404 is a standard response code which is an error message given when the server could not find what was requested. But it is also the code of a city in China that has never appeared anywhere on any maps ever exist. The city has no name except an ominous code. It’s built in the 50s for the sole purpose of R&D of nuclear weapons. There were at it’s peak about 50,000 people living and working there in an area no larger than one square kilometer.
The city was built at that time by the best scientists, technicians, doctors, teachers, and so on from scratch. Most of them stayed there and never left ever since. Until the beginning of the new millennium, the second and the third generation of the citizens started to abandon the city for a new life somewhere else. The city became total deserted before long.
“When I came back again with my camera and saw those deserted scenes, it stuck me as if I was facing an entirely different world, feeling extremely familiar and yet very strange at the same time.” — Li Yang
ABOUT THE ARTIST : Born in "404" city in 1984 and had lived there for 19 years.
We say in China “Small as it is, the sparrow has all the vital organs. ” This sparrow-sized futuristic city had everything a major city in China had at that time. From all the governmental departments, educational institutions, intermediate level court, to park and public bath. It’s a full functional city in the middle of nowhere, and the “nowhere” is the infamous Gobi desert.
The pictures in the book 404 NOT FOUND wasn’t taken by any ruin-tourist, journalist or urban historian, but Li Yang, a photographer who was born and raised there, who witnessed the decline of the city, who left as a 19-year-old and came back to a phantom town where not a single soul dwells.
