April 6, 2012 |
The Three Gorges Dam, straddling China’s Yangtze River, is the world’s largest hydroelectric power plant.
Begun in 1994, and now nearing completion, it’s a modern miracle of engineering, creating electricity, expanding the river’s shipping capacity and reducing the risk of floods. But it’s far from an uncomplicated success story. For the dam to be built, small towns and archaeological sites along the river had to be flooded, displacing no less than 1.3m people. For many it’s a double-edged sword: a symbol of the country’s shiny new future and a destroyer of homes, culture and history.
Chen Qiulin is one of the millions whose past is now lost. Her home town, Wanxian, has been buried underwater. While she might hear the siren song of what a new, improved China has to offer, she is also haunted by yesteryear’s ghosts – a push-me-pull-you situation that she explores in breathtaking films and photography. Take her early video trilogy, Farewell Poem, River, River and The Garden, poetic documentary tributes to the gradually demolished Wanxian. It is shot around sites loaded with memories from her childhood, including the opera she visited with her grandfather, memorialised in her work by an opera troupe creating a scene from Farewell My Concubine.
Recent projects have tackled the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that took 70,000 lives in the Sichuan Province. In her film Peach Blossom, a lonely bride wanders in virginal white wedding regalia, through an urban landscape that looks positively post-apocalypse: heaps of rubble, dank with pond-green slime, litter the road beneath soaring concrete edifices and mountains. She makes for a sad, barren sort of figure, tiny amid the ruins.
Qiulin’s works skewer contemporary China’s big conflicts, between change and tradition, nostalgia and expectation and the rapaciously developing urban world and rural lives out of synch with the bright lights of shopping malls, apartment blocks and freeways. The Garden makes this last point succinctly, with its two workers carrying flowers through streets overshadowed by glass and concrete towers. Their cheerfully bright blooms, thoug
by Skye Sherwin
