on a wall.
“Across the bay from Hong Kong, on the Pearl River Delta. Forty-five years ago the area was a county of fishing villages and rice fields. Now it is one of the densest skylines in the world, with the Ping An Finance Centre alone rising 599 metres, seventeen million people, and the country's most concentrated technology corridor. A city that grew up in a single working life. from the studio
Shenzhen, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Shenzhen lies on the eastern bank of the Pearl River estuary in southern Guangdong, directly across the bay from Hong Kong and connected to it by multiple border crossings. The city covers roughly 1,997 square kilometres and holds a registered and resident population of more than 17 million. It became China's first Special Economic Zone in August 1980, a policy decision under Deng Xiaoping that recast a small county of fishing villages into the country's principal experiment in market opening, manufacturing scale, and more recently, technology.
In August 1980 the National People's Congress designated Shenzhen as China's first Special Economic Zone, an area of roughly 327 square kilometres permitted to operate under different rules from the rest of the country. The population was then about 30,000. By 2000 it had passed seven million, and by 2020 it exceeded seventeen million, with the urban area now spreading across every district from Luohu in the east to Bao'an in the west. Few cities in modern history have grown faster, and the original SEZ boundary monument still stands near the Hong Kong border.
The skyline is dominated by Ping An Finance Centre in Futian, completed in 2017 at 599 metres, currently the fifth-tallest building in the world. The KK100 in Luohu and the China Resources Tower in Houhai add to a downtown of more than 150 skyscrapers above 150 metres. The civic core at the Civic Center, designed by Lee Timchula and Associates and opened in 2004, runs an axis from the City Hall through the cultural plaza to Lianhuashan Park, where a hilltop statue of Deng Xiaoping looks south toward the original Special Economic Zone boundary.