American Fantasy Park was the first theme park in China, opened to public in suburb Shanghai in 1996, and closed in 2001. Since it has been abandoned, it has been degraded like unrecyclable garbage and looked more bizarre when the vast land around it started to “grow” with residential buildings and national roads.

After almost 20 years of the abandonment, I visited it in 2020 early summer, sneaked in from an obvious “secret” path where the grass has been trampled. It reminded me of a hidden conscious buried in the deepest layer.

From the early 1990s, there was a trend (still now) in real estate projects, which is to imitate the European or American style in residential buildings. It seems like the real estate developers wanted to detach the Chinese residentials from its previous Soviet Union style buildings (the Khrushchevka) and to embrace the “western” styles. And without certain context, these buildings look like misplaced monsters. Obviously, American Fantasy Park was one of them. I don’t know if it had created the “fantasy” of America that people fancied at that time, but the a little bit of everything design for sure fabricated a hybrid of time and space mess up. There is colonial historical style mansions, 1950s western cowboy town highlights, Disney inspired toy souvenir shops, etc.

The visit was rather surreal and post-apocalyptic, but looking at the grow buildings (yet unused too) in the backdrop is truly a conjoint fantasy of America and China.