Fixing Landscape_ A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three

166 for the record Porter rediscovered only a few years ago, however, Baidicheng’s stability is as much an effect of historical re-creation as it is a fact of historical preservation. The temples and other ancient buildings that make this topographical feature a famous cultural site are not always what they seem to be. With the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, even the geographical status of Baidicheng has changed. Thanks to the inundation of the low-lying land that anchored it to the banks of the Yangzi, the former fortress is no longer a promontory, but an island, connected to the banks of the Yangzi by a high, Chinese-style bridge punctuated by tile-covered pavilions. Before the completion of the dam, the banks of this soon-to-be island were reinforced with a wide band of concrete added to prevent erosion caused by the increased pressure of water in the reservoir. Still connected to the surrounding land, Baidicheng was primed for a new spatial reality. This is how it appears in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (figure 5.1), to the left of Kuimen, its concretized banks extending up from the waterline. Beset by forces that threaten its continued existence, Baidicheng has been armored to preserve the look and feel of the Three Gorges as a certain kind of Chinese landscape. For the region to remain a coherent cultural concept despite the enormous changes it has undergone, landmarks like Baidicheng had to be carefully fixed in place, even as others were dismantled, moved, or inundated. The goddess of Mt. Wu from Mao’s poem “Swimming” might marvel at this epochal reinscription of the Three Gorges, but thanks to such acts of preservation she will not find her world completely altered. figure 5.1 Han Sanming stands before Kuimen. See also color plate 11.

a record of the trace 167 What this image from Still Life allows us to see is neither the landscape of Li Bai nor the Baidicheng of today, but a trace of the material interventions required to maintain a sense of continuity in the face of displacement, a spatial reality effect made possible by tons of concrete. In Still Life, Jia folds multiple aesthetic influences—from premodern painting and poetry to Cultural Revolution posters and contemporary popular music—into a cinematic style that makes visible the time and space of displacement, a surreal zone of “noncorrespondence” between the moment and site of cinematic capture, when familiar landscapes were already in the process of disappearing, and the viewing context, when those landscapes have been reduced to memories.2 The viewer experiences displacement through the “good people” (haoren 好人) who wander the Three Gorges city of Fengjie as it is being demolished (the film’s Chinese title is Sanxia haoren 三峽好人—The Good People of the Three Gorges).3 At the center of the film are the coal miner turned demolition laborer, Han Sanming (played by Jia Zhangke’s coal miner cousin, Han Sanming 韓三明), and the middle-class nurse, Shen Hong 沈紅 (played by Zhao Tao 趙濤), both of whom have traveled to the Gorges from the northern province of Shanxi in search of their estranged spouses. Split into four sections, each of which bears the name of a basic consumer object (cigarettes, liquor, tea, candy), the film traces the movements of these characters (and commodities), watching as they are delayed or thwarted in their objectives. Simultaneously swept along by and out of pace with the temporality of contemporary China, Shen, Han, and the local people they encounter negotiate the ruins of Fengjie by creating bonds that defy, if only for a time, the circulatory logic of capitalism. Though not in thrall to the yuan or the dollar, they are still driven by economic pressures; in the face of displacement, they strive (and sometimes fail) simply to live. By its completion in 2009, the Three Gorges Dam had displaced upwards of 1.5 million people from thirteen major cities and more than a thousand smaller towns and villages. As Jia Zhangke shows us in Still Life and his documentary Dong 東, most of these settlements were dismantled by their own inhabitants, men and women tasked with removing the built environment from beneath their feet.4 Some of these people were relocated to new towns and cities bearing the same names as the old ones, while others became part of the massive internal migration that has reshaped Chinese society since Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms.5 Through their displacement, a region inscribed by its inhabitants past and present was transformed into a surface for the realization of a national myth born out of Sun Yat-sen’s vision of a modern China, rendered lyrical by Mao, and finally made material by Jiang Zemin and his fellow technocrats.

168 for the record In parts I and II of this book, I explored how the Three Gorges region has been inscribed and reinscribed through texts, images, maps, parks, monuments, and engineering projects that have fixed it as a national, imperial, cultural, and racial landscape. The preceding chapters demonstrate that the power of the ji/trace and the act of inscription have long been part of elite cultures in which landscape is not only an object of appreciation or an aesthetic form but also a manipulable object—a surface for the inscription of power and ideology. As we have seen throughout, it is far harder to access how nonelite people have experienced the landscape and the aesthetic traditions that have made it famous. For Du Fu and other premodern writers, the folk songs and lore of the Gorges are a source of local color easily assimilated into elite literary forms. For John Hersey and the Western travel writers on whom he draws, the Yangzi boatman is a symbol of China and an exemplar of a certain kind of Chineseness. For Isabella Bird, the tracker is a figure one must “sympathetically bear in mind” by scrutinizing his body and the traces that his subhuman labor have left on it. The links between concern for the tracker and the earlier forms of sympathy that helped establish Chinese people as a limit case for the human threaten to taint even the most compassionate observation with voyeuristic violence. Do we risk making the same symbolic reductions and perpetuating the same kinds of violence when we look at the displacement or suffering of Chinese people today? Are there ways of looking that acknowledge hardship without encouraging voyeurism and violation? The first question is both personal and general; it is one those of us who write about violence—whether slow or explosive, environmental or structural— must always ask, even if we can never provide a fully exculpatory answer. The second allows us to approach the ethical complexities of consuming images of displacement, dispossession, and suffering through the primary question that guides this book: in what ways does aesthetic form shape how we see and act in the world? In Still Life, landscape is not simply the product of cultural traces experienced by the informed traveler or viewer; neither is it the backdrop for a human tragedy or part of an allegory of national and racial grounding in the earth. Instead, it is the central component of a larger aesthetic system that absorbs earlier forms in order to change how we see the relationship between the working people of the Three Gorges region and the famous landscape they inhabit, even as they are being displaced from it. Jia uses landscape not only to structure how his characters—the “good people” of the Three Gorges— experience the spatial and temporal reorganization of the region, but also to focus attention on how the film viewer observes and acknowledges the layering of those people and their surroundings.

a record of the trace 169 Still Life does not speak for these people—indeed, it keeps us at a remove from locals by focusing primarily on the experiences of Han and Shen, both of whom have traveled to the region from the north—but it does acknowledge their existence by imagining how personal and collective experiences of the present and recent past might intersect with the long history of the Three Gorges as a famous Chinese landscape.6 For Jia, acknowledging entails not only recognizing an external reality, condition, or human presence, but also accepting that they have a moral claim on the artist and his viewers. Still Life encourages a way of looking that restores working people to the landscapes from which they have so often been omitted and to the built environment from which they were on the point of being displaced, while also acknowledging the disproportionate costs they have paid for China’s “rise.”7 It also asks us to join these people in contemplating the unknowable—what follows displacement and inundation. This does not necessarily make Still Life a more moral work of art than the writings of Bird or Hersey—such comparisons are of limited use—but it does create an opportunity for a different mode of viewing, one that renegotiates the terms of how and why we might “sympathetically bear in mind” the people of the region, while also making it possible to imagine how they see and experience the landscape of the Three Gorges. This mode of viewing is shaped by two interrelated formal schemes. The first is built around the static shot, deep focus, and the organization of deep space into distinct planes. The layering of landscape, architectural, and figural elements in deep space allows Jia to remediate multiple art forms in the same shot, especially landscape and portraiture, while also temporarily embedding his characters within the disappearing spaces of the Three Gorges.8 Given the English-language title of the film, it might seem more obvious to take the genre of still life painting, rather than landscape and portraiture, as a theoretical jumping-off point. Still Life contains a number of assemblages of everyday objects (literal still life images, or jingwu 靜物), such as those that begin the “cigarette” and “tea” sections of the film. If Jia fuses landscape and figure to show how people and places interact, these objects show how the characters behave as active social agents, creating links with one another. Unlike normal commodities, whose exchange value is determined monetarily, these goods are part of a separate economy of social goodwill that persists and grows after they change hands. Though they tell us a great deal about the characters’ class associations and methods of social exchange, they do so not as immobile objects, but as things that circulate among individuals, creating links and strengthening the mutual embrace of landscape and figure within cinematic depth.9

