“Ecological Entanglements from Northeast China and Beyond” 

 Co-Learning Series [1] 

Between the Dongbei Railroads, the Hengduan Mountains and the Greenland Ice Sheet: Mediatizing the Infrastructures of Planetary Dimension

"Ecological Entanglements from Northeast China and Beyond" is a co-learning series among artists

Presented by WU SPACE

Sponsored by Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council.

The series, curated by researcher and curator Mia Yu, invites artists and researchers from home and abroad to delve into local history from their own field experiences, and to engage in dialogue and co-learning on topics such as nature awareness, energy infrastructure, ecological transformation caused by mining, post-industrial rewilding, and industrial waste. The series will attempt to establish comparative links between Northeast China and other regions of the world, and to explore the neglected and non-classical perspectives of the Global South. “Ecological Entanglements from Northeast China and Beyond” will take place from late July to late October 2022 and will consist of four online seminars, closed-door workshops, and field trips to the Northeast.

The first online seminar, scheduled for July 27 and titled “Between the Dongbei Railroads, the Hengduan Mountains and the Greenland Ice Sheet: Mediatizing the Infrastructures of Planetary Dimension,” will feature Mia Yu, artist Chen Xiaoyi, and Geneva-based artist Anastasia Mityukova, with a focus on massive-scale infrastructures embedded in the earth. Respectively addressing themselves to the railroad–coal-mine complex in the Northeast China, the scatters of mining caves in the Hengduan Mountains, and the U.S. military base in Greenland, the participants will explore the geopolitics, ecological transformation, image mechanisms, and individual narratives behind these infrastructures. The melting of Arctic sea ice is the corollary of fossil fuel emissions, and the ecological problems caused by the Cold War are manifesting themselves in an unexpected way in the present and the future. As humans overexploit nature, nature, in turn, rewrites the fate of humans. What are the complex entanglements between coal, minerals, earth’s crust, ice, and human beings in the telescoping of deep time and the history of the 20th century? Using the media of painting, photography, and video, how do artists mediate macroscopic studies and microscopic perceptions of planet-scale infrastructures? Moreover, does the work of artists imply the existence of certain non-classical alternative perspectives of the Global South?

 - Overview - 
Mia Yu | Planetary Scales and Personal Perspectives: Mechanism of Mediatization of Coal Images

A complex mechanized and integrated system, railroads fragment natural bodies such as forests, bodies of water, mountains, and land, and integrate them into the network of large-scale infrastructures. The railway boom of the 19th century marked the beginning of human beings’ massive-scale exploitation and transformation of nature into extractable resources. In the Northeast China, the formation of transnational railroads, together with the large-scale coal mines alongside, formed a geopolitical infrastructural complex. This complex not only mediated the exploitation of coal—geological formation per se—as a natural resource, but also integrated the images of coal into the modern visual system. In her presentation, Yu will survey images related to coal mines in the Northeast in the 20th century (including the special albums of railroads in Tsarist Russia, maps of railroads, bird-eye-view tourist maps of Manchukuo, propaganda posters of the New China, designs of the renminbi, government-commissioned drawing of the Northeast, etc.) and explore the dynamic mechanisms of mediatization behind the image. At a time when the industrial areas of the Northeast have partially become a rust belt, how can artists, using the media and approaches of contemporary art, mediate the abandoned coal mines and tailings, now planetary ruins, and project a vision of the future?

Chen Xiaoyi | A Short History of the West and the Land of the Unknown 

The Hengduan Mountains are a group of north-south mountain ranges typical of the Southwest China. Their vertical landscapes accommodate the flow of lives of various species and organisms. With numerous blocked, isolated, unknown places, the mountains boast mines of non-ferrous metals. Chen Xiaoyi will take the Hengduan Mountains as an entry point into the Southwest and the scattering of abandoned mines in the mountains as a field of observation. She attempts to interweave the temporality of geological formations and historical narratives and rethink the perspective of the historical other in the porosity of multiple dimensions and scales of time. Chen’s effort is both a retrospect of the past and present of the Southwest China as a resource region and an exploration of the possibilities of establishing a non-homogenized ecological framework.

