The Surging News reporter Yang Baobao
Kaixian Bow Village is a very ordinary small village in Jiangnan, but opening Fei Xiaotong's "Gangchon Economy", it has another well-known name: Jiangcun.
In Jiangcun, Fei Xiaotong and the ideas he left behind were the most precious assets. To this day, there are still many sociologists and anthropologists who follow in fei lao's footsteps.
How to retain and carry forward this wealth is a problem facing Emura. On January 14, the "Gangchon Bookshelf Project" project opened in The Gangchon Auditorium. The "Jiangcun Xiaoshuzhai", which collects Fei Xiaotong's works, was opened at the same time.
It is reported that this activity aims to display Fei Xiaotong's works and global rural research documents, cases, atlases, etc. to every corner of Jiangcun through the artist's residency creation and curation, form an open rural library, build a rural art landscape, make culture and art settle in the countryside, and promote the development of rural construction.
Gangchon Bookshelf is scheduled to open
After more than two months in the village, these works of art were born in Jiangcun
From October 2, 2021 to December 2, 2021, the Gangchon Art Residency Project invited five artists and one architect to participate in the design of the "bookshelf" installation and scene design, taking books and space carrying knowledge as research objects for more than 60 days of life and creation in Gangchon. During this period, works of art closely related to Fei Lao and Jiang Cun, such as the installation works "Gangchon Books", "Gangchon Story", the mural "Hello, Gangchon", and the sculpture "Come to My World, the Book house of Light", were born in Jiangcun.
Zhang Wenxuan, chief planner of the "Jiangcun Bookshelf Project", said that this art residency project originated from the "Jiangcun Small Bookstore" that Jiangcun was planning to open at that time, providing a space for everyone to read Fei Xiaotong and other academic works in rural fields. "How to make it easier for the villagers in the local area to communicate and link with knowledge?" Using art to bring everyone a new way of reading Fei Xiaotong, so there is the Gangchon Art Residency Project.
Several of the artists who came to Jiangcun had already read Fei Xiaotong's works.
On the shelves of the artist Qi Wenwen Studio is "Gangcun Economy", which he has read many times. Other works of Fei Lao, such as "Native China" and "Birth System". When it comes to Jiangcun, he resonates.
"When I first received the invitation to this residency project, I immediately became interested in the project. Getting up close and personal with the world in a book you've ever read is as wonderful as a dream popping up in front of you. "Qi wenwen has painted many oil paintings with rural themes, and Emura continues his creative logic, making him feel that the characters here are particularly compatible with architecture and his works.
After the end of the station, Qi Wen left a mural "Hello, Jiangcun". Two young lovers are by the river, the girls are reading, and the boys are looking up to the sky to imagine their future lives. In the distance, villagers net fish, and the background is the sky and distant mountains.
"There is love, there is knowledge, there is a romantic scene of the fishing tradition and the idyllic life of the countryside." Qi article said.
Mural "Hello, Gangchon"
Artist Yi Lian reread "Gangchon Economy" specifically for this project. Coming to Jiangcun, the history of more than 80 years ago coincided with the present, which made him feel particularly emotional, "Jiangcun is quiet and thick, surrounded by water and soothed by water, and being in it is like entering a historical amber, polishing and renovating, sparkling." ”
His installation "Gangchon Collection" is made from bricks of construction waste collected locally in Gangchon. The shape of the brick is somewhat like a book, and it is easy to wrap a layer of transparent resin around the brick, which looks clean and tidy. Install something like a "nameplate" or a library "label" on the side of the brick with numbers and other information. Each brick has its own unique ID information. These titles are derived from keywords extracted from Fei Xiaotong's Gangcun Economy as titles.
After the installation was placed in Jiangcun, villagers often picked up bricks from bookshelves to read the titles of books. Emura history and reality, in ingenious ways, collide.
Yi Lian's installation "Jiangcun Collection"
Artist Song Xi lived in Jiangcun for 2 months, and his work is a framed house with a lamp hanging in the middle, which is a luminous book. This is the "bookshelf" in Song Xi's heart. Home is a warm carrier, a place where people leave and come back, home is a family bond, is the soul home. The artist's work combines the structure of the home with the body to form a moving house. In the middle of the house are glowing books. Light passes through the form of the book, so that the light illuminates the moving home and the people at home. The relationship between man and space, the relationship between knowledge and man is explored here.
Jian Guorong is a staff member of the "Gangchon Bookshelf Project" and is also an artist. In the project that Emura worked with artists, he also became interested in the subject of Emura. Silkworm farming was once an important source of income for Jiangcun residents, Jian Guorong bought silkworms to silkworms, and also found a lot of leftover silk and furniture in the Jiangcun Silk Reeling Factory, using an old chair as a material, Jian Guorong made an installation work "Jiangcun Story", so that the newborn mulberry tree penetrated the chair to grow. By transforming and rewriting the material, through a series of behavioral interventions, he attempted to create an incision and way to understand Edmura's culture and history.
