To read traces it is necessary to be a tracker—to let the shadow of one’s intention fall across the track; it is to become part of the movement.
FAREWELL TO BAIDICHENG
The desire to inscribe the landscape of the Three Gorges has, unsurprisingly, taken multiple, often contradictory, forms over the last two millennia. What makes it possible to compare these form is their shared preoccupation with change. To reinscribe the fading traces of the past as legible sites, or to mend natural and social systems seen as faulty, is to fight against or rush toward change. Since at least the Song Dynasty, fear of change has inspired layered acts of landscaping designed to preserve sites of cultural importance or to revive lost values in the Three Gorges region. The reconstruction of Du Fu’s home at Dongtun, the reinscription and relocation of the Plant Memorial in Xintan, the creation of an underwater museum around White Crane Ridge—these efforts to give shifting landscapes cultural coherence are simultaneously necessitated and thwarted by change. They remind us that landscape is a thing produced and reproduced, inscribed and reinscribed, imagined and material, constantly changing, even (or especially) as it is appropriated for ideological purposes or as a symbol of cultural continuity.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, the proliferation of imperial and national discourses on China’s developmental failures made change an existential imperative.2 The scientific remapping of the Yangzi and its reconceptualization as a source of energy, the introduction of steamships and the fight over shipping rights, the reordering of the banks of the Yangzi as commemorated by the Yu the Great Mythology Park in Wuhan, and, of course, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam—in different ways and to different ends, these processes and constructions are designed to bring order to systems seen as dysfunctional, to fix the Chinese landscape as a scientific, imperial, national, and cultural prospect.
Because they have long contributed to the consistency of the Three Gorges as cultural concept, premodern aesthetic forms and carefully preserved landmarks help diminish the perceived impact of the dam project as technological fix. From certain angles, the Three Gorges Dam has tamed the river and fueled the nation without diminishing the Chineseness of the landscape. Such seeming continuities are anything but simple, however. For contemporary artists who responded to the Three Gorges Dam project, premodern forms and familiar landmarks have functioned not as timeless expressions or sites of Chinese culture, but as the building blocks of an experimental aesthetics of change in which the ji/trace is repurposed to confront new types of spatiotemporal disorder.
Where Du Fu asked us to look with him so that we might see the fractured memories of a past golden age as they formed and dissolved on the surfaces of the Gorges, Yun-fei Ji, Jia Zhangke, and other artists ask us to look at the dissolution of that very landscape as it is reduced to rubble and swallowed by the waters of the reservoir. If writers of the Tang and Song demonstrated how human structures, solid as they might seem, decay and shift and disappear altogether, only to reappear in other places and at other times, the contemporary artists who document the social and environmental consequences of development have shown us that rivers and lakes can dry up too, that even mountains may wear away. This is something that poets of the trace knew all too well; it is a lesson we would be wise to relearn. In the age of climate change and the massive spatial and social transformations that drive it, oceans, mountains, coasts, rivers, and grasslands are changing before our very eyes, not over millennia or centuries, but on shorter and shorter timelines. Retracing the long history of how images and texts have inscribed and reinscribed the Three Gorges as a techno-poetic landscape acclimates us to changes in the past, of course; but as a methodologically deliberate way of seeing across time, it also suggests a critical path that might help us attend to, live in, and create for a world made strange by change.
Perhaps nowhere are these changes stranger or more widely documented than in contemporary China. Since Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms in 1978, China has industrialized and urbanized at a rate unprecedented in human history, its newfound wealth finally allowing it to realize the grand infrastructural dreams of its founding fathers, among the most cherished of which has always been the damming of the Yangzi River. An engine of growth, mover of goods and people, source of water both near and far, and producer of hydroelectric power on a massive scale, the river has never been so important, or imperiled, as it is today. Pollution, erosion, habitat loss, canalization, and the diversion of its waters to parched regions in northern China have transformed the Yangzi and other Chinese rivers (including those that cross international borders), destroying their ecosystems and effacing the historical traces that happened to survive the ravages of time. The traces that remain in the Three Gorges, such as the temple complex at Baidicheng, are now part of a totally altered geography: once a narrow promontory reaching out into the river, Baidicheng has been transformed by the Three Gorges Dam and reservoir into an island, an accidental parable of rising seas and changing coasts. Travelers headed downstream might like to think they are bidding farewell to the same old Baidicheng—the landscape from which Li Bai’s light boat departed early in the morning—but that ship has long since sailed.
