Chen Qiulin examines the roles that urban development and displacement play in disrupting traditional Chinese cultural norms. Her multidisciplinary practice includes photography, installation, video, and performance.
Read MoreChen's series of three video works and photographs taken between 2002 and 2004 present distinct visions of China's changing sociocultural landscape. Farewell Poem (2002) intercuts footage of her home city Wanxian's (now Wanzhou District) partial submergence with operatic scenes from Farewell my Concubine, a 1993 Chinese historical drama. Chen laments the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River (1994—2008), which displaced 1.2 million people and flooded many towns and cities.
This elegiacal approach is similarly explored in River, River (2005), which tracks two teenagers and several opera characters as they travel through Wanxian's disintegrating infrastructure. Here, Chen's hometown is presented more optimistically, with new buildings and a sense of hope for the future.
Yet this hopefulness is also subverted in The Garden (2007), which portrays migrant workers carrying huge bouquets of fake pink peony flowers to new dwellings and high rises in Wanxian. In this context, the peonies, traditionally a ceremonial symbol of new beginnings, are contrasted with the false promise of a neglected and ruinous urban landscape. Chen reveals the hidden aftermath of the rapid urbanisation that typifies China's contemporary ambition and contrasts it with traditional ways of life.
In Chen's series 'One Hundred Surnames' (2004—ongoing), tofu is used sculpturally to convey the volatility of cultural identity, communal memory, and traditional ancestry. The series began with Bean Curd of 14 February, a 2004 party that Chen hosted in Chengdu, where guests ate 100 carved tofu surnames with a traditional Sichuanese hotpot dinner.
In further video, installation, and photographic iterations, Chen carves one hundred of the most common Chinese surnames in tofu, then documents their process of decay. She highlights the ubiquity of tofu in Chinese communities around the world and its roles in connecting the lived experiences of migrants. However, Chen also relates tofu's softness and easy spoilage to the dangers of urbanisation, the 'perishing and transfiguration of tradition'.
