For thousands of years, passers-by on the Yalu River have been hurried. The rich historical context makes Dandong, a small city by the Yalu River, not only a cut into the time and space intertwined in the northeast, but also an international, multi-cultural exchange and conflict border fortress.
On March 12, the exhibition "From Andong to Dandong: Rafts, Broken Bridges and Passers-by on the Yalu River", focusing on "places" and "borders", opened at the 10 o'clock sleep art space. Curated by architect and artist Liang Chen, the exhibition showcases the creations and projects of 16 artists and groups from different perspectives of Dandong and non-Dandong nationalities.
From the Zhongchao Platform to the Tanlu Fault Zone, the volcanic movement of Changbai Mountain to the formation of the Yalu River, from the construction of the Yan Great Wall in the Warring States Period to the wicker edge of the Manchu Qing "Land of Longxing", the log raft down the river upstream to the "Mudu" of the downstream timber trade, from the Battle of Jiawu (1894-1895) to the Russo-Japanese War (1905-1906), the Japanese colonists forced the construction of the Anfeng Railway into China in 1904 to the last station of The defeat of China in 1945. From the Yalu River Bridge, which was blown up by the US military in 1950, to the important port that reached North Korea after the victory of the war, from "Andong" before 1965 to "Dandong" after 1965, the Andong Protectorate of Datang to the "Red East" of socialist allies, from trade, silk and other handicraft industries as the forerunner before the founding of the People's Republic of China, to becoming a star city of light industry after the founding of the People's Republic of China, and then to the rise of the current Internet red tourism city - Dandong, which is the "center" from the perspective of Northeast Asia and the largest border city in China.
The exhibition site
The audience is in front of Wang Ningde's work "The Other Side"
The audience is in front of Liang Chen's work "Alef No.1"
The exhibition "From Andong to Dandong: Rafts, Broken Bridges and Passers-by on the Yalu River" presents the creation of novels, poems, paintings, photography, video, installations and other media by authors of different eras based on Dandong. Attention is paid to presenting the internal perspective of Dandong authors, and also pay attention to the observations of others of non-Dandong authors. Exhibitors include the Dandong-rooted Literary and Historical Archives Research Group, resident creators who have long been concerned with local culture, and Japanese writers born in Andong.
"Iron Pen Mountain House" works
Tiebi Mountain House, originally a printing bureau, used to print banknotes (commonly known as "Deng Tickets") for Deng Tiemei's anti-Japanese troops. Later, the "Iron Pen Mountain House" became a page of paper, and it was silent in the register of Andong industrial and commercial households in the early liberation period (1950). In 1965, Anton was renamed Dandong for the sake of Sino-Dprk friendship. Folk, some people still like to call Itong, they got together, used the "Iron Pen Mountain House" as a studio, so there was "Anton Historical Video Chronicle", and began a journey to find and collect and tell the story of Anton.
During the Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger, the Fang Zhi Novel Working Group, which conducted a 14-day artistic residency in Dandong, the results of the stay were presented in the form of "exhibition in exhibition" and presented in three narratives of three curators, just like three chapters of a novel, or three interpretations of a novel. The curators, artists and writers repeatedly communicate and collaborate, and through three curations, they try to present an "Anton-Dandong" with multiple time and space.
Born in Dandong in 1979, Jia Aili paints with a free narrative and explores the possibility of deconstructive meaning hidden in this free narrative. Jia Aili tries to naturally unfold the materials in his hands such as history, scenes, people and other materials through painting, and connects with our contemporary perspectives, and restores the fragments of history with contemporary people's values and emotional memories. Architect Liang Chen focuses on the rheology and space-time accumulation of a definite set (specific concepts, objects, spaces, etc.) in time over a long period of time, a multi-time period, and a large scale. Since 2013, Liang Chen has advanced in the long-term and multi-period observation and self-analysis of his hometown of Dandong, Liaoning Province, to build the starting point and source of his creation. Based on the rich local cultural research and architectural practices in Dandong, Erguna, Xinjiang and other places in recent years, Liang Chen also initiated the "Boundary Project" based on interdisciplinary research on art, architecture, anthropology and so on. Focusing on the frontiers of knowledge generation and exchange, he seeks to take an interdisciplinary view of the broader and more complex boundaries of culture, history, language and social psychology.