Anastasia Mityukova | Project Iceworm: In Progress

Beginning in 1957, under the cover of the Arctic scientific research base, the United States Army started digging a system of tunnels under the northern Greenland ice sheet. Known as Project Iceworm, this project was meant to construct an underground base to store and deploy hundreds of nuclear missiles that would be able to reach the Soviet Union. Due to the elasticity of the ice sheet, snow and ice started to slowly deform and threaten to collapse the buildings underground. In 1966, the US Army abandoned the project, with tons of biochemical, radioactive waste left behind under the ice. Now, a globally warming climate and the melting of the Arctic ice are gradually unearthing the toxic materials, including nuclear wastes, at the sites of the project. It is expected that the contamination will spread to the surrounding Arctic regions. In 2018, photographer Anastasia Mityukova started investigating the project. Since the project was still largely classified, she resorted to archival methods including social-media posts, interviews with the Inuits, and personal memories, and gradually constructed a fragmentary, semi-fictional archive of over six thousand images. Working on the “unphotographable” Arctic region and future ecological catastrophe, Mityukova did not eschew the lack of evidence, but instead highlighted the challenge brought about by this lack. As she artistically strategizes fiction, she constantly mediates the tension between reality and fiction.

- Organizer & Speakers -

Mia Yu

Mia Yu is a Beijing-based, globally active art historian and curator. Her research interests include global exhibition histories, Asian geopolitics, infrastructure, decolonization and the Anthropocene in Northeast China. Her recent exhibitions include “Three Contested Sites—The Worldly Fables of the Long 1990s” (co-curated with Nikita Cai), “Resonances of One Hundred Things” (OCAT Biennale 2021), “From Vladivostok to Xishuangbanna” (Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival 2020), “Photoethics: CHINAFRICA” (2020) and “Ni Jun: An Inconvenient Case” (2019). Mia Yu was the winner of theYishu Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Art in 2018, the recipient of the Tate Asia Research Travel Fellowship in 2017 and the winner of the CCAA Art Critic Award in 2015. She was also nominated for the Curator of the Year Award for the 14th AAC Art Awards in 2019. Mia Yu’s research essays appeared at the book Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000  published by Afterall Exhibition Research Center and Bard College as well as other art journals. Her video essays have been exhibited at Times Art Center Berlin, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Guangdong Times Museum, Villa Vassilieff Paris and Asia Society Hong Kong. In 2021, Mia Yu initiated the long-term para-curatorial project “North x Anthropocene: Ecological Sensibilities from the Edges”.

Anastasia Mityukova

Anastasia Mityukova (1992) is a Swiss visual artist based in Geneva. She obtained her bachelor in photography at ECAL in 2018 and her master in contemporary art practices at HEAD in 2021. Her artistic practice is exploring ambivalences of the photographic medium. Embracing photography’s ambiguity, constantly interrogating how we are trained to treat photographs as evidence is the core of her research. She is challenging this medium with an approach close to a documentary, using methods of gathering, comparison, field research, trying to deconstruct our knowledge of certain stories and events.

Chen Xiaoyi

Chen Xiaoyi, received an MA Photography from London College of Communication. Her work based on photography but not confined to specific media, focusing on the subtle perceptions of human beings by producing images. In the projects that have been progressing in recent years, she has focused on the Western China as a resource area in history, focusing on the mines and mining relics in the Hengduan Mountains region as cuts, and continuously salvaging those lost time, the mystery of nature and the land. She has exhibited internationally; she was awarded the Three Shadows Photography Award in 2015, and named one of Asia’s 30 Artists under 30 by Forbes magazine 2017.

 - About the Project - 

“Ecological Entanglements from Northeast China and Beyond” is developed under the collaborative research framework of “North × Anthropocene: Ecological Sensibilities from the Edges” (“Northern × Anthropocene” for short). Initiated by Mia Yu on the platform of WU SPACE, “Northern × Anthropocene” supports co-learning, collective walking, seminars, exhibitions, commissions, publications, etc. and seeks to explore the deep narratives behind the intersection of energy development, mineral extraction, industrial infrastructure, ecological transformation, and personal perceptions from the Northeast. The establishment of coal mines, iron ore mines, hydroelectric power stations, oil bases, and large-scale mechanized farming areas in the early 20th century rendered the Northeast the earliest heavy industrial base in modern China and its natural resources a battleground for large-scale resource exploitation. Infrastructure at a planetary scale witnesses a mix of colonial modernity and socialist industrial modernity and profoundly embodies the legacy of the Cold War. Admittedly, the New China owes its energy security and food security to modern technologies but they also have far-reaching effects on the local geology, landforms, hydrology, vegetation, and climate. “Northern × Anthropocene” situates the ecological transformation of the Northeast’s large-scale infrastructures in a spatio-temporal stack of deep geological time, the flux of 20th century history, personal perceptions, and future imagination. Through co-learning and collaboration, participants will observe the complex entanglements between coal, crude oil, water bodies, crust, soil, plants and animals, and people, develop ecological, cross-species wisdom from first-hand experience in the North, and imagine the future in a new ecological practice led by technologies.

- Supported by -

Pro Helvetia