Two eels in the park 二鳗游园
2022, video installation, found objects (empty fish feed bags and fishing medicine cans and buckets), water pipes, electronic candles, single-channel video (loop, colour, sound), 13:55 