170 for the record In the second formal scheme, which frequently emerges from the first, Jia uses sequences of tracking and panning shots to mobilize the gaze, evoking the experience of viewing a traditional handscroll painting as well as the prospective gaze of socialist realist art. If the static shot engenders a mode of cinematic observation centered on characters staring out into space or working in the landscape, the scrolling shot suggests the embodied experience of those characters as they look and move through the Three Gorges. By replacing the implied object of both traditional painting (a transcendent landscape) and the socialist gaze (a utopian future just beyond the frame) with surreal digital effects and strange episodes, Jia marks the limit of our vision and the uncertainty that comes with displacement. Still Life is shaped by a range of cinematic, pictorial, textual, and sonic influences, but its way of looking is ultimately dedicated to the “exposure of traces of a life that is no longer there, or rather a way of life about which there remains only the most basic evidence.”10 This chapter explores how Jia uses the stillness of the static shot and the mobility of the scrolling shot to expose these traces, making sensible the space-time between presence and erasure. By emphasizing Jia’s formal methods, I offer an alternative to the realist discourses and documentary frameworks that are so often applied to his work.11 In Still Life, techniques normally associated with the indexicality of the photographic image or its ability to capture a preexisting reality—the long take, nonprofessional actors, “real time” pacing—instead make visible not only the lingering traces of a passing “way of life” but also the hallucinatory qualities of the cinematic image as “that which contains the unseen in what is visible, the historical in what appears transitory, and the ethical in what seems neutral.”12 Still Life is not invested in a single reality or perspective; instead, it looks beyond the frame, toward the unstable nature of reality in a place that disappears before the camera. For Jia, renegotiating the relationship between landscape and figure and punctuating the narrative with a string of surreal events—an orblike UFO, an unfinished monument that blasts into space, a cast of Peking Opera singers engrossed in handheld video games, a tightrope walker suspended between the shells of two buildings—are ways of giving form and feel to what the science fiction writer Ning Ken 寧肯 has described as the “ultra-unreal” (chaohuan 超幻) quality of contemporary China and its relation to its past.13 But Still Life does not simply capture the unreality of Chinese reality, thereby replicating the logic of realist discourse. It rejects the “unified reality” of China “as a land, a nation or a people” in favor of a sensorium attuned to the scattered fragments of cultural life past and present.14 More than just a record or document (ji 記/紀) of the massive changes that

a record of the trace 171 have reshaped China over the last three decades, Still Life is dedicated not only to fixing images for posterity but also to evoking their evanescence—it is a record of the trace/ji 跡. 15 As a record of traces no longer there and a cinematic trace of forms of labor that erase themselves, Still Life depicts the beauty and struggle of life in contemporary China where it unfolds—in the interstices of the real and the imagined, the past, present, and future, the documentary and the visionary, the global, the national, and the local. The result is a film that reimagines what it means to see the Three Gorges as a “Chinese landscape.” People in Place and Place in People The Three Gorges is a place so richly defined by the poetic imagination that it can be hard to see beyond Li Bai’s roseate clouds or Mao’s goddess to the stones and trees that the poet Fan Chengda asked his readers to consider in the Southern Song. Rather than trying to strip the landscape of its representational layers and return to the underlying materiality of mountain and river, however, Still Life takes us deeper into the workings of the ji/trace. It does this not only by making visible the layered historical and aesthetic traces that comprise the Three Gorges as cultural landscape but also by combining them with an unrelated set of traces, the popular references and everyday objects that mediate its characters’ experiences of the landscape and their relationships with one another.16 These latter traces take a range of forms—from paper money and pieces of candy to Cultural Revolution imagery, shots from other films, theme songs from old television shows, and digital effects more common to blockbuster films. To combine these historical, material, and medial traces within a cinematic frame that gives equal prominence to figure and ground, the spatial and the temporal, Still Life is designed around depth and the forms of embodied movement that animate it. Long takes, deep space, and long, slow scrolling allow Jia to layer his traces and give his characters space to move, but these techniques also create an observational space-time in which he repurposes his sources. In Still Life, the trace is both a link to the past and a building block for new ways of seeing and being in the world. The mechanics of Jia’s visual system are especially clear in the scene that opens this chapter, which begins with a medium shot of Han Sanming from the waist up, looking out at the Yangzi as it flows through Kuimen while holding a ten-yuan banknote in his hand (figure 5.1). When Han looks from Kuimen to the bill, his eyebrows arch in surprise and the camera cuts to a point-ofview shot (figure 5.2). Mao’s Mona Lisa smile confronts Han from the bill’s

172 for the record front before he flips it over in search of the image of Kuimen on the other side (figure 5.3). Han has climbed to this height to compare the Kuimen before his eyes with the Kuimen on the bill and to orient himself within an unfamiliar landscape. Mao’s appearance is a momentary distraction from this task, but by flipping from front to back—Chairman Mao to Kuimen—Han inadvertently figure 5.2 Mao’s face superimposed on the Yangzi. figure 5.3 Han Sanming compares the image of Kuimen on the ten-yuan note with the vista of Kuimen before him.

a record of the trace 173 shows how the separation of figure from landscape structures the bill’s underlying symbolism. Though each element is isolated from the other, they operate in tandem—the landscape naturalizes and aestheticizes Mao’s role in reshaping the region while Mao’s face reminds us of the voluntaristic ideology that promises, “man will conquer nature” (rending shengtian 人定勝天).17 Through Han’s misrecognition, the viewer recognizes not only how power speaks through landscape but also how landscape can be used to naturalize power. Han first encounters the ten-yuan banknote the night before, when he meets the local demolition crew he will soon join. Learning that he arrived in Fengjie on a boat that traveled through the Three Gorges, the men ask if he saw Kuimen. When it becomes clear that Han knows nothing about the landmarks of the region, they hand him the banknote. He responds by showing them a fifty-yuan note depicting the famous Hukou waterfall on the Yellow River near his home in Shanxi. If these banknotes are designed to reduce native places to national landscapes that naturalize money and the systems of political and economic power that it fuels, this encounter regrounds landscape and repurposes currency. Both the iconography of Mao and the magic of money are rejected in favor of an alternative form of social exchange and a different way of being present in the world.18 Landscape emerges not as idealized scene or historical setting, but as the product of embodied and cinematic forms of observation. While Han’s embodied observation is mediated through the ten-yuan note and made possible by his movements through Fengjie, the form of cinematic observation that Still Life engenders emerges from its method of combining figure and landscape. To bring them together, Jia and his cinematographer Yu Lik-wai 余力為 rely primarily on the space opened up by deep focus. Whereas shallow focus or soft focus tend to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the screen, creating a visual hierarchy that reduces setting or landscape to backdrop, the static shot in deep focus “open[s] a third dimension,” allowing the camera to focus on foreground, middle ground, and background simultaneously, creating the conditions for a more complex relationship among all elements within the visual field.19 In Still Life, deep focus is more than an optical effect made possible by camera technology; it makes visible the processes that constitute vernacular landscapes and exposes the ways in which ideology displaces the body from the landscape. Jia and Yu achieve these ends primarily by using deep focus to organize deep space into a series of fields or planes, creating what I call multiplanar depth. Compositionally, multiplanar depth is similar to what David Bordwell has described as “planimetric” composition, which he considers “well-suited

174 for the record to a ‘painterly’ or strongly pictorial approach to cinema.”20 In Still Life, multiplanar depth does more than create a painterly effect, however; it fixes characters in space in order to draw attention to the many ways they have been or will soon be displaced by the enormous spatial, economic, and social changes that are reshaping contemporary China. The stillness of the static shot and the fusion of figure and landscape that deep focus makes possible stand in contrast to the furious pace of a state project that displaces people and instrumentalizes the Three Gorges, flattening them into a mere surface for the inscription of power. By briefly restoring depth to the relationship between an individual body and the landscape it occupies, Han Sanming’s encounter with Kuimen carves out a cinematic space and time outside of this process. More often than not, however, Jia uses deep focus and multiplanarity not to emplace his characters, but to draw attention to the threat of displacement in a landscape that is slowly disappearing beneath their feet, as when he frames Han Sanming and Shen Hong using the ruined (and in some cases newly constructed) buildings of Fengjie. Normally conceived of as protective enclosures, buildings in Still Life are more often than not gaping, empty hulks, open to the elements and unable to protect life. In the process of losing their original function, however, ruined buildings gain poetic resonance and a new aesthetic utility.21 Throughout the film, these porous structures provide apertures or windows that Jia uses to frame images, enclosing and lingering on them as though they were paintings or photographs hanging on the walls of a gallery. Shen Hong and Han Sanming (and sometimes their companions) often stand before these openings, simultaneously enclosed by the camera’s frame through which we look and the filmed frame through which they look. In place of the windows or doors that accommodate the body and its movements, these holes mark a break in the protective function of buildings, signaling the vulnerability of the people who occupy them.22 The first of these sequences comes on Han’s first day of demolition work, while he is indoors with his fellow workers for their lunch break. The structure they are in seems to be the same structure they have just been dismantling— empty, dirty, pierced with gaping holes in the exterior walls, and surrounded by rubble. As Han wanders off to eat alone, a woman follows him to an empty room. There, she asks if he’s interested in a “girl” (xiaojie 小姐), but when he confusedly responds “What girl?,” she quickly corrects herself, saying “young woman” (shaofu 少婦). Moving over to a large hole in the wall, she yells in the direction of a battered balcony from which four women emerge (none of them particularly young), fanning themselves with shoe inserts and striking awkward poses (figure 5.4).

a record of the trace 175 Not only do the jagged bricks to the left and right of the slightly oblique shot frame the camera’s view and the group of women, but within this frame the women are further framed—by the balcony on which they stand and those surrounding it, by a doorway, by windows, and by the building itself and those in the background. Like the Albertian window of perspectival painting, it seems as though the first opening is meant to be looked through, to create a sense of depth that draws the viewer’s gaze, dissolving the frame as boundary. For Renaissance painting, this type of perspective was a tool of immediacy: by using the internal frame to erase the medium, the artist made “the space of the picture continuous with the viewer’s space.”23 In this scene however, we are not dealing with one, or even two frames; we are met by a multiplicity of apertures, their repetition belying the first two frames’ claims to immediacy and signaling that the medium is just as important a component of the scene as is the tenuous, commodified status of these women.24 Unlike the scientifically precise frames I described in chapter 3, which welcome a penetrative and extractive imperial gaze, these jagged frames draw our attention to the act of image-making and establish a mode of viewing designed to acknowledge not just the traces of physical labor and the people who have left them, but also those people whose labor leaves no trace at all, except perhaps on their bodies and psyches. The jaggedness of the frames also serves as a reminder that even the mode of observation made possible by displacement is temporary: through the destruction of the objects that create depth as a visual effect, we figure 5.4 A multiplicity of apertures.

