Glacial Erratic

Portals through the Haze: Accelerated Modernization and The Three Gorges

Harry der Boghosian Fellowship, Syracuse University, 2019

Over the last several decades the countryside, mountains and rivers in China have been dramatically and irrevocably shaped by an accelerated modernization that is uniquely Chinese. Among the most auspicious of many such examples is The Three Gorges Dam, built across the Yangtze River in Hubei Province, a project so massive that upon completion in 2012, it forever altered the rotation of the Earth. However profound this latter fact, it pales in comparison to the impact the project had on The Three Gorges and on the lives of local residents. Ultimately, more than one million people were displaced and relocated. And 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages, some more than two thousand years old, were demolished and flooded.

This exhibition depicts the impact of accelerated modernization on The Three Gorges by focusing on a 120-mile stretch of the Yangtze River between the cities of Fengjie and Yichang, between which lie Qutang Gorge, Wu Gorge, and Xiling Gorge. And it proposes to do so by creating an abstract, fictional reality that is more real than would be possible to create using conventional architectural means of representation. It is thus an exhibition about The Three Gorges, but it is also about architecture itself. Accelerated modernization creates a chaos of all that it comes into contact with, transforming all that is solid into air, all that is fixed and frozen into a churning mass [1]. This transformation is especially profound in The Three Gorges, where the ancient mists that blur together mountain, river, village and city into one seemingly continuous landscape, blend with factory pollution and particulate matter created by the demolition of thousands of settlements along the Yangtze, to form an aerated haze—an airborne filter through which everything that can be seen is seen. A second, semi-liquified haze of bricks, stones, and other building matter can be found scattered on former settlement sites along and below the river, all colored and seemingly cast in the same hue and texture—a haze of matter that once formed distinct structures now reduced to the common denominator of rubble. A third haze, the Yangtze itself, risen to a new level with the completion of the dam, obscures from direct view the many former villages along the river that were demolished and submerged—a fully-liquified haze that creates a new datum that obscures but does not completely conceal the past that rests below.

[1] Paraphrased from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in The Marx-Engels Reader (1978), edited, Robert C. Tucker, p.476.

In such a world obscured by haze, the precision and verisimilitude sought through the use of conventional forms of architectural representation is imprecise, if not entirely useless. The haze reveals and conceals; it collapses time and space; it blurs the natural and the artificial, the mountain and the village, and renders impossible any definitive vantage point. This exhibition encourages the viewer to take the fictional but profoundly realistic perspective found in traditional Chinese landscape painting, one where all scales and all views are experienced simultaneously. The viewer is thus encouraged to consider what is on view as a continuum of all possible vantage points and objects, a "metaphysical recollection," as architect Wang Shu suggests, rather than a singular, stable object viewed from a single, stable point of view.[2] Staged between and through a physical model and a series of photographs—portals to a more fundamental reality—the exhibition ultimately encourages the viewer to navigate the landscape from the scale of a room to the scale of an entire region, looking into as well as out onto The Three Gorges. Only such active, simultaneous viewing can reveal what is hidden under, through and beyond the haze.

[2] The aspiration to achieve a more fundamental realism animates the architecture of Wang Shu, who has written about Song dynasty landscape painting: “In Autumn Mountains, attributed to Guan Tong, there is an extraordinarily majestic mountain, but the fact that the entirety of this mountain can be seen so clearly would almost be an impossibility in reality. The distance between the viewer and the mountain in the painting is at least 10 kilometers, but the details of the mountain would only be visible if seen from a very close range, thus the delineations could only have come from the recollective eyes of the metaphysical.” From "The “Narrative of the Mountain," translated by Le Luo, Log 45, Winter-Spring 2019, p.17.

1. The Landscape

The most prominent element in the exhibition is an eleven-foot landscape model that represents the “entirety” of the Qutang Gorge. The model frames an attenuated, forced perspective: the deeper the viewer looks into the landscape, the more of the landscape is revealed. Rather than viewing one scale at a time, the model invites the viewer to consider many scales at once. Contouring is a technique conventionally used to give landscape a stable metric. But in this model not all contours register the same amount of information or value. At either end of the model, where the slopes are shallow and the river wide, the contours trace across 350-feet of shoreline, while in the middle, amidst the sharp mountain peaks, the model traces a 10-mile wide span of river.

2. The Rubble

The demolition of countless settlements along the Yangtze created mountains of rubble that to this day lie submerged beneath the river surface. Every piece of rubble—whether minuscule glass shard from a building window, single brick, or twisted amalgam of concrete and steel frame—is a memory container: Of the bricklayer who placed the brick; of the family who painted the structure red to celebrate a newborn; of the migrant worker whose hammer reduced its walls to shards, dust and debris. Over time these submerged mountains of rubble will be transformed by the river currents and shaped into a new geological stratum.

3. The Containers

Vertically stacked “gabion towers” are abstract figurations of a future architecture that might give shape and form and thus new life to the amorphous, scattered piles of rubble and the memories and culture they contain.

4. The River

When the dam was completed, the Yangtze rose, submerging the demolished settlements along the river and with them the memories they evoke and the culture they represent. The river is represented as two parallel surface planes: the original river surface and the new river surface hovering above. Though the new river is in reality placid and clear, it is modeled as a treacherous, fully-liquified flow of surface rubble, a fictional, though fundamentally real shroud that simultaneously conceals and reveals traces of the former settlements that lie below the surface.

5. The Rooms

There are three rooms embedded into the landscape model: a domestic space, perhaps a bathroom or a painter’s study; a museum space; and a circular portal to the mountains and river. Each of these rooms define an interior space but each also frames a view from within the model—from the interiors of these three spaces—out onto the landscape itself and indeed out onto the exhibition space. The viewer is encouraged to imagine themselves in these rooms and to view the landscape from these alternative, internal vantage points.

6. The Haze

The Haze—aerated, semi-liquified, fully-liquified—obscure and reveal all that can be seen in the model and in the Three Gorges.

7. The Photographs

The large-scale prints are made from photographs taken on two trips to The Three Gorges, one in 2015 and the other in 2018. Like the rooms embedded in the model, each photograph—on the walls and in this booklet—frames views of The Three Gorges. But unlike the rooms, the very walls of which frame vantage points internal to the landscape, the mobile vantage points of the camera offer vantage points with varying degrees of focus and depth external to the landscape. Even when shot from inside a half-demolished building, the framing device is the camera, not the room. Together the rooms and the photographs set up a relay of framed perspectives (eyes) that move between the imagined outward views framed by the rooms and the inward views framed by the camera, leaving the viewer to picture the scene as Wang Shu suggests, from “the recollected eyes of the metaphysical.”