- Overview - 
Uriel Orlow | Ruins in Reverse, Haunting and the Restitution of Memory to History

In this talk, Uriel Orlow will present a number of recent projects developed from Armenia to the Democratic Republic of Congo which engage with micro-histories, spatial manifestations of memory, social and ecological justice and blind spots of representation. He will engage with the question, how we as artists can engage in different forms of haunting, alternative temporalities and reparative sociability?

Mia Yu | Unpacking Fushun: Energy Flow, Deep-Time Landform and Geo-Engineered Nature

As the initiator of “North x Anthropocene” project, Mia Yu provides an overall review of the summer fieldtrip to Fushun. On one hand, this fieldtrip is an exploration of the rise and fall of mining and industrial development history, enabling artists to refresh their impression of various forms of energy infrastructure; on the other hand, it attempts to offer a planetary perspective on the complex interplay among deep geological timescale, coal, oil, mining wastes and renewable energy. In the process, Fushun emerges as a perceptible site of artistic research.

Han Qian | In The Stillness Between Two Waves Of The Sea: The Field in Art Practices

Han Qian will base her reflection on how an artist arrives at the field, from her current new work “In The Stillness Between Two Waves Of The Sea,” With ten-year living experiences in Europe, Han Qian is torn between two different perspectives. It was only when she arrived in Northeast China for the “first time” that the tangled relationship between land and identity led her to a new field. From Wuhan to Northeast China, from the ironworks to the mines, all the encounters and arrivals interpenetrate and absorb everything around her confronting both the order of the old world and the look of a new life. In her recent works, confusion and understanding share a ground of intergrowth in her work. How can anthropogenic time and geological time grow from this land and mirror each other? In this process, In this process, does the human also transformed into a kind of “sediment” in different scales of time? What is consumed and what is built seems always to be intertwined.

Qiu Yu | Complex Perception marked with the “Scar”

The trip to Fushun brought Qiu Yu to a specific field wherein his body becomes a medium for perception. The convergence of hope and abandonment echoes the transition from fossil to new energy. In the magnitude of geological time, the strata elements mingle with the body, of which the wandering artist becomes a part. As the “scars” are covered with callus, they pulsate and itch, and tangle with each other. Qiu Yu will share his idiosyncratic experience, episodic reminisce and imagination aroused by technology, energy, ecology and body perception during the period of the transition from old to new energy.

Li Yong | “The Burning Wilderness”: Two Stages of Observing Xishechang

A Fushun resident and observer of Xishechang Waste Field, Li Yong has experienced many changes in his ways of observing and engaging Fushun after co-organizing and participating in the fieldtrip. Li Yong’s creation has always been marked with the keyword “waste”, tapping into the energy and vitality in “waste”. The energy of Xishechang is embodied in the heat with the form of combustion. It strikes an astonishing resemblance with the landscape in the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s work. On the cover of Rulfo’s book “The Burning Field”, there is a sentence which reads “Despair is like wildfire, burning the hard-skinned plain clean”. For Li Yong, burning never equals desperation in Xishechang. Li Yong attempts to understand the geological and historical time of the combustion and treats it as an influx of light and heat, while reading the changes in Xishechang in the ebb and the flow of time.

- 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”.

‍ - Speaker - 

Uriel Orlow

Uriel Orlow’s practice is research-based, process-oriented and often in dialogue with other disciplines. Projects engage with residues of colonialism, spatial manifestations of memory, social and ecological justice, blind spots of representation and plants as political actors. Working across installation, photography, film, drawing and sound his works bring different image-regimes and narrative modes into correspondence. His work has been presented at major survey exhibitions including in 2022 at the Berlin Biennale, British Art Show 9, Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Kochi Biennale and Dakar Biennale and previously at the 54th Venice Biennale, Manifesta 9 & 12, B, Lubumbashi Biennial VI, 13th Sharjah Biennial amongst others. Monographic publications include Conversing with Leaves (Archive Books, 2020), Soil Affinities (Shelter Press, 2019) and Theatrum Botanicum (Sternberg Press, 2018). Uriel Orlow is a research fellow at University of Westminster London and a docent at University of the Arts, Zurich.

Han Qian

Han Qian is an artist and writer. Taking body and time perception as her departure point, Han focuses on the intertwined time that stretches between the real and the imagined, the everyday and the other. Through the threads of memory, dreams and history, she contemplates personal identity and its history, trying to make her creations as a continuous journey between the past and the present. Individual experiences and memories act as intimate clues in the journey, searching for possibilities of and dialogues with external and historical identities in symbiosis. She mainly creates videos, installations, performance, prints and texts. Her current axis of work is based on the family history of three generations of her own family and to sort out the migration and re-creation of the Chinese steel industry from north to south in the twentieth century. She explores the genealogy of natural resources and political discourse behind this historical narrative, and the changes in individual destinies within it, and thus begins a series of long-term field-based creative projects.

Qiu Yu

Qiu Yu is an artist and a candidate for the PhD in Art and Technology at the School of Design of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is engaged in the creation and research of technology art. In his works, he uses mixed media such as sound, video, installation, and objects to explore the inner logic and linguistic relationship embedded in technology media and the perception of life under the influence of mixed media. His works have been exhibited in the Beijing Media Art Biennale, B3 Biennale, the Jinji Lake Biennale, the Anren Biennale, the Asian Digital Art Exhibition, the “Growing” International Biological Art Exhibition, the 13th National Exhibition of Fine Arts, and other exhibitions in China and abroad.

Li Yong

Li Yong is an artist who lives in Fushun. In his early works, he searched for micro-vitality and balance in the space of Fushun. In recent years, his work has focused on the interwoven energy of light and heat in the ruined field of Fushun, chasing the complex temporal entanglement of the historical, geological and future in it. His works are mainly but not limited to photography, as he  also uses video and installation. He has been nominated for the 2010 Three Shadows Photography Award and the 2015 TOP20 Chinese Contemporary Photography. His works have been exhibited at the Beijing International Photography Biennale, Art Beijing, and other art museums and galleries. In 2020, Chinese Contemporary Photography Catalog - Li Yong was published by Zhejiang Photography Press. 

 - 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