176 for the record lose access to depth as a means of acknowledging the relationship between people and the places they occupy. This shot uses a portrait-like composition to draw attention to the relationship between bodies and architecture, while also acknowledging the forms of labor required to survive in the space-time of displacement. Though Han refuses the offer of a young woman, we know from earlier in the film that he purchased his wife from this very region years before—that he is, in fact, someone who has commodified women. He has traveled to the Gorges to look for a young woman, his wife, and a young girl, the daughter that his wife took with her when she left him. The significance (and dark humor) of the scene hinges on the procuress’s language: the term shaofu normally refers to a young married woman. Perhaps this is why Han seems so nonplussed— as if this woman already knows his life story somehow. Though we seem to share the perspective of Han Sanming here, a more common framing composition in Still Life depicts characters standing before or looking out through various openings, as when Shen Hong travels to an unfinished building in the newly constructed city of Fengjie (figure 5.5) or in the shot immediately preceding Han’s discovery of his friend Mage’s 馬哥 (a transliteration of Mark) battered corpse (figure 5.6). In these shots, we watch the characters watching, as if before a painting in a gallery or a film in a cinema. James Tweedie has identified a similar composition in a 1983 film by the Taiwanese New Wave director Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, one of Jia’s most important stylistic influences.25 The Boys from Fengkuei (Fenggui laide ren figure 5.5 Shen Hong framed by an unfinished building in the new Fengjie.

a record of the trace 177 風櫃來的人) follows a group of young friends from the Penghu Islands in the Taiwan Straits as they relocate to Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan. Wandering the city, they imagine themselves occupying modern buildings and eventually find their way to the eleventh story of an unfinished building, where they have been told that they can watch a sexually explicit European film. Discovering that they’ve been scammed, the men look out over Kaohsiung, framed by a missing window that maps almost perfectly onto both cinematic frame and movie screen (figure 5.7). In Tweedie’s reading, the spectacle of the city is a substitute for the promised cinematic spectacle. Viewed from a height and through the window of an unfinished building, it is simultaneously real and immediate—the city through which they move—and inaccessible, raising “the possibility that a new society will remain an unfinished project, endlessly deferred in favor of new images of modernity that rise to meet and envelop its inhabitants.”26 Still Life echoes both formal and narrative elements of The Boys from Fengkuei, though this particular composition is more than a simple act of citation. Where Hou uses the window as a screen substitute that separates his characters from the scene they observe, offering an ambiguous vision of modernity as an unfinished spectacle that may or may not include the spectator, Jia uses jagged windows, holes, and doors not only to place his poorest characters within a city under demolition, drawing our attention to the traces of a labor that effaces figure 5.6 Han Sanming and his fellow workers framed by a building they are demolishing.

178 for the record itself, but also to frame a landscape that will soon be underwater, foreclosing even the most ambiguous futurity. In perhaps Jia’s most poignant use of a partially demolished building as frame, Han Sanming and his wife, who is referred to only as “Missy Ma” (Ma yaomei 馬幺妹; yaomei is Chongqing dialect for the youngest girl in a family) wander through the ruins of Fengjie at dusk, threading skeletal buildings and old trees. Having just committed to paying his wife’s brother’s debts in order to buy her out of indentured servitude, Han must now say good-bye so that he can return to Shanxi to earn the promised money. The couple wanders into an empty room, its walls streaked with burn marks and broken by yet another giant opening, even on the top but jagged and blown out at the sides near the bottom. At first, they stand and then squat to the right of this window, remaining almost totally silent except when Han’s wife offers him a piece of candy (the same kind that Mage gave Han when Han last saw him alive), the nostalgia-inducing da baitu 大白兔, or Big White Rabbit brand of chewy milk candy (figure 5.8). The two face each other in silence until a loud sound draws them to the giant hole. Through this opening they look into the distance at a multistory building that implodes and swiftly disappears in a cloud of dust. After it is gone, Han draws closer to his wife and holds her from behind, the first physical connection between the two and a sign of their reconciliation figure 5.7 Viewing a “new society . . . endlessly deferred” in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Boys from Fengkuei (1983).

a record of the trace 179 (figure 5.9). The building’s collapse brings them together, but it is also a reminder of their vulnerability and the many obstacles that will continue to keep them apart until Han can raise enough money to buy her freedom. By framing a scene of demolition and layering it with an image of Han and his wife, Jia asks us to acknowledge his characters’ impending displacement figure 5.8 Han Sanming’s wife “Missy Ma” gives him a piece of Big White Rabbit candy. figure 5.9 The couple watches the demolition of the tallest building in the ruins of Fengjie.

180 for the record and provides a cinematic frame that allows us to observe them fixed, if only temporarily, in place. Please Look (Again) The scenes I have described up to this point show how Jia uses static shots and deep focus to combine landscape and portraiture, giving cinematic form to processes of emplacement and displacement. They also introduce two overlapping modes of observation: the film character gazing out into the landscape, and the film viewer observing the interaction of figure and ground. Jia’s organization of deep space and his framing of Han and Shen shape how we watch them and acknowledge their relationship with the landscape, while also drawing attention to how they look and what they see (or often fail to see). Standing in profile, gazing up and out into the landscape or beyond the frame, they distantly evoke the literati found in landscape images like Ding Guanpeng’s illustration of the final couplet of the second of Du Fu’s “Autumn Stirrings” poems, which I discussed in chapter 2. Unlike those literati figures, who are depicted from a distance and tend to be quite small relative to the painting as a whole, however, Jia’s characters occupy a much larger proportion of the image, with the landscape in the plane beyond them. This planar composition, as well as the poses his characters strike, are traces of a more recent artistic reference point—the countless images of heroic figures found in propaganda art and film of the Mao era. In images from the 1950s and ’60s in particular, Mao and other socialist heroes are often placed in front of a landscape that stretches into the distance as they gaze resolutely up and beyond the frame of the image, toward a socialist future soon to come. Like the imperial landscape gaze described in chapter 3, their “socialist realist gaze” is prospective, subordinated in this case to the telos of socialist utopia. A gesture with Soviet roots, the socialist realist gaze in Chinese visual culture of the Mao era is directed beyond the frame of an image or the diegetic world of a film, toward an “ideologically resplendent offscreen space.”27 Fundamentally “anti-individual,” it is deployed by revolutionary leaders or “representatives of collective action” to inspire confidence in the certainty of that future and to generate the emotions necessary to pursue it.28 Because it draws both the represented figure and the poster or film viewer beyond the frame, the socialist realist gaze also opens a gap between figure and ground that can easily be ideologically programmed.

a record of the trace 181 The posters “Keep Close to the Great Leader Chairman Mao As You Bravely March Forward 盡跟偉大毛主席領袖奮勇前進” (1969) (figure 5.10) and “Man’s Whole World Is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects Areas South and North of the Yangtze River 人間正道是 滄桑: 毛主席視察大江南北” (1968) (figure 5.11) are typical of the class of images through and against which Still Life’s multiplanar structure signifies.29 In both posters, Mao stands in three-quarter profile, looking up and beyond the frame while revolutionary masses behind him stretch into the distance, indistinguishable from the national landscape—a literal depiction of the proverbial renshan renhai 人山人海 (“mountain of people, sea of people”). Images of this sort exemplify what Ban Wang describes as the Chinese sublime (chonggao 崇高), “an aesthetic that furnishes a gigantic image of the people, the figure of the collective subject engaged in world-transforming practice in order to carry out the telos of history.”30 The separation of this collective subject from their leader into separate planes—one figural and the other landscape—is enhanced by Mao’s steady gaze, which communicates his faith in man’s duty to master and transform the world (as he has mastered and transformed the people). In both images, landscape (in the form of people) is reduced to a background surface onto which the infinitely reproducible image of Mao can be superimposed. The experience of Zheng Shengtian 鄭勝天 (b. 1938), the artist who conceived the idea and base sketch for “Man’s Whole World Is Mutable,” demonstrates how thoroughly detached landscape and figure could be from one another in the composition of socialist realist art. As Zheng recollects: “When I was about to transfer [my sketch] onto canvas, I was told that Mao’s head had to be painted by a young revolutionary Red Guard. Also, the body had to be drawn by a teacher with a stronger revolutionary awareness.”31 As a result of his suspect class standing, Zheng was allowed to paint the “romantic” landscape background free from intervention, an experience he recalls fondly. Zheng’s anecdote suggests that the landscape was considered less important than the sacred image of Mao. In the finished painting, however, it is only in relation to the landscape as embodied by the revolutionary masses that Mao signifies. As a boundary separating and linking China’s southern and northern halves—a “natural moat” become a “thoroughfare,” as Mao describes it in “Swimming”— the Yangzi functions as a synecdoche for a nation united and mobilized by Mao’s prospective gaze. While Mao remains well within the pictorial foreground in both “Keep Close to the Great Leader” and “Man’s Whole World Is Mutable,” his myriad proxies fan out to realize his vision of transforming the natural world in the deeper plane that stretches behind him to the horizon.