Zhang Tuitui "Green River"
The exhibitors tried to create in different media and tried to excavate the cultural memory of Dandong's historical changes. The young poet Hongxing has been committed to a more current poetry scene practice for many years, and his work "I May Usher in an Explosion in My Hometown" chooses to use the poem of the same name as the model, the Braille installation as the main body, and the recitation audio of the whole poem. Graphic designer Zhang Shuo uses nylon fabrics and cotton fabrics as the medium, and Zhang Shuo uses the text symbols of various periods in the historical changes of Dandong for more than 100 years, with reference to the visual characteristics of content dissemination and sales materials in the corresponding periods, and organizes the "Welcome to Anton" mixed visual field that integrates the mixed memories of each period. In the work "Green River", Zhang Tuitui tore a piece of cloth with a length of 21m into two pieces and stitched it up again, using needle and thread to externalize the "dividing line" and crossing the "river surface" with his own body.
Architectural designer Liang Rui's works use aluminum lunch boxes as a carrier to try to re-imitate the depersonalization and repetitiveness of the collective ecological environment. The smell of burned coal, the means of production, is used to connect the memory and perception of the visitor. Kazuhiro Okaokazu Okata, who was born in Andong in 1937, worked as a newspaper reporter and editor, and his works were based on Manchuria and Manchukuo, based on the events of his birthplace of Anton. Later, after returning to China, he wrote "Manchuria Anning Hotel" against the background of the story that took place in Andong that year.
Sun Haixia, "Sun Haiting, Dandong, Fourth Quarter of 2021"
Zhao Liang, "Riverside"
The exhibited works range from detailed video recordings of the Border between China and North Korea and imaginary images of north Korea's national landscape. Dandong video artist Wang Ningde's work "The Opposite Shore" is based on a photograph taken on the other side of North Korea. Born in 1986 in a Border Town on the Yalu River, Mr. Ho has crafted a series of ingenious sculptures of scrap copper wire, rusted pipe fragments and hardware obtained on a black market along the border. He Xiangyu has repeatedly "copied" these ready-made products to recreate and personally reflect on these complex sculptural forms. Through scattered images circulating on the Internet, Ezaosha's "Joseon Fragments" imagines and depicts the ordinary street scene of an ordinary Korean city and the daily life of ordinary people from the perspective of an individual. Part of the documentary filmmaker Zhao Liang's work "Riverside" comes from Zhao Liang's long-term shooting of North Korea on the other side of the river at dandong's home in recent years. Another part of the image is from the footage of "On the River" filmed around 2003, which records the daily life and exchanges of people on both sides of the river. Focusing on architectural design and cultural heritage protection, Sun Haiting's work attempts to use the Yalu River as a geographical clue to observe the mutual influence of Dandong as a border city and the boundary river through still images.
Tan Zhenbang , "Husband and Wife Are Not The Same Forest Bird"
Among the works in the exhibition are the private memories of Korean scholars about Dandong, as well as the young director's imagination of Dandong's future. Yin Jinan, an art historian with multiple identities, takes his hometown of Dandong as the background this time, and his work "Talk about My Yalu River" is about Yin Jinan's memories and self-descriptions in Dandong from birth to university. Born in Dandong, Tan Zhenbang's work "Husband and Wife Are Not Forest Birds" is a documentary set in the ordinary middle-class family life of Dandong, featuring a couple who have been divorced for fifteen years, showing the current situation of the second marriage - the current situation of the director's own parents' marriage, as well as their views and views on marriage and love. These personal histories outline the contours of Dandong's historical space.
This exhibition not only presents historical facts and documents, but more importantly, hopes to stitch, reconstruct and reproduce one "local landscape" after another through the authors' unique viewing perspectives. In addition, as a whole, the exhibition also miniaturizes the spatial geography of the Yalu River in the exhibition hall, trying to explore new possibilities for local research and spatial narrative.
It is reported that the exhibition is also part of the "Boundary Project" based on interdisciplinary research in art, architecture, anthropology and so on. The program focuses on China's vast local cultural resources, especially the frontiers at the forefront of knowledge generation and exchange. Starting from the geographical boundary, the exhibition tries to explore the broader and more complex cultural, historical, linguistic and social psychological boundaries from an interdisciplinary perspective, and explore more possibilities for artistic innovation.
The exhibition will run until 5 June 2022.
Nandu reporter Huang Qian