From Andong to Dandong: Rafts, Broken Bridges and Passersby on the Yalu River", curated by architect and artist Liang Chen, is on view at an art space in Beijing's 798 Park, centered around Liang Chen's hometown of Dandong. The exhibition includes narratives from individual experiences of cultural workers of Dandong origin from different generations, as well as the multiple imaginations of outsiders to this border town in Northeast China. The exhibition does not deliberately cater to the trend of "Northeast Renaissance," but rather expands the boundaries of language, cultural geography, and even space-time on the basis of writing a local history, creating a new horizon that transcends the concept of nation-state.

The name Andong, which can be traced back to the Andong Metropolitan Prefecture established in the Tang Dynasty, was renamed Dandong in 1965. This city of the "Red East" looks out across the Yalu River to the entire Korean Peninsula. The art historian Yoon Gil-nam, who moved to Andong at the age of six and lived through the period of the name change, wrote his memoirs, "My Yalu River," which recounts the details of his life in Dandong before he went to Beijing to study. The exhibit's subtlety lies in the fact that the manuscript is placed on a desk in the exhibition hall, where the viewer sits at the desk as if he were a young man, Yoon Gil-nam.

It is here that the viewer can look into the Yalu River reproduced in the first-floor gallery. The river has witnessed historical changes, and the change of the city's name is just one of the events. Local researchers and enthusiasts of local history in Dandong have set up a workshop and an online platform under the name of "Tie Pen Shan Fang", and "From Andong to Dandong" has been expanded by them as an incision into the whole modern history. They wandered in the old alleys, buried in the piles of old papers, visited the relics, collected objects, and gradually filled up the documentary archives to sort out the historical veins, and those little-known old city stories surfaced. From the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Japanese invasion to the anti-American invasion and the construction of heavy industrial bases, immigration and colonization brought about cultural conflicts and intermingling between ethnic groups, war and peace destroyed and rebuilt the city, and workers and factories became the landscape of socialist production. The city, thus transformed into a place full of special feelings, is the interface of intimate interaction between individuals and history.

If individual memories and historical materials have a certain "real" element presupposed in them, "From Andong to Dandong", as an art exhibition, also deliberately constructs another set of "fictional" narrative. The fiction here does not mean that the narrative is detached from reality; it is still based on real life experiences, but leaves enough white space for imagination and poetry. Dandong-born documentary filmmaker Zhao Liang turns his camera toward an ordinary village on the other side of the river, recording the ordinary moments on the other side of the border between China and North Korea. In the shot, an unknown North Korean girl goes to the river to draw water for living and carries it back on her head.

The camera caught her stumble and the water spilled all over the place, but luckily there was no danger. The Yalu River's strong political connotations are dissolved by the intimacy between people and nature, and the simple warmth of everyday life stirs empathy and refuses to allow the viewer to imagine that mysterious country in a curious way. The artist He Xiangyu, also from Dandong, brings a story of adventure. Good at swimming, he decided to take on the challenge of crossing the border river. Wearing a yellow swimming cap, he appeared and disappeared on the river. His first attempt failed and he was escorted back to the country by soldiers. On his second attempt, he finally touches the other side. The artistic act of "crossing the border" is romantic but powerful. Although the Yalu River is a natural carrier of borders, its flowing, soft nature as a body of water invites reflection on the conceptual barriers that block our understanding and increasingly divide society.

During this year's Spring Festival, Dandong also warmly opened its arms to many cultural border crossers. "The Fang Zhi Fiction Working Group convened here for a 14-day artistic residency. Unlike the internal perspective of Dandong artists returning to their hometowns, the transient visitors to the residency brought the sensitivity of outsiders to translate the fragments of their thoughts into various media such as text, video and performance. They form "a novel" that forms the exhibition within an exhibition, providing a fictional dimension.

Curator Liang Chen once said, "All real problems are historical problems." He cleverly transposes reality and history into the exhibition space with the design thinking of an architect. Without relying on textual interpretation, the audience can naturally travel through the gap between art and history and intuitively experience the deep intertextuality between different works. These design details map out the basic methodology of Liang Chen's spatial history research: insight into specific geographical areas based on different scales of spatio-temporal coordinates, and the exploration of the subconscious of space, allowing the tension between public history and personal emotions and memories to emerge. This method will be continued in the next field research of Liang Chen on the border areas of Erguna in Inner Mongolia and Cocotohai in Xinjiang. As the first research sample, the historical specificity of Dandong, the entire northeast region, is also shaped by its ethnic, colonial, hot and cold war history. Local cultural workers have revisited these passages in history in recent years, and the research has generated "local knowledge" that is quite different from the mainstream historical narrative. However, this operation should not be simply understood as a replica of the decolonizing and decolonizing "postcolonialism" that artists in other parts of the Third World are so keen on.

What is the history of the black land beneath our feet? In Dalian, the trade hub of Northeast Asia, south of Dandong, local youths are trying to restore the city's intricate existence in modern history through their creative practice. Musicians Xie Yugang and Yang Haisong have composed an experimental soundtrack retracing the colonial history of Lushun Dalian through the Tsarist and Japanese invasions, and the record is wittily named after the dialectal words "Evening Shirt" (white shirt, from Japanese) and "Bragi" (dress, from (Russian). Beijing-based video artist Yang Yuanyuan was touched by the novel "Dalian under the acacia tree" by Japanese writer Takayuki Kiyoka, who was born in Dalian. Her "seven-act play" "Dalian Vision" blurs the boundaries of the times and takes the viewer on a journey through the overlapping visions of history and the present. Takayuki Kiyooka has always considered Dalian as his beloved hometown, but the situation after World War II forced him to return to his country of origin, Japan. This work, which won the highest prize in Japanese literature, the Akutagawa Ryunosuke Prize, is full of the melancholy of homesickness. "Where is my homeland?"

A bitter question echoes in the lines of the novel. The Chinese translator, Gao Yan, retains the timeless and fluent style of the original author, while when we look back at "From Andong to Dandong", we encounter another "visual translator", Zhang Shuo, who translates and blends languages. On a suitcase at the entrance of the exhibition is the spy story "Manchurian An Ning Hotel", which takes place in Andong. The Japanese author Kazuhiro Okada, who was born and raised in Andong, had similar experiences as Takayuki Kiyoka. Inspired by the novel, Zhang Shuo, a graphic designer, inherited the traits of a "traveler". Zhang Shuo extracted textual symbols and visual elements from printed materials such as pamphlets in different languages and at different stages of Dandong's history over the past century, and then disassembled and reconstructed them into the main visual system of the exhibition.

Chinese characters, Manchu, Japanese, Russian and Korean are ambiguously mixed together, and the conflicting yet harmonious visual style transcends the narrowness of the nation-state, while simultaneously resolving the inherent contradictions of post-colonial logic - this is the unique quality of the entire exhibition, which does not intend to give a clear definition of hometown. The question "Where is my hometown?" The question of "Where is my hometown?" is left in suspense, and that remembered hometown may be a place that can never be returned to again. Only in images like "raft, broken bridge and passers-by" does the perception of our hometown become clear, real and true.

Article Source:艺术与设计

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