The Worcester Art Museum is pleased to announce the opening of a new contemoprary exhibition, Two Chinas: Chen Quilin and Yun-Fei Ji, running through Spetmeber 21, 2008.
Two Chinas considers the rapidly changing conditions in China through the lens of new acquisitions created by two young Chinese artists, Chen Quilin (b. 1975) and Yun-Fei Ji (b. 1963). Both artists have responded to the altered landscapes and human displacement caused by flooding, which is a result of China's Three Gorges Dam project. Chen Quilin uses video in Bie Fu (Farewell Poem), from 2003, to revisit her childhood memories and China's past amidst the rubble of Wanzhou, her hometown and one of the cities flooded by the dam project. In Yun-Fei Ji's monumental scroll-like painting, Below the 143 Meter Mark, from 2006, allusions to classical landscape painting are transformed by grim contemporary details - houses and hillsides crumbling, a ghost town littered with abandoned bundles and bicycles.
BACKGROUND
The stretch of the Yangtze River defined as the Three Gorges region is an image of stark contrasts—the natural beauty of a mountainous terrain and the harsh living conditions of the inhabitants along the raging river's banks. China's leaders have long dreamed of taming the Yangtze whose waters have caused deadly floods for thousands of years.
The idea of a dam, first proposed by Sun Yat-sen in 1919 and again in the mid-1950s by Mao Tse-tung, became a reality when construction on the world's largest hydroelectric dam began in 1994 at Sandouping, with completion expected in 2009. The Chinese government envisions that the dam, which will raise the river's level to 175 meters (574 feet) and create a reservoir that extends nearly 400 miles upstream to Chonqing, will provide much-needed electricity to fuel the booming economy, control the Yangtze's regular flooding, and increase commercial shipping access to China's interior. Not incidentally, this vast structure has become symbolic not only of China's engineering and construction expertise but also of the government's desire for economic "progress" regardless of human or environmental cost.
Controversy inside China and around the world is directed at the social and environmental implications of the dam including the forced resettlement of an estimated 1.5 million residents. As many as 13 cities, 140 towns, 1300 villages, and 100,000 acres of farmland will be submerged under the rising waters of the dam's reservoir. Ubiquitous markers—"143 meters" or "175 meters"—dot the landscape designating future heights of the water (we see them in the streets of Wanzhou early in Chen's video, and Ji locates the water level in the title of his painting).
While many towns along the river are being dismantled and rebuilt higher up the hillsides with the promise of new apartments and prosperity from increased shipping, rural dwellers— peasants, boatmen, fishermen, and farmers—must abandon homes, fields, and ways of life that were intertwined with the river, and are oftentimes relocated to distant urban areas where it is difficult to find jobs because of different languages, cultures, and economies. Although some important cultural sites have been moved and rebuilt, an estimated 1300 known archaeological sites including ancestral burial grounds, centuries-old temples, and ancient fossils will disappear underwater, along with miles of majestic, mountainous landscape that has been the subject of Chinese art and poetry for thousands of years.
Environmentalists charge that the dam will exacerbate the river's already declining health by changing the oxygen content, blocking fish migration, and increasing rubbish build-up in the reservoir. There is great concern that when the dam's reservoir submerges waste dumps and old factories, the water will become a toxic lake threatening the ecosystem and human health. Rising water also threatens to cause severe erosion and landslides along steep hillsides. What is certain is that even before the dam's completion, this one example of China's path to economic development and urbanization already has altered forever the special interrelation between humans and the landscape that defined life in the Three Gorges region. -- www.worcesterart.org
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