The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

75 Chen Qiulin Salvaged from ruins Chinese artist Chen Qiulin established her artistic language to formulate juxtapositions of the new with the old. These tensions and polarities sustain her practice and, in keeping with this approach, for APT6 Chen exhibits both a reconstruction and a study of ruins. In 2006, Chen salvaged a traditional wooden home from the Xinsheng region of Zhongxian County in Sichuan Province, an area affected by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. She employed labourers to precisely number and dismantle the simple and well-worn wooden pieces, to be reconstructed elsewhere. The house was initially shown at the Long March Space in Beijing, and has now been shipped to Australia, through all the arduous bureaucratic channels such undertakings require. Chen’s ambitious enterprise could be seen as a micro version of the Three Gorges Dam project, with Xinsheng Town 275–277 2009 providing a physical embodiment of the intangible effects of displacement. Chen grew up in suburban Wanzhou in Sichuan Province, an area also destined to be submerged by the rising water of the Three Gorges Dam. Between 2002 and 2007, the subjective effects of the dam’s construction played out in Chen’s works, which charted attitudes ranging from despair to acceptance. 1 First proposed in 1919, the dam is the world’s largest hydro-electricity project. It has set unenviable records for the number of people displaced (more than 1.2 million), the number of cities and towns flooded (13 cities, 140 towns, 1350 villages), and the length of the reservoir (more than 600 kilometres). The new dam will provide clean energy and mitigate the persistent flooding of the Yangtze River, but the project has not been without cost: reports of corruption, spiralling expenditure, technological problems and human rights violations, as well as resettlement difficulties, as residents are rehoused in new developments. Rescued from its now-submerged location, the houses presented in APT6 have become similarly de-territorialised, a nomad without a specific site. Within the imposing spaces of the Gallery, this home appears out of place, of a different architectural language, its footings from far away. Yet, in making this move, Chen has liberated a new space and forged a fluid future for this traditional structure. The houses now function as indexical signs of the site they once occupied, and also recall some of the issues surrounding contemporary site- specific art raised by art historian Miwon Kwon. Though the ‘site’ itself no longer exists in an accessible form, it is mobilised in a discursive manner as the key element of the work through the physical object of the house. Chen’s project also encapsulates Kwon’s contemporary phenomenon of the ‘itinerant’ artist, where today we see the ‘intensive physical mobilization of the artist to create works in various cities throughout the cosmopolitan art world’, highlighting the changing conditions of artistic production and reception. 2 The looming physical presence of the house contrasts with the whimsy of Chen’s video projection Garden 2007, also featured in APT6. To make Garden , she filmed a group of migrant workers whom she had employed to deliver huge bouquets of fake peonies in ceramic vases to the artist’s hometown of Wanzhou. 3 The video begins in darkness before dawn and, as it becomes light, these floral messengers stride past people washing in the river, the flowers bobbing slowly in time with their steps along narrow paths, through a hazy and polluted landscape of concrete rubble. They move through dreamlike sequences featuring traditional Chinese opera performers to deliver bright packages to shiny new apartment buildings. Within the grand narrative of China’s social and economic transformation, Chen’s work considers concepts of place, memory and individual experience. She excels in the tensions created by startling contrasts — the brilliant colours and textures of fake peonies against grey rubble, the worn and ‘lived in’ wooden houses amid the Gallery’s pristine architecture, the old and the new. Chen Qiulin’s work evokes some of the complexities that arise when the lives of individuals are considered in relation to great leaps of industrial progress — like phantom attachments that persist beneath the waters of the Yangtze. Angela Goddard Endnotes 1 Wu Hung (ed.), Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art [exhibition catalogue], Smart Museum of Art and The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008, p.18. 2 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity , MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2000, p.46. 3 The peony is a traditional floral symbol of China. It is known as the ‘flower of riches and honour’, and is used symbolically in Chinese art to signify the fragility of life and its potential for renewal.