figure 5.11 “Man’s Whole World Is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects Areas South and North of the Yangtze River” (1968), designed by Zheng Shengtian 鄭勝天. See also color plate 12. Source: U.S. Library of Congress figure 5.10 “Keep Close to the Great Leader Chairman Mao as You Bravely March Forward” (1969). Source: International Institute of Social History, Landsberger Collection (BG E12/631)

a record of the trace 183 These images establish a hierarchical relationship between figure and ground while also subordinating the space of the nation to the temporality of socialist development. The same relationships are simultaneously concealed and reinforced by the ten-yuan banknote that Han Sanming inspects early in Still Life (figures 5.1–5.3). It conceals them by isolating the portraitist and landscape components on opposite sides of the banknote, eliminating their ability to interact within pictorial depth, and reinforces them, Januslike, by making the images two sides of the same object. Han’s alternation between Kuimen, Mao, and the image of Kuimen stages this very reading while simultaneously creating a composite image of a single figure and the landscape. In Still Life, the balance between figure and landscape is an acknowledgment of the bonds between humans and their environments. These bonds, though imperiled and temporary, are maintained by the quotidian practices of moving bodies. It is the body in motion, and the body at work in particular, that defines the relationship between the film’s characters and the Three Gorges landscape. After cutting away from Han and Kuimen in the ten-yuan scene, the camera pans from right to left across the rubble where Fengjie once stood. In the far distance, through the haze, the famous mountains that make up Kuimen are visible once again. On the steep bank just across the river, one can make out the raw scars of recent landslides, traces of the environmental impact of the dam project (figure 5.12).32 The camera then cuts to Han Sanming, who is framed by the jagged edges of the building he is demolishing and who stands, only for a moment, in front of a graffiti-covered wall (figure 5.13)—a mess of mostly indecipherable inscriptions that bring to mind a calligraphic scroll. In the next series of shots (figures 5.14 and 5.15), we see Han and his coworkers rhythmically pounding a partially demolished building with sledgehammers—their efforts, though smooth and assured, seem futile. What is perhaps most striking is how fit they look, how close their welldefined muscles are to the puffed-up physique of Yu the Great at the Yu the Great Mythology Park in Wuhan. Unlike Yu, however, their physical fitness does not signal a mythologized vision of national prowess and strength in the age of the Chinese economic miracle. Like the Yangzi River trackers of an earlier age, their muscles and sinews bear the unmistakable mark of an economic system in which strength is their only capital. From the moment Han first encounters his coworkers, standing around in their underwear after bathing at the end of their workday, we are invited to consider how their bodies bear traces of their labor.33 The irony, of course, is that their healthy physiques are

184 for the record produced through the demolition of the last few buildings of a city where they are among the last residents—stuck in an economic dead end that makes their bodies their only assets, they are being paid to remove the very ground on which they stand. * Whether superimposed on the landscape or depicted as a floating head on one side of the ten-yuan note, Mao and his landscapes are both separate and figure 5.13 Han Sanming, calligraphically framed. figure 5.12 Han Sanming looks out at the ruins of Fengjie and the destabilized banks of the Yangzi. See also color plate 13.

a record of the trace 185 closely related. In “Keep Close to the Great Leader” and “Man’s Whole World Is Mutable,” both of which gain their symbolic reach through the illusion of depth, the two pictorial planes function first as mirrors of one another—the people/nation are Mao and Mao is the people/nation—and second as elements within an ideological hierarchy—Mao as theory, the people as praxis. Jia uses a similar planar composition to expose such ideological flatness, recovering individuals from the formless mass and placing them within figures 5.14 Futile labors and well-muscled bodies. figure 5.15 Han Sanming at work.

186 for the record the multiplanar depths of the landscapes they observe and in which they labor. Han and Shen gaze into, not away from, the landscape, where they see the ruination of an imperfect but familiar world and the production of a new one in which earlier values no longer signify and social relations have nearly lost their grounding. By repurposing socialist realist imagery and its methods of combining figure and ground to depict the experience of displacement, Jia creates an ephemeral space-time in which the gaze finds a new set of objects. Together with Han and Shen, we see that the dream of a perfect future has given way to something darker and more complicated, an ambivalent legacy inscribed on but soon to be erased from the landscape of the Gorges. In Still Life, the repurposed socialist realist gaze is a trace of an earlier historical moment and its visual codes that Jia uses to establish a new mode of viewing and representing people in place. In contrast to the earlier images with which it resonates, in which the object of the gaze is always beyond the frame, Still Life allows us to see what its characters see (or sometimes fail to see). In moments of extended looking that echo the socialist realist gaze, Jia often inserts surreal objects and episodes, such as the UFO-like orb that marks a transition between Han Sanming’s search for his wife and daughter and Shen Hong’s search for her husband (see next section). Perhaps the most striking of Still Life’s surreal interruptions occurs when a rocket-like monument launches mysteriously into space in a section of the film dedicated to Shen Hong’s search for her husband.34 After a long day of wandering the partially demolished Fengjie and its newly constructed replacement city, Shen is staying at the apartment of her husband’s old army friend Wang Dongming 王東明 (played by Wang Hongwei 王宏偉), an archaeologist working to recover artifacts from soon to be flooded areas. Visible from the balcony of Wang’s apartment, the monument appears firmly grounded in the distance, framed by a range of hills behind it, a balustrade in front and beneath it, and a clothesline sloping above it. When Shen steps silently out onto the balcony to hang a small blue and white singlet on the line, we hear only the sounds of birds and a baby crying (figure 5.16). For a brief moment after she hangs the shirt, Shen looks up and out beyond the frame of the shot. After she goes back inside, the camera remains fixed on the scene. Soon, the distant monument begins to shake, a cloud of smoke and dust grows from its base, and it launches into space, rumbling quietly as it leaves the frame (figure 5.17). This computer-generated interpolation shatters a scene of meticulous formalism. Just as the banknote mediates between Han Sanming and Kuimen,

a record of the trace 187 the flying monument launches itself between the balcony and the mountains, breaking the fusion of multiple layers within depth. Though its launch is a digital effect, the monument itself is not computer generated, but rather an actual, unfinished memorial to the displaced residents of the gorges. Constructed to resemble the character hua 華—a poetic word that refers both to the people of China (huaren 華人) and to People’s Republic of China (Zhonghua figure 5.16 Shen Hong and the repurposed socialist realist gaze. See also color plate 14. figure 5.17 The monument to the migrants of the Three Gorges launches into space.

188 for the record renmin gongheguo 中華人民共和國)—it is a monument to the failed promises of national development, an allegory of national ruin in the midst of unprecedented economic growth. Like the ten-yuan note, it operates through symbolic reduction—in this case, of the people (huaren) to the nation (Zhonghua), and vice versa. As an object embedded in the Three Gorges, the unfinished structure is part of the larger effort to reinscribe the postdam landscape by producing new monuments and landmarks. Along with the Yu the Great Mythology Park, it stakes a claim to the Chineseness of the landscape by drawing on both the mythology of the modern nation of China and the symbolic capital of the ancient Chinese people.35 By displacing it from the depth of the landscape in Still Life, however, Jia Zhangke rejects the ideological cooptation of both the recent and distant past to remind us of the displacement of (the) people, not only from the Three Gorges but also from the goals of the new People’s Republic of China. In Still Life, all that is solid melts not only into air, as Marx so famously put it, but also into water.36 This image from the Communist Manifesto, along with countless Maoist concepts, slogans, and images, are part of Jia’s cultural inheritance. Throughout Still Life we hear strange echoes of Marx’s characterization of the magic of capitalism—the monument that lifts off into space like a rocket, a glowing bridge that emerges from the darkness, Peking Opera performers engrossed in handheld computer games, a tightrope walker crossing the gulf between the shells of two buildings, a flying saucer. It would be easy to write off these scenes as surreal irruptions in an otherwise realist film. Yet, as traces of the recent past and ephemeral present, they provide Jia with a way of making sense of (and poking fun at) not only modern Chinese history but also the inherently strange experience of inhabiting a place as it disappears. We see them not only through Han Sanming’s or Shen Hong’s eyes, but through a socialist gaze repurposed for the ultra-unreal of the postsocialist present. Differences between images of Mao from the 1960s and images of Shen Hong and Han Sanming will be clear to anyone with a passing understanding of the historical and aesthetic contexts of these works. What is important here, however, are not differences, but similarities: a central figure standing resolutely in the extreme foreground, and beyond him or her, a landscape. The comparison I am making based on these similarities is less about issues of influence and filiation than it is about how images travel and change, how they come to function as traces of the past in depictions of the present. Once an image or a style of composition is appropriated and transformed, it begins to age anew; having once traveled, it will often set off again; and

a record of the trace 189 though it moves on, it leaves traces. Many of the political myths fostered by “Mao-art” have been debunked, but its images continually reemerge as ghostly traces in the visual culture of postsocialist China. In its most attenuated form, this art, much of which is generally grouped under the rubric of “Political Pop” (zhengzhi popu 政治波譜), produces simulacra that repurpose the imagery of the Cultural Revolution for the lucrative market in contemporary Chinese art. If, after the shocking and effective first wave of such appropriations in the mid-1990s, Political Pop and Cynical Realism have lost much of their novelty and most of their punch, then the work of artists like Jia Zhangke points to a new aesthetic in which artistic forms delve deeply into the nexus of historical trauma and visual culture, excavating a set of medial traces to communicate a contemporary experience that has yet to relinquish the ghosts of the past.37 Scrolling Breadth Peering into Still Life’s depths and through its frames, we discover a composite of traces that make visible not only the past but also the moving, laboring bodies that occupy the space-time of displacement. If the stillness of the static shot invites the viewer to acknowledge the precariousness of the “good people” of the Three Gorges under such conditions, the film’s scrolling sequences offer the viewer a vicarious experience of looking at and moving through the landscape. Scrolling evokes the visual and temporal experience of viewing a landscape handscroll like The Shu River I discussed in chapter 2, but remakes that traditional format into a method for synthesizing the many historically and culturally disparate traces and aesthetic influences that shape Still Life. Though often set in motion by the gaze of Still Life’s characters, scrolling rejects the fixed stare and hidden object of socialist realist art, compelling not only Han Sanming and Shen Hong but also the film’s viewers to reconsider the links between the “traditions” of the distant past, the ubiquitous political imagery of the recent past, and the everyday images and objects that shape experience in contemporary China. It is by mobilizing the gaze of both the film’s characters and its viewers that Jia produces a work that extends beyond the documentary or the realist to encompass the nature of cultural production and its relation to the recent and distant past in a China that is racing toward an unknown future. The most extended scrolling sequence begins after Han Sanming has rescued Mage, who had been bound inside a large plastic bag and dumped amid

