Flooded land, common ground
Painting and video focus on China's Three Gorges
WORCESTER - Old-timers in Central Massachusetts saw four towns destroyed in the 1930s to make room for the Quabbin Reservoir. They know progress can be a brute.
China's Three Gorges Dam project, the focus of "Two Chinas: Chen Quilin and Yun-Fei Ji" at the Worcester Art Museum, trumps the Quabbin in size and sheer audacity. As many as 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,300 villages will be submerged when the dam is completed in the next few years.
"Two Chinas" is a gorgeous little show filled with pathos and wit. Susan Stoops, WAM's curator of contemporary art, pairs works by two Chinese artists whom you might not think had much in common: Ji, a painter born in 1963, grew up during the Cultural Revolution and now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Chen, a video artist born in 1975, pretty much missed the Cultural Revolution and has come of age as China has begun to value its artists and see them as players on the world stage. She still lives there.
Chen grew up in Wanzhou, once a port city along the Yangtze River, which was partly dismantled and then flooded in June and July of 2003. Chen spent time there in 2002, as buildings were being destroyed. For her lyrical nine-minute video "Bie Fu (Farewell Poem)," she has spliced together scenes of the city's dismemberment, which at times feels incremental and at times brutally quick, with scenes depicting characters from the tragic Chinese opera "Farewell My Concubine," the story of a condemned warrior and the woman who loves him.
The artist appears in both stories. As the title character in "Farewell My Concubine," she's brilliantly costumed in crimson, her face vivid with eye makeup. In the story of Wanzhou, she wears a simple white frock and runs through the city's gray rubble like a lost child. The video quickens as the concubine twirls in a bright red dress, then seems to slow as the city dissolves to the regular beat of a sledgehammer chipping away a building.
Toward the end, in a series of still shots, the concubine transforms into the girl in white. Tradition, with all its vivid drama, collapses into present-day reality, which seems washed of color, forsaken. The opera is a stand-in for the life of Wanzhou, fast-paced and vital, but at the end of "Bie Fu (Farewell Poem)," we're left with grime and detritus, as a small boy looks out over the soon-to-be flooded river, as if for the last time.
Stoops has ingeniously designed "Two Chinas" to invite equal attention to Chen's video and Ji's large-scale drawing in mineral pigments and ink, "Below the 143 Meter Watermark." The two pieces are installed back to back, each in its own little gallery, each with benches inviting viewers to sit. This setup urges the viewer to contemplate the difference between watching, which is what we do with a video, and looking, which is what we do with a painting or drawing.
I found myself more passive before the video, and alert and active before Ji's piece. I walked up to this masterful work on distressed paper, moved my gaze here and there, discovered images, and relished Ji's technique, which entails drawing, applying washes of pigment, and erasing. "Below the 143 Meter Watermark" (the title refers to a sign marking the reservoir's intended water level) reads like a treasure map, with meandering paths leading the eye.
Nearly 10 feet tall, the work mimics the scale of a Song Dynasty landscape, and from a distance it has the simple grace that ancient Chinese painters sought to achieve. Hills undulate up the page in soft hues of blue and beige. The boldest lines describe only natural elements - the calligraphy of elegant trees and gnarled bushes, the contours of the land.
Up close, though, outlines describe what people have done to the landscape: You'll find carts stacked with boxes, furniture, trucks, buildings, some standing and some destroyed, but all in traces of pale ink, as if fading away.
Ji's massive drawing and Chen's video are both elegies. They wander over destroyed landscapes that used to bustle with life - landscapes still haunted by their pasts, and held in the memories of those who lived there, even if they're now under water.
