I was born in Tianjin, a soon-to-be Chinese metropolis still in its slum-like infancy. My uncle often recounted stories about Zhang Daqian, a master painter renowned for the morphing brushwork in his paintings of the Chinese mountains. His most accomplished piece was titled长江万里图.
The Yangtze River was the birthplace of Chinese civilization. In 1968, Zhang Daqian sketched the shouldering mountains as he sailed down the river. He later translated his drawings into a 22”x787” assemblage of continuous landscape.
The decade surrounding the creation of the painting was a time of great change in China. As a result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1958, China faced starvation. 1962 marked the start of the China-India War. In 1965, Mao began the Cultural Revolution, a campaign to purge the nation of old customs and ideas. Amidst the chaos, Zhang Daqian found that the country he knew since birth had disappeared. His journey and subsequent painting were his way of getting in touch with his roots.
China again faced similar struggles. In her ruthless pursuit to outpace America, China willingly sacrificed culture and history. As a continuation of the demolition of the 530-year-old Beijing city wall in 1965 to make room for subways, the destruction of over 1600 historic houses granted space for highway expansions in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The China I grew up in was nonexistent. I felt that it was ripe time to create another长江万里图.
Like my predecessors, I decided to make an image using techniques relevant to my time. In an age when tourists traveled digitally on Google Maps before leaving for vacation, when politicians demolished neighborhoods with phone calls, and when life was distanced from reality, the contemporary equivalent of sailing down the Yangtze River was creating a digital tour on Google Earth. I assembled the image of the river using sections that were devastated by the flood instigated by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. I also left the right panel unblended to suggest the vicious geopolitics governing the river. Finally, the arced shape gave the illusion of immersion while the satellite perspective continued to distance the viewers from the experience. 长江万里图 was both a contemporary fantasy that paid tribute to a great tradition and a critique of the current state of China.
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