Peter Lindbergh’s new project, The Unknown, represents yet another innovative chapter in the field of fashion photography. His exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (1 April through 22 May 2011) consists of huge murals that are reproduced in our new photo book Peter Lindbergh: The Unknown. The Chinese Episode (200 pages, 89 plates). Lindbergh’s extraordinary images are displayed within an unusual framework and from a novel perspective for fashion photography: The Unknown is a photographic “serial novel” of fashion shootings set against the backdrop of a fictitious landing of beings from outer space. Peter Lindbergh commenced this visual tour de force in 1990, and he has pursued it with cineastic intensity to the present day. The extraterrestrial theme is elegantly augmented with elements of Hollywood glamour from the fifties, the German cinema of Fritz Lang, and futuristic scenarios of science fiction movies — much in the manner of Orson Welles or Ridley Scott. Lindbergh has now joined these photographs together for the first time to form a large-scale pictorial narrative for the exhibition in Beijing. The Unknown is a gigantic remix, a visual journey through decades of images that follows no given order or chronology. The Unknown represents a quantum leap without equal in the world of illustrated books and fashion photography.