Jian Guorong's installation "The Story of Gangchon"
Jiangcun, a sample of rural China
Fei Xiaotong is one of the founders of Chinese sociology and anthropology, and "Jiangcun Economy" is a book he observes the ecology of China's rural areas. Jiangcun does not refer specifically to a village, but is a microcosm of the Chinese countryside. But the prototype of Jiangcun is indeed the Kaixian Bow Village in Qidu Town, Wujiang District, Suzhou City.
In 1936, Fei Xiaotong returned to his hometown of Wujiang, Jiangsu Province, visited Kaixian Bow Village, and began his rural fieldwork, based on which he wrote the classic sociological work "Jiangcun Economy" based on this village, and the scientific name of "Jiangcun" was also derived.
Jiangcun is the starting point of Fei Xiaotong's academic research on rural issues in China. After "Gangchon Economy" became famous all over the world, he continued to visit Gangchon. From 1936 to 2002, Fei Xiaotong visited Jiangcun 26 times in a period of nearly 66 years. Here, he practiced the concept of "aiming to enrich the people", and together with his sister Fei Dasheng, he led the economic development of Jiangcun, and also mobilized a group of scholars at home and abroad to carry out research on Jiangcun, making Jiangcun a window for the world to observe China's rural areas.
In Fei Xiaotong's book "Wujiang's Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow", he once wrote: "Jiangcun is a memorable milestone on my academic road in this life. From here on, I have been absorbing the nourishment of my life in the land of this side of my hometown, and I have spent my whole life..."
More than 80 years have passed since the book that gave Emura its name. Jiangcun is also changing, modern life has entered this small village, silkworm reeling is no longer the main business of the villagers, and the silk reeling factory has also been closed.
But in the passage of time, there are also many things that have not changed. Jiangcun is still a simple village in the south of the Taihu Lake, and a microcosm of China's rural areas in the Yangtze River Delta. The villagers still live a peaceful life, and there are still sociologists and anthropologists who continue to study the village.
"Artists come here, they don't feel a big contrast in perception, anthropological research is a long process." Du Chenyan, the project's artistic director, said. Instead, the artists who came to Jiangcun quickly integrated into the small village. They lived in Xiaofang's aunt's house, and Fei Xiaotong had come to Jiangcun to live before, and it received many scholars who came to Jiangcun to investigate. They used the stationary way to directly enter the daily life of the locals, live with the locals, stroll through several nearby villages, and have the inspiration to create in the temporary artist's studio of the silk reeling factory.
"This project is a process from start to finish from life to creation, and creation takes place in everyday life. Like Gangchon, everything happens in plainness, but the end result is amazing, except for anthropology, art happens in Gangchon. These arts grow out of the everyday life of Gangchon. Du Chenyan said.
The roots of Chinese culture are in the countryside, and to pay attention to the countryside is to pay attention to China. "Gangchon is a typical Gangnam village, which is obviously different from the northern village where I grew up in terms of lifestyle. Jiangcun is completely recorded and displayed as a sample of Chinese villages, which is the spiritual wealth of contemporary people. Living here as an art residency for two months, conducting research and artistic creation, has brought me closer to nature. At the same time, it also reminds me of my hometown, and I have an emotional connection in life and creation, beauty and coexistence. Artist Song Xi said when he recalled the creative life of the resident.
The opening ceremony was held at the Gangchon Koshusai
Let the books and bookshelves carry the memories of Jiangcun
The story of Gangchon connects the past and the future. Jiangcun is the starting point of Fei Xiaotong's academic research on China's rural issues, Fei Xiaotong has practiced the concept of "aiming to enrich the people" all his life, always paying attention to the most grass-roots social life in China, and as early as the 1980s, he put forward the concept of "supplementing agriculture with work". In the context of the current era of "rural revitalization" and "common prosperity", his works still have practical significance.
From January 14th to March 4th, during the "Jiangcun Bookshelf Project" exhibition, artists and architects will interact with villagers and the public in the form of workshops, sharing and exhibitions to interact with villagers and the public to display creative concepts, and use art and culture to feed the countryside with diversified and rich perspectives.
In 1996, Fei Xiaotong made a speech entitled "From Small Bookstores to The World's New Libraries" at the 62nd Annual Conference of the International Library Association, proposing that "the rise of rural libraries in townships will greatly accelerate the pace of regional economic and cultural development."
"In a hundred years of Jiangcun, passers-by are hurried, and with such a position, we can truly carry forward the memory of Jiangcun, carry forward the concept of Fei Lao, and become the spiritual fortress of generations of Jiangcun people." At the opening ceremony of the "Jiangcun Bookshelf Project", Wang Pengyu, deputy secretary of the party committee and mayor of Qidu Town, said. "Jiangcun Bookshelf Project" expects "books and bookshelves" to become a unique humanistic landscape in the scene of Jiangcun rural communities, through these books and curatorial activities, constantly linking cities and villages, the elderly and children, villagers and visitors, becoming a medium of community exchanges, and eventually forming a cultural rural construction event and knowledge dissemination, contributing continuous theoretical support and case reference to China's rural revitalization, and promoting the development of rural construction. It is also expected that a better picture of a well-off society will continue to unfold and extend on the land of Jiangcun in China.
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Yijia Xu