In the course of traveling from a place fixed in the poetic imagination to one fixed by concrete, this book has also followed a trajectory from ancient trace (guji 古跡) to famous site (shengji 勝跡), from place to people, from lyrical self-expression to aesthetic forms driven by sympathy for others, from magic transport to arduous labor, from exile to the region to displacement from the region. In another kind of narrative, these movements might bespeak greater concern with material displacement than with its representation, with the reality of the physical world than with how its boundaries and terms are culturally reimagined. But the mission of Fixing Landscape has been to pick out the invisible threads linking the representational and the material, not only the “real world consequences” of techno-poetic tropes that turn changing landscapes into stable cultural concepts, but also the ways literature, film, painting, and photography speak back to the landscape and direct attention toward those who seek to fix it for their own ends.3
Though the Three Gorges Dam is completed and its reservoir filled, the landscape is of course neither totally fixed nor fully altered. The river still flows; it is still possible to approximate Fan Chengda’s journey home or to retrace the imaginary itinerary that the Qianlong Emperor took when he viewed The Shu River (figures 2.1–2.4). This is what the Beijing-based photographer Michael Cherney (who also goes by the Chinese name Qiumai 秋麥 or Autumn Wheat) has done in his monumental Ten Thousand li of the Yangzi River (Changjiang wanli tu 長江萬裡圖), a forty-two-scroll photographic work printed and mounted on mica-flecked mulberry paper.4 Inspired by the thematic genre of Yangzi River paintings and a Song Dynasty painting of the same title in the collection of the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., Cherney selected forty-two sites along the Yangzi and Min rivers. Most of these correspond to those marked on the Freer painting, though Cherney has plotted them using modern technology, including online maps and Google Earth, in order to “determine the GPS coordinates of locations that would allow for photography of desired sites from the most ideal angle (rather than from the limited perspective of the river’s surface).”5 These techniques allow for a degree of spatial precision unthinkable in the Song, though the goal for Cherney is neither to fix exactly the locations inscribed on the Freer painting, many of which are only very loosely connected to the landscape, nor to establish his images as having some “basis in fact,” which was Fan Chengda’s goal in commissioning a new painting of the Gorges. Instead, he seeks an “ideal angle” that allows for the most compelling picture of the river, as in his image of Kuimen (figure IV.1), entryway to the Qutang Gorge and the repeated point of departure and passage for this book.
FIGURE IV.1 “Kuifu 夔府,” Michael Cherney (Qiumai 秋麥), from his Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze River (2015).
Image courtesy of the artist.
The mountains that make up Kuimen are among the most recognizable topographical features of the entire Yangzi River. Captured in innumerable travel photographs—and, as we have seen, depicted on the back of the ten-yuan banknote—Kuimen is an endlessly reproduced scene, a virtual landscape that can be tinted with a different ideological color for every new occasion. Cherney, however, drains Kuimen of its customary lurid tones, presenting the river and its mountains in granular black and white, beneath a veil of haze. One small part of a panorama that encompasses the mountains on the river’s southern bank as well as Baidicheng in the foreground at left, the sharply angled peak that forms the northern portion of Kuimen is a distant and barely visible shadow in the upper left-hand corner of the scroll. Though barely perceptible, this image of “Kuifu” is not what remains of a landscape drained of ideology: its contrastive dullness draws attention to the norms of representational manipulation.
The gauziness of the landscape also conflates the omnipresent clouds and mists for which the Gorges have long been famous with the thick mantle of caustic smog for which China is increasingly infamous. Present in much of Cherney’s work, this atmospheric pall evokes the fragility of both the environment and the material traces of the past in contemporary China. Cloaked and threatened by the shadows of development, the subjects of Cherney’s photographs are rendered spectral: faint traces captured by the camera as part of an ongoing project to explore those places where China’s past and the present converge, or, more often, diverge. Against the impulse to fix the landscape, contemporary artists such as Cherney have embraced techniques that give form to change, that make visible not only the historical traces and representational modes that make the Chinese landscape, but also the more ominous traces of the environmental and social crises that threaten to unmake our world. Confronted with the displacements caused by the Three Gorge Dam and reservoir, artists have been forced to reimagine preconceptions about the relationship between place, materiality, and representation. Where the passage of time and the rising of water make it impossible to locate the physical traces of the past, they have found alternative ways of reinscribing those traces, thereby sustaining and renewing the landscape traditions that developed around the Three Gorges. Through a poetics of disappearance and displacement, they have recaptured the indeterminacy of the trace even as they mourn the erasure of the landscape that once held it. By joining Du Fu in asking us to “please look,” they teach us how to read traces, to become “part of the movement,” and to thereby acknowledge the folly and the danger of trying to fix what can never be fixed.6