190 for the record the rubble of the old city, and concludes soon after Shen Hong’s first appearance in the film. In the scene that anchors this sequence, Han and Mage eat a meal and get to know one another. When Mage learns that Han has come in search of his estranged wife, he calls the older man nostalgic and quotes one of Chow Yun-fat characters: “The world of today doesn’t suit us because we’re too nostalgic.” Unlike Han Sanming, who says very little in the film, Mage speaks a great deal, often channeling the swagger of Hong Kong gangster films and television shows. When the two exchange mobile phone numbers, we learn that although both are indeed nostalgic, they yearn for different times. Han’s ringtone is a MIDI version of the 1990s hit “May the Good Live Forever in Peace” (haoren yisheng pingan 好人一生平安), the theme song of the television drama Yearning (Kewang 渴望).38 When Mage learns the name of the song, he asks, “What ‘good people’ are left in Fengjie now?” Without waiting for an answer, he proudly asks Han to call him and listen to his ringtone— Frances Yip’s Cantopop theme song to The Bund (Shanghai tan 上海灘), a Hong Kong television series set in 1920s Shanghai and staring Mage’s hero, Chow Yun-fat. Released in 1980, the show and its theme song were wildly popular in Asia through the 1980s.39 Unlike Han Sanming’s digitized, instrumental song, Mage’s “Shanghai tan” is a recording of the theme song to The Bund, a superior version that intensifies the technologically and theatrically mediated nature of his character. Both the song and the television show are 1980s iterations of nostalgia for 1920s Shanghai, and their sentimentality and stylized bravado provide the model for Mage’s personal style.40 The theme song to The Bund, like the songs of the Taiwanese chanteuse Deng Lijun 鄧麗君 (Teresa Teng), was part of a wave of foreign and Sinophone popular culture that began arriving in Mainland China in the early 1980s. As Jia Zhangke recollects, these works introduced not only new sentiments but also formerly forbidden types of sociality and individuality: “from this pop culture we learned about new social groups, like triads. Previously we would only sing revolutionary songs. As children, we would usually all begin by learning ‘we are the heirs of socialism,’ all these songs that were always in the plural, that were collective. But then Teresa Teng sang in the singular: ‘The moon stands for my heart;’ she was singing about the individual, the self.”41 If The Bund and Teresa Teng showed children born in the 1960s and 1970s how to form new collectives and assert personal desires, Yearning, which follows two families from the 1950s into the Cultural Revolution, explored the familial and social bonds that defined life in the age of revolutionary tumult.42

a record of the trace 191 As Mage’s ringtone plays in the restaurant, Jia’s camera tracks right to a television showing images of an elderly woman supported by officials as she climbs a flight of stairs, a crying woman, a boat with an English language sign reading “Yangzi River Tourism,” and a man atop a hill waving with his jacket in farewell. The camera then cuts to a shot of a 156.3-meter “Stage Three” reservoir marker taken from a boat on the Yangzi (figure 5.18). At the same moment, the tinny, diegetic ringtone version of the song shifts to a clearer, louder, extra-diegetic version, and the camera, which had been stationary throughout Mage and Han’s encounter, begins more than a minute of panning and tracking shots. Starting on the river, the camera cuts to Han, who stands in his underwear on a rooftop (figure 5.19), then to a view of Kuimen at the left, toward which he walks and gazes and from which appears a glowing, silvery orb. As the UFO moves to the right, the camera reverses direction and pans to follow it, while The Bund fades into a series of deep, percussive rumbles. When the orb leaves the frame that contains Han Sanming, the camera cuts on action to our first shot of Shen Hong (figure 5.20), who continues to follow it to the right until it disappears in the distance above a rusting factory, its whirring replaced by atmospheric music and the sound of creaking metal in the abandoned factory. The stances of both Han and Shen resemble Mao’s in the Cultural Revolution images described above. Where Mao or one of technocratic leaders of postreform China might have seen a factory symbolizing the achievements of the modern socialist state (figure 5.21), figure 5.18 “Stage Three” water level marker.

192 for the record however, Shen sees the rusted hulk of a shuttered factory (figure 5.22), a symbol of the failure of the socialist economy and the tragic effects of that failure on workers. As Shen Hong enters the structure, she walks in front of workers ineffectually trying to demolish the enormous structure with bars and sticks figure 5.19 Han Sanming watches a UFO approach. figure 5.20 Shen Hong’s first appearance.

figure 5.21 “A Daqing Blooms on the Banks of the Yangzi 扬子江畔大庆花” (1975), Song Wenzhi 宋文治. Source: International Institute of Social History, Landsberger Collection, BG E13/411 figure 5.22 Factory as socialist ruin.

194 for the record figure 5.23 Demolition workers pound away at the factory with sticks and bars. (figure 5.23) and, later, an injured man seeking compensation for the loss of his hand in a work-related accident. That the latter scene takes place under the gaze of faded portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao drives home the point that Jia’s characters occupy a transitional world of contradictory temporalities (figure 5.24). These images foreshadow the television clips of Chinese leaders, each of whom dreamed of or facilitated the dam’s construction, that play on the boat that takes Shen Hong away from Fengjie later in the film. Though its media of dissemination have changed, propaganda remains an inescapable presence. The sequence that begins with Han Sanming and Mage in the restaurant and ends with Shen Hong’s arrival at the factory is one of two in which Jia layers images from television sets with disembodied song and shots of the riverscape taken from boats. In this one, the sentimental tone and lyrics of Frances Yip’s song provide a fatalistic pop philosophy that contrasts ironically with the images that play on the television screen immediately following Han and Mage’s conversation, as well as the shot of the high-water mark that appears after the music shifts to extra-diegetic mode: Waves rush, waves roll—for ten thousand li the river’s waters never rest Washing away the affairs of this world—churning them together into a single tide

a record of the trace 195 Joy or sorrow? On the waves there’s no distinguishing bliss from misery Success or failure? On the waves there’s no way to see what you have or lack The unending flow of the song’s river is not only a figure for the passage of time, a metaphor based on the clichéd analogy between time and water’s flow, but also for the ineluctability of fate and the impossibility of definitively interpreting the past. Of course, as the dam was being constructed, the Yangzi’s power was no longer defined by its eastward flow, but by its steady upward creep. The mystery of fate and the ambiguity of the past have been replaced with the engineer’s timeline and the ubiquitous water marker, a manifestation of the future that one sees best from “on the waves.” The Bund theme song and the movement that it initiates are echoed in the scene that opens this book and the poem that has served as a point of passage between its sections. After Shen Hong parts from her husband, the camera cuts to a slowly upward tilting shot of Chinese tourists standing at the prow of a ship as it travels downstream through the Gorges. Gone are the ruins of Fengjie; here are the Three Gorges enshrined as national and cultural Chinese landscape. As the camera focuses on the river scenery, we hear traditional Chinese vocal music, over which the tour guide’s voice recites Li Bai’s “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” as recognizable an artifact of traditional figure 5.24 Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

196 for the record figure 5.25 Deng Xiaoping. Chinese literary culture as Frances Yip’s song is of 1980s Sinophone pop culture. Following her recitation, the tour guide begins to describe the dam and reservoir project, which has “today, once again drawn the attention of the world” to the landscape of the Gorges. At this point, the camera cuts to a shipboard television showing a montage of images of Chinese leaders involved in the history of the dam—Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping—as well as footage of its early construction (figures 5.25 and 5.26). In this sequence of shots, Jia seems to position Li Bai’s poem as offering what Jie Li calls a “transcendent vision” of the Three Gorges landscape that stands in contrast to the changes wrought by China’s leaders.43 In order to “once again draw the attention of the world” to the area, the man-made structures and natural shape of the Gorges must be forever transformed. Yet Li Bai’s poem does not stand outside the world that Jia Zhangke depicts. Nor does it necessarily offer a stable cultural position from which to critique the Three Gorges Dam. As I have suggested throughout this book, landscape representation plays an important role in the production of space. Though Li Bai’s poem is only one small part of the enormous body of landscape representations that have depicted the Three Gorges over more than two millennia, I have made it a point of passage because it appears again and again in representations of the region. Its predictable repetition contributes to the “obviousness” of the Three Gorges as a cultural concept.44 By helping to fix the Gorges as a Chinese landscape in the cultural imaginary, “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng” and other famous poems inadvertently prepare the

a record of the trace 197 way for (or are used to distract from) the physical and social transformations that the region has undergone. If the scene that opens this chapter exposes the ideological function of isolating figure from landscape on the ten-yuan banknote, this moment shows how poetry might support the ideologically driven reorganization of the Three Gorges by perpetuating a “traditional” landscape vision. As yet another medial trace and a scrolling figure that parallels the Shanghai tan theme song, “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng” evokes the past but speaks to the present. Layered under and in dialogue with cinematic images of the Gorges and televisual propaganda, it becomes part of a composite work of art, no less mediated than Jia’s repurposed socialist realist gaze. Just as the Tang poet “cross[es] 1,000 li in a single day,” Jia crosses thousands of years and a multitude of forms to evoke a place so complexly inscribed and reinscribed that it requires new ways of looking and listening. In this way Jia not only draws on and expands earlier landscape traditions, he changes how we see the landscape and how we understand the connections between people and places. figure 5.26 Mao Zedong.

6 INK IN THE WOUND The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. . . . For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.) —Walter Benjamin1 A Sense of Crisis In 2003, the Pratt Manhattan Gallery launched an exhibition of Yun-fei Ji’s 雲飛季 paintings titled “The Old One Hundred Names.” According to Ji, the works included in this exhibition depict a fictional Chinese “village that existed before the Cultural Revolution and disappeared after the Three Gorges Project”: There is a long process leading to the fading away of the village.  .  .  . Before that [exhibition], I painted a piece about the Opium War, because I think the Opium War is a very important episode in modern Chinese history. Colonialism awakened a sense of crisis in our ancient culture. The pillars of our past—like Confucius and Laozi—collapsed because

ink in the wound 199 we had to confront the power of the West. The suspicion toward the past persisted through the revolutionary years and the Cultural Revolution. Everything from the past was bad and we had to smash it all to pieces. I feel that there is a connection from the Opium War to the Cultural Revolution, all the way to the Three Gorges Project.2 In Ji’s statement, a clear if partial lineage emerges linking the Three Gorges Dam project with some of the key events of modern Chinese history. These historical moments are joined both by a shared claim to “traumatic experience” and by a self-destructive impulse that developed out of China’s first violent confrontation with the Western nation-state. In Ji’s scheme, the Chinese people’s target at each moment is their own past: the varied traditions, icons, ideas, and spaces that impede progress, whether toward nationhood, revolution, or technological and economic mastery. And yet, time bears no wounds—the real victim (and perpetrator) of these traumas is not the past, but the people themselves: “we had to confront the power of the West” and “everything from the past was bad and we had to smash it all to pieces” (emphasis added). The history of Ji’s imagined village is figured as a process of traumatization and compulsory self-effacement inextricably—if vaguely—linked to Three Gorges Dam project. Born in 1963, Yun-fei Ji experienced the tumult of the Cultural Revolution as a child and came of age in the dynamic period following Mao’s death in 1976. As a schoolboy, he studied various styles of Western painting, and in 1978, at only fifteen, he joined the first class to enroll at the Central Academy of Art after instruction had been suspended during the Cultural Revolution. Though his formal studies were in oil painting, by his graduation in 1982 he was already seriously engaged in calligraphy and Chinese painting, and by the mid-1980s he had begun working with the traditional materials— ink, brush, mulberry paper—that now define his artistic practice. In 1986, Ji moved to Arkansas to pursue an MFA at the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, finally moving to New York City in the late 1980s. Though he continued to experiment with various media and styles during his first years in America, by the early 1990s his idiosyncratic version of Chinese painting and his use of traditional media had crystallized in a series of paintings about the Cultural Revolution. We never learn the name of the fictional village that is haunted by ghosts of the Cultural Revolution. In its place, Ji offers “the old one hundred names,” a translation of the Chinese lao baixing 老百姓, a phrase that refers to the common Chinese people, undistinguished by power, money, or learning—the

200 for the record people of the People’s Republic. Within the condensed narrative of “The Old One Hundred Names,” the Three Gorges Dam threatens not a village or a landscape, but the common folk who occupy the village and the landscape. By forgoing a specific place name in favor of a term that suggests the class of people in whose name the state rules, Ji began a process of mapping a human topography that combines landscape and figurative painting to convey the physical, mental, and societal effects of the dam on the people of the Gorges. The earliest paintings in the “Old One Hundred Names” series mark the beginning of Ji’s fascination with the Three Gorges Dam project and its consequences. For more than a decade after this exhibition first opened, he continued to add to a body of work that gives pictorial form to the complex and shifting relationships between the people of the Gorges, the places that they inhabit (and from which they are displaced), and the traumas of recent Chinese history. In his earliest Three Gorges images, Ji often imagines the region at the moment of its transformation by the dam and reservoir as a postapocalyptic wasteland, constructed out of a jumble of conventional landscape elements, historical figures, and all manner of wreckage, not to mention demonic figures and skeletal scavengers. In works produced after 2002–2003, following his first trip to the Gorges, Ji began to experiment with a more understated and documentary style, though even these images are haunted by ghosts and monsters. Stylistic shifts notwithstanding, all of Yun-fei Ji’s Three Gorges works depict a world in which political power has encroached catastrophically on the landscape and its people, leaving both shattered and desolate. The source of this chaos—the Three Gorges Dam—is absent from Ji’s paintings; it is an object of repression nowhere seen but everywhere felt. Ji also eschews the conventional, spatially grand associations of the Three Gorges region as famous Chinese landscape—there are no recognizable vistas of Kuimen, no depictions of Baidicheng and its landmarks, no towering cliffs, no surging Yangzi. In the absence of the region’s famous natural and manmade monuments, Ji constructs his landscapes out of generic forms borrowed from Chinese landscape painting and fills them with representations of ruined buildings, everyday objects, migrants, monsters, and ghosts to create a new, claustrophobic topography. This figural-architectural-landscape hybrid keeps the dam hidden from view but shows how it consumes the Three Gorges and displaces its inhabitants. This chapter explores how Ji reimagines and reinscribes the landscape of the Three Gorges as a site of trauma—both a raw wound that opens onto past

ink in the wound 201 traumas, especially the Cultural Revolution, and a frame for the physical and psychic consequences of the dam project. In Ji’s work, the trace of the brush gives form to trauma, and the act of tracing constitutes a documentary practice focused on those displaced from the site of trauma. Although I situate Ji’s work in relation to the scholarly literature of trauma studies in the next section, I do not read Ji “through the lens” of trauma.3 Instead, I explore how he gives form to his personal conception of traumatic experience through images of temporal and spatial disorder and physical endangerment. In particular, I focus on what I call “collapsed time,” the space-time of imminent demolition, which brings the future undeniably into the present while transforming buildings, villages, and even whole cities into traces of the past. Although many of Ji’s images display the temporality of belatedness or “afterwardsness” that defines Freudian definitions of trauma, they are just as strongly shaped both by a “pretraumatic” affect defined by the anticipation of trauma and by the need to represent the immediate unfolding of traumatic events rather than their return.4 By populating his paintings of displacement and collapse with images of victims both of the dam and of the Cultural Revolution, which began just three years after he was born, Ji uses the still raw traumas of the latter to imbue the events surrounding the former with traumatic content before their full psychological effect has had a chance to register, producing a record (ji 記/jilu 紀錄) of the present that looks to the future but carries the full weight of history. Both in his paintings and in comments on his artistic practice, Ji presents himself not only as a primary witness to the Cultural Revolution, but also as a secondary witness to the contemporary events that he depicts. He not only remembers and reexperiences old traumas, he also imagines and represents new ones, even though they happen far from his adopted home in America. Understanding the nature of the secondary witness’s empathy for, or identification with, the victim has become a central concern of trauma studies, both as an interpretive tool for judging and describing accounts of trauma and as a methodology for writing trauma on its own terms.5 Ji’s paintings perform an empathic identification with the residents of the Three Gorges that is grounded both in their shared connection to modern China’s historical traumas and in their common national and cultural identity. In this sense, the empathy that Ji performs with the living bodies of the Three Gorges migrants seems to differ from the sympathy that Isabella Bird and other nineteenthcentury Western travel writers encouraged their readers to feel for the battered bodies of the Yangzi trackers.

202 for the record If Bird’s depictions of the tracker raise troubling questions about both the ethics of consuming suffering and the violent history of Western sympathy for the Chinese, Ji’s empathy raises equally complicated questions: Are shared nationality or race preconditions for empathic identification? Does Ji’s conflation of historical events personally experienced and contemporary events unfolding halfway across the globe efface the local, turning the Three Gorges into any Chinese place scarred by the past or being swept away by a belated modernization project—in other words, into no place at all? Finally, to what extent is the status of primary or secondary witness a valuable commodity in the global market for Chinese art, and how might the scholarly study of Ji’s art help to domesticate trauma for audiences far removed from the events he depicts and imagines? It is easy to see that Ji is in most ways an outsider to the events depicted in his Three Gorges paintings. Yet the shared ethnic identification of the artist and his subjects, the immediately recognizable Chineseness of his painting style, and the content of his work threaten to reduce him to a native informant for Western viewers (and collectors) or, worse, to conflate him with the primary victims of the dam project, lending his work a traumatic authenticity that translates into added market value. I am in no way accusing Ji of co-opting the trauma of others for financial gain— there is nothing to stop collectors, critics, or galleries from conflating the artist with his subjects if they wish to do so. My goal is simply to indicate some of the ambiguities that come with exploring the intersections between national and personal traumas. Ultimately, while the haunting power of the Cultural Revolution in some of Ji’s Three Gorges paintings raises difficult questions about the representation of traumas past, present, and future, Ji’s primary goal is not to highlight his affective and cultural bonds with his subjects, but rather to produce an aesthetic mode that acknowledges and communicates the human cost of the Three Gorges Dam project. In his later Three Gorges paintings, produced after he traveled to the region, violent floods are almost totally replaced by images of migrants squeezed within the liminal spaces of the landscape and surrounded by their everyday goods. The psychic impact of displacement remains palpable, but it is accompanied by a sober sense of the material and social costs of development. In the text that accompanies a number of these images, including the Three Gorges Migration Scroll and Four People Leaving Badong (figure 6.1), Ji juxtaposes the official narrative of and justification for the dam project with what he describes as a “record” or “document” (jilu 紀錄) of (and for) the people who, “brick by brick, tile by tile,” demolished their own homes and villages.

ink in the wound 203 Shared Traumas Yun-fei Ji’s The East Wind (2003), from the 2004 “Empty City” exhibition (figure 6.2), is impressively hectic: Red Guards (both human and dog-faced) carry a picture of Mao Zedong and bellow through a megaphone as they walk across a scene of wreckage (figure 6.3); bird-faced and pig-headed monsters peer out from dark corners and edges; emaciated, half-naked humans, some wearing dunce caps, are crushed beneath collapsed buildings; a figure resembling Liu Shaoqi, a favorite enemy of Mao from the early years of the Cultural Revolution, reclines near the bottom of the picture, his emaciated body oddly twisted as he looks directly out at the viewer (figure 6.4); one of the men just above Liu resembles Deng Xiaoping, another victim of Cultural Revolution purges and the leader of the People’s Republic in years leading up to the official decision to construct the Three Gorges dam;6 an upside-down donkey plummets through space beside a woman’s severed head, echoing the carnage of Picasso’s Guernica (figure 6.5). All of these figures inhabit a narrow, gorgelike space, its original shape suggested by the upper edges of the painting, where detritus gives way to cliffs between which stretches a faint line of water. Situated below the water level, the figures in this painting are simultaneously victims of the dam, of the Cultural Revolution, and of the shadowy ghosts and goblins that haunt the wreckage. Like geological strata that have been thrust up and folded into one another, the roughly horizontal fields of The East Wind bear the marks of violent forces. At the center and close to the top of the image, a Red Guard carries a partially effaced but still recognizable picture of Mao Zedong, architect of the figure 6.1 Four People Leaving Badong (2009), Yun-fei Ji; watercolor and ink on xuan paper, mounted on silk. See also color plate 15. Source: The Carolyn Hsu and René Balcer Collection. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

figure 6.2 The East Wind (2003), Yun-fei Ji; watercolor and ink on xuan paper. See also color plate 16. Source: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

figure 6.3 The East Wind (detail): Dog-faced Red Guard. figure 6.4 The East Wind (detail): Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping lookalikes.

206 for the record Cultural Revolution and promoter of the Three Gorges Dam. The East Wind seems to conflate these two things, but the nature of the connection between victims of the Cultural Revolution and of the dam is unclear. Are we meant to assume that Liu Shaoqi and the painting’s anonymous skeletal figures are the same kind of victim, or that they are simply victims of a similar type of abuse of power? Should we identify the source of destruction with the water at the upper edge of the painting, or with the eponymous “east wind”? The cause of all this chaos is purposely ambiguous. What is clear is that Ji has chosen to focus on a moment that is simultaneously pre- and postapocalyptic—before the dam and reservoir have fully swallowed up the Gorges, but when the ruins of the contemporary landscape and the ghosts of the Cultural Revolution that it contains are briefly visible, before being hidden beneath the figure 6.5 The East Wind (detail): Upside-down donkey.

ink in the wound 207 opaque surface of the reservoir. In Ji’s ink-and-water-based practice, water is an object and a medium of representation that strives against opacity, making transparent what is otherwise hidden. Joining forces with wind, water wreaks havoc while also exposing a cross section of the landscape, revealing a befuddling mess, the wreckage of a history unyoked from Marxist teleology. The forces of destruction allow us to see the landscape for what it has become: a dump in which the traumas of the past and the present are indistinguishable. As a locus of trauma, the historical trace is a wound that opens onto other wounds, other traumas. The Cultural Revolution has long been recognized as one of the most traumatic events of modern Chinese history, one that appears in the work of many artists and writers born before the 1970s.7 Particularly in his earliest Three Gorges works (those collected in the “Old One Hundred Names” and “Empty City” exhibitions), Ji uses the Cultural Revolution as a widely acknowledged and still potent trauma to imbue the events surrounding the dam with traumatic content before their full social and psychological effects have had a chance to register. According to both Freudian approaches and contemporary clinical definitions of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic experience is predicated on a temporal separation between the traumatic event and its psychological manifestations—it requires a period of latency (and amnesia or disassociation), after which it returns. For Ji, however, the “connection [that he draws] from the Opium War to the Cultural Revolution, all the way to the Three Gorges Project” marks the construction of the dam as an immediately obvious traumatic event, without the need for a period of latency and belated return. The fully formed traumas of the Cultural Revolution offer Ji a solution to the difficulties of deeming traumatic an event that is still unfolding, that has had no opportunity to return, and that does not affect the artist directly. A method of superimposing this event and what he imagines its psychological effects will be (its haunting return) is necessary for Ji because he is keen both to capture the immediate implications of the dam project and to suggest that it is part of a larger network of historical traumas. The precise definition of trauma, both as a diagnostic term and as an interpretive concept, remains a topic of debate. Described by various theorists as a “disorder of memory,”8 a “pathology of history,” “an unfinished relationship with the past,” and a kind of “belated experience,” trauma find its most universally recognizable expression in flashbacks, “hauntingly possessive ghosts” that bring the traumatic event vividly back to life in the present.9 Both a return of the past in the present and a return to the past, the flashback is made possible by the belatedness or “post-ness” of the traumatic event, which Freud describes as Nachträglichkeit, (literally “afterwardsness”).10

208 for the record Nachträglichkeit locates trauma neither in the original event nor in its return, but in the “dialectic between (the) two events . . . and a temporal delay or latency through which the past was available only by a deferred act of understanding and interpretation.”11 For Cathy Caruth (following Freud), belatedness is constitutive of trauma, which becomes “fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time.”12 As belated representatives of a past trauma, figures from the Cultural Revolution appear in Ji’s Three Gorges paintings as if from “another place and in another time.” It is only through their departure from their originating event that they can register as traumatic. Though the Freudian model of trauma supports such a reading of the Red Guards and the dunce-capped victims of Ji’s images, it tells us little about Ji’s vision of the flooding of the Three Gorges region, an event that had not yet taken place when he painted this image in 2003. By juxtaposing this flood with the destructive forces of the “east wind,” which seems to be unleashed by the megaphone-toting Red Guard, Ji locates trauma not only in a period of latency, but also in the event itself, which has long been seen as solely an object of dissociation, repression, forgetting, and return.13 The idea that traumatic experience is an aftereffect, the symptom of a disease that can be traced to a specific psychic wound in the past, has been fundamental to psychiatry since the origins of trauma as a clinical diagnosis in nineteenth-century England and France.14 That it remains central to modern psychology and trauma theory confirms the etiology of the disease but threatens to obscure the ways in which vernacular conceptions of trauma have come to infuse contemporary thought. Given the brutal legacy of the twentieth century, not only are we likely to think of all of recent history as traumatic (however much of a cliché this is), we have also entered an era in which technology delivers instantaneous (and constant) traumatic or “triggering” images.15 More and more, it seems that our traumas are neither forgotten nor resurrected through ex post facto testimony or historiographical retrieval, but captured digitally, and simultaneously and obsessively rebroadcast from their inception. One need only think of the televised destruction of New York City’s World Trade Center—images and events that have never returned because they never stopped happening. In the shift from an age of latency and return to an age of documentation, we have become all too familiar with trauma and its manifestations, and seek to capture them as they happen. The flashback now streams live and is archived digitally. For Ji, who has lived in the United States for more than two decades, the events surrounding the Three Gorges were immediately accessible from afar through technology and immediately identifiable as traumatic because they conjured the “hauntingly possessive ghosts” of the past.

ink in the wound 209 The presence of so many traces of the Cultural Revolution in Ji’s work is a reminder that, for him, that particular trauma remains potent. Though the dam and reservoir have now mostly obscured the physical traces of this complex past in the Three Gorges, in Ji’s imagination, their construction first precipitated a violent exposure and excavation (as in The East Wind), the simultaneous creation of a new wound and the reopening of a familiar, older one. As a meeting point of historical, contemporary, and future traumas, Ji’s version of the Three Gorges allows for the exchange of traumatic signifiers across time and space, so that the events surrounding the dam project can be recognized as traumatic from the outset. Traces of this exchange appear throughout Ji’s oeuvre. In three paintings from his first two major exhibitions, Ji includes the same ruined automobile, a simple object that sheds light on the formal mechanisms he uses to evoke traumatic experience as a form of repetition. The car appears on the left-hand side of The East Wind (figure 6.6), about midway down. An almost identical version appears in two 2002 paintings from the “Old One Hundred Names” exhibition, A Monk’s Retreat (figure 6.7) and The Flooding of Badong. In each of these images, Ji depicts a dense scene of destruction, despite the fact that the flooding of the area was a gradual process that required the methodical disassembly of infrastructure and staggered relocation of residents. The automobile’s reappearance links each painting to the same destructive flood, the same ruined landscape. Located opposite the dog-faced Red Guard’s megaphone in The East Wind, the body of the car also bears the same traces of violence that mark the human figures in the painting, who are crushed beneath buildings or torn to pieces. Traveling from painting to painting, it reappears to haunt the viewer. It finds a home in Ji’s work not simply through a psychological metaphor, but also through the forces of destruction unleashed by the dam. Like so much flotsam, the car rides the trash-choked waves of Ji’s imagined flood. The Red Guards are companions of the auto, symbols of a temporal collapse (made possible by spatial collapse) that allows for the movement of traumatic elements across time and within Ji’s paintings. David Eng and David Kazanjian’s work on how loss and melancholy function as productive temporal disturbances suggests one approach for understanding how such pathways come into existence: “by engaging in ‘countless separate struggles’ with loss, melancholia might be said to constitute, as Benjamin would describe it, an ongoing and open relationship with the past— bringing its ghosts and specters, its flaring and fleeting images, into the present.”16 Rather than focusing on the recursive bind of trauma, Eng and Kazanjian emphasize how the productive forces of melancholy retrieve and emplace

figure 6.6 The East Wind (detail): Ruined car. figure 6.7 A Monk’s Retreat (2002), Yun-fei Ji; ink and mineral pigment on xuan paper (detail): Ruined car. Source: Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

ink in the wound 211 the “ghosts and specters” of the past within new “sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future.”17 The poignancy of Ji’s project is that his new site of “memory and history” sits on unstable ground; the human-occupied stretches of The Three Gorges on which Ji focuses can accommodate the past only in the fleeting moments before they “disappear irrevocably” beneath the waves.18 This ephemerality is precisely what draws our attention, forcing us to join Ji in bearing witness to the destruction of the landscape as a site of historical negotiation and a staging ground for visions of the future. Hovering between presence and absence, the past and the future, the Gorges and its inhabitants are simultaneously the objects of loss and their melancholic specters. The new Three Gorges site that is generated by the productive melancholy of loss and the more violent force of trauma disappears almost as soon as it forms. Ji envisions the Gorges not as a famous landscape, but as a mess of human rubble, a convoluted, blurry space with indeterminate horizons, in which traces of the Cultural Revolution are jumbled with vulnerable and violated human bodies and ghostly creatures.19 To make sense of the relationship between the past and the present in a painting such as The East Wind, one begins by sifting through the unstable trash heaps that mark the Gorges as both demolition and construction site. In a socialist nation reconstituted as the pumping heart of global capital, the trash heap is the site par excellence of “memory and history” and the dog-headed Red Guard a Chinese version of Benjamin’s angel of history: “where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”20 In the context of such ruination, Ji’s focus on the Three Gorges takes on an urgency that encompasses both the immediate victims of the dam and the status of history in a time and place bent on transformation. Stripped of identifying marks, the Three Gorges as famous landscape and cultural concept becomes both a generically Chinese landscape and a figure for the nation as trash heap. C ollec ting from H istory, D ocumenting the Present The East Wind is a prime example of how Ji uses spatial chaos to link the traumas of the Cultural Revolution and those of the Three Gorges Dam project. As perhaps Ji’s most radically apocalyptic expression of the Three Gorges theme, however, this painting does not exemplify what critics often identify

212 for the record as the defining trait of his artistic practice: his synthesis of traditional Chinese landscape painting styles, techniques, and media.21 This synthesis is Ji’s most consistent formal method for making connections between different historical periods. By drawing on a variety of Chinese painting styles without imitating any single school or approach, Ji creates a hybrid, but still recognizably Chinese, style that marshals the aesthetic past in order to document the present. This is not simply a matter of formal resemblance; Ji uses historical styles to create systems of signification for the present. Through his evocation of the Northern Song (960–1127) monumental landscape style, for example, Ji introduces traces of an allegorical system in which the structure of a landscape represents an ideal political and cosmic order that he uses to draw attention to the average people who have been displaced by the dam project.22 In his most recent Three Gorges work, Ji echoes the documentary and admonitory functions of paintings of people displaced by natural disasters, a genre that has roots in the Song Dynasty. He frames a number of these images with blocks of text that not only closely mimic poetic and commemorative inscriptions on traditional paintings, but also more explicitly voice his understanding of the dam and its place in the history of the Three Gorges and the nation. Four People Leaving Badong (figure 6.1), for example, is sandwiched between two inscriptions; the first quotes Li Daoyuan’s Commentary to the Classic of Rivers, and the second details the history of the dam. Produced in 2009, long after Badong had been dismantled and inundated, this image and its text are a visual record and a physical document not only of what happened in the recent past, but also of the severed links between the long cultural history of the region and the experience of the people who have occupied it in our own time. Ji combines premodern styles, media, and discourses in order to establish traumatic affinities between the past and the present, and to produce a language of critique that signifies in relation to Chinese traditions. Ji describes his artistic process in primarily historical terms: My method can be categorized as a process of collecting. Shi Tao, a seventeenth-century painter, used a seal in his paintings that says “searching a thousand strange cliffs to make a sketch.” This describes a method of collecting forms from nature. You might also say that I do the same, but in relation to history.23 If natural forms provided Shi Tao with the raw material for composing his landscapes, then history, as both subject matter and aesthetic form, provides

ink in the wound 213 one set of building blocks for Ji’s landscapes. Collecting from history, however, is only the start; the real creative work comes in selecting and combining what Ji discovers, and in the relationship that develops between the historical form and the contemporary content of his art. According to Ji, contemporary components enter the picture and join the historical through a related “process of recording, almost a documentary process” based on his own observations within the region of the Three Gorges.24 Ji thus combines two types of collecting: one art historical, and the other contemporary and quasiethnographic. Together they form a multitemporal style that transforms the landscape into a spatial structure of overlapping and communicating traces. In some cases, this spatial structure bears a striking resemblance to Chinese landscape painting styles of the past, perhaps most famously (and frequently noted), monumental landscapes by such early masters as Li Cheng 李成 (919–967) or Fan Kuan 范寬 (active ca. 1023–1031). On close inspection, however, it proves impossible to insert Ji into any one artistic school or lineage. Critics have identified a dizzying range of influences: Guanxiu 貫休 (832–912), Li Tang 李唐 (ca. 1050–after 1130), Xia Gui 夏圭 (fl. ca. 1195–1230), Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 (1254–1322), Huang Gongwang 黃公望 (1269–1354), Sheng Mao 盛懋 (active 1320–1360), Luo Ping 羅聘 (1733–1799), Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450–1516), Francisco Goya (1746–1828), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Otto Dix (1891–1969), and Georg Grosz (1893–1959), among others.25 Rather than turning directly to the landscape for inspiration, as he describes Shi Tao doing, Ji instead turns to these and other sources for his building blocks, creating composite landscapes that communicate very little about the actual appearance of the Gorges, but a great deal about both his aesthetic influences and the real and imagined effects of the dam. The style generated by Ji’s collecting and recording is idiosyncratic, but his method is very much in line with the conventions of Chinese painting. Painters often followed earlier models to depict landscapes they had never visited in order to capture poetic associations or convey philosophical ideas. As Valérie Malenfer Ortiz has shown in her study of Southern Song painting, the most famous landscape themes, such as the one that developed around the Xiao-Xiang region of modern Hunan, often bear little identifiable relationship to actual places or specific landforms.26 In most literati writing on painting after the Tang, an artist’s ability to achieve mimetic specificity was considered secondary to his or her capacity for capturing the essence of a place, thing, or theme. By participating in this tradition and drawing on so wide an aesthetic palette, Ji forges a vaguely traditional style that suggests the presence of multiple influences without privileging any single forerunner. The indeterminacy

214 for the record of Ji’s paintings detracts from the “obviousness” of the Three Gorges as a specific Chinese landscape and cultural concept. This allows him to foreground the women, children, and men who have been dispossessed and disembodied by the dam, while still producing images that appear “Chinese” to both Western and Chinese viewers. The monumental Below the 143 Meter Watermark (figure 6.8) exemplifies Ji’s approach to Chinese painting traditions. A densely composed depiction of mountains and rivers, this image echoes the format of hanging-scroll landscapes of the Northern Song but exaggerates their scale and structure, creating an oppressively claustrophobic painting.27 Below the 143 Meter Watermark gives one the sensation of being submerged or buried beneath layers of mountains and/or fathoms of water, an effect achieved in part through dramatic foreshortening: the landscape recedes sharply into the distance from the bottom edge and foreground of the painting. The majority of the painting is given over to a dense patchwork of trees, hills, waterways, and structures in various states of decay. All of this culminates in a massive, clublike peak that stands just left of center, dominating the upper quarter of the image, and, in the far distance, a handful of similarly shaped mountains. Presumably all of the abandoned, decrepit buildings that fill the massive painting below this great peak lie below the 143-meter watermark and will be inundated. Although the painting “appears from a distance to resemble a monumental classical scroll that draws on the tradition and symbolism of Confucian idiom,” any attempt to read the work according to such logic fails.28 In the language of traditional painting criticism, a monumental mountainscape from a tenth-century master, such as Li Cheng, or a Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) synthesist, such as Wang Hui 王翬 (1632–1717), would have relied on qimo 氣脈 (energy arteries) or shanmo 山脈 (mountain arteries) in order to structure the landscape according to a complex hierarchical system. Such pathways allow for the flow of both energy and vision through the painting, generally beginning near the bottom and snaking their way upward to the peaks at the top (the long 龍, or dragon, is often used to figure this pattern), which were conventionally associated with the seat of power, the emperor. The sovereign peak represented both the pinnacle of a hierarchical pattern and the regulating agent of this pattern.29 If we look very closely at Ji’s painting, we can discern what looks like a similar zigzag pattern and an accompanying flow. Beginning at the bottom left-hand corner, it moves diagonally to a small river midway up on the right and then continues diagonally upward in the other direction before reaching another small empty space below and to the left of the uppermost peak. Though it is faint

figure 6.8 Below the 143 Meter Watermark (2006), Yun-fei Ji; Ink and mineral pigment on xuan paper. Source: Worcester Art Museum. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York