Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the opening of Liu Yujia's solo exhibition "A Darkness Shimmering in the Light", curated by art historian Mia Yu, on June 22nd at 4pm in the gallery’s Beijing 1st Space. The exhibition takes the scattered light in the northern forest as a consistent trope and the notion of frontier as a speculative perspective that transcends geopolitics, presenting the artist's two bodies of recent work, filmed on location in Xinjiang and China’s Northeast from 2019 to 2023, and interpreting the artist’s "eco-fiction" films which is interwoven by multi-media and text.

 

 

 

Through the Ethereal Glow of the Northern Frontiers

Mia Yu

 

 

Pervading the forests stretching across Northeast Asia is an elusive and shimmering light – the essence of the temperate coniferous forests, where the soul of the region resides. Beneath this dappled light, the data and energy of life pass between ginseng, mushroom, moss, musk deer, and all the other members of the forest biome. 

 

From 2022 to 2023, artist Liu Yujia embarked on four long journeys deep into the Changbai Mountains and the upper stream of the Songhua River. During her frequent voyages through the North’s ethereal glow, she filmed all four seasons of Northeast China. For the artist, the long journeys were an awe-inspiring and transformative life experience; for the timeless Eurasian landmass, her arrivals and departures were as fleeting as a flicker of light. 

 

Taking inspiration from the pervasive, glimmering and all-immersive light in the boreal forests as a trope that calls the human-nature duality into question, the exhibition “A Darkness Shimmering in the Light” presents Liu Yujia’s two bodies of recent work about ecological entanglements, filmed respectively on location at the Kunlun Mountains in Xinjiang and the Changbai Mountains in China’s Northeast. The exhibition highlights the artist’s approach to film as a form of eco-fiction that is intricately interwoven with documentary footage, ethnography, local mythology, folklore, and embodied experiences. Looming in the backdrop of these films are the majestic contours of two prominent mountain ranges in Asia, as well as China’s two national frontiers, both suffused with complex histories, geopolitics and extractive economies. Here, the notion of the frontier ecology is taken as a speculative perspective that has the potentiality to transcend geopolitics. By juxtaposing the artist’s works on these two frontier regions, the exhibition attempts to present Liu Yujia’s eco-fiction as a space where historical, ecological, spiritual and personal dimensions intersect, and also an experimental approach to evoke emotive and affective forms of kinship of the human and non-human. 

 

Liu Yujia began her exploration of frontier regions in 2015 by filming Black Ocean in Karamay, which was completed in 2016. Since then, she ventured further into the Xinjiang hinterland, where she witnessed melting glaciers, dried-up riverbeds resulting from climate change, ancient civilizations buried under desert sands, and landscapes shattered by excessive exploitation of resources. Liu Yujia's film Treasure Hunt, for which filming started in 2019 and finished in 2021, weaves together two excavation narratives: one is Aurel Stein's early 20th-century archaeological expeditions to the Kunlun Mountains and Hotan region; the other is the ethnic Uyghur laborers digging the dried riverbed of Yurungkax River for precious jade. With her works in Xinjiang, Liu Yujia began to perceive the landscape of the frontier as a portal for travelling through time and space, bridging history with the realities of the present and the boundless horizons of future imagination. 

 

In 2022, Liu Yujia shifted her focus to the vast landmass of China’s Northeast, further advancing her exploration of the frontier into the ecological realm. Her exploration of the Changbai Mountain region shed light on contradictions inherent within the frontier ecology: the Changbai Mountains, Amur River, Ussuri River, Tumen River, Yalu River and Reka Argun’ River are some of the majestic mountain ranges and prominent rivers of Northeast China that demarcate the borders between modern nation-states. The formation of national borders is a complex process entangled with colonial history, imperialist expansion, war, immigration, and the socialist nation-building. However, mountains and rivers are also interconnected ecological entities whose very nature challenges the notion of separation. Viewed from an ecological perspective, Northeast China is a frontier region in which nature and culture, the geopolitical and the mythical, the human and the more-than-human merge in an everyday fashion that threatens to dislodge these binaries all together. It is the paradoxical tension between separation and connection that captivated Liu Yujia, compelling her to return to Northeast China time and again and to explore its paradoxical potentiality through an embodied practice of travel-filming. 

 

Liu Yujia's creative process always begins by throwing herself into the vast lands of deserts, forests, snowfields, and glaciers. "All you need to do is embark on the journey!" Liu Yujia embarks on her journey with resolute determination. She surrenders her senses to the unknown and embraces all possibilities and uncertainties. She ventures into the midst of sandstorms, blizzards and extreme cold, and grapples with technical glitches while crossing paths with herds of deer, hunters, loggers, mountaineers, self-exiles, and shamans. She delves into a working style akin to what Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar refers to as "sentipensar," that is, a way of knowing that does not separate thinking from feeling, reason from emotion, knowledge from caring.

 

Over the course of a year, Liu Yujia has filmed a substantial amount of documentary footage in the Changbai Mountain region, utilizing mediums that include 16mm film, digital camera, drone, and GoPro. These mediums carry a sense of diverse materiality and layered temporality, resembling an energy reactor. Liu Yujia then ignited her energy reactor with reassembled texts. Upon completing filming, she retreated to her study, extensively researching trans-Siberian ethnography, non-fiction about the northern territories, novels, and folktales of Northeast China. From these rich sources, Liu Yujia selected and remixed fragments to weave her "eco-fiction", in which the majestic rivers, mountains and boreal forests on the borderlands form a constant yet fluctuating stage; snow, ice and wind serve as poetic mediums that bridge the past and present; animals, plants and humans coinhabit in a pluriversal tapestry of life. Liu Yujia's fictional narratives brim with embodied and affective experiences, interweaving indigenous culture, knowledge and animist belief. These narratives not only belong to Northeast China but also to the greater northern land that spans the Eurasian continent unhindered by national borders.

 

From the Kunlun Mountains to the Changbai Mountains, from Xinjiang to Northeast China, from sandstorms to snowstorms, from the parched Yurungkax river to the Songhua River dotted with hydropower projects, Liu Yujia has delved into specific frontier regions over and over again, before taking her leave when the time was right. From this she has constructed a hybrid northern imaginary. Navigating between documentary and fiction, Liu Yujia attempts to transcend the territorial boundaries imposed by modern countries, invoking an ecological poetics unsuppressed by geopolitical forces. The exhibition "A Darkness Shimmering in the Light" provides the occasion for the two Asian frontiers to merge through Liu Yujia’s filmic language. We, as audience, are given the opportunity to listen to various multi-species stories, sense the silent energy of the boreal landscape and compare two extractive frontiers populated by divergent multi-ethnic peoples. What we aspire to gain is by no means sensory pleasure, rather suspended questions. Can such artistic "eco-fiction" be legitimized as part of a post-anthropocentric approach? Can emotive forms, affective relationships, and embodied experiences also be recognized as forms of ecological ways of knowing? Can the frontier regions, so long regarded as mere object of extraction, be imbued with subjectivity such that it forms a vibrant network of ecological actors?

 

Whether we are aware of it or not, light and water have always permeated the margins of humanity, connecting the peoples and regions isolated by their border status. In this exhibition, light as both metaphor and cinematographic medium is the unifying thread that connects a series of eco-stories of affective and embodied experiences. These stories allow us to clearly see that, against the backdrop of the Changbai Mountains and on the stage of the Songhua River and Tumen River, different terrestrial beings share intersubjectivities and dependencies which not only transcend national borders but also have the potential to dispel humanity’s anthropocentric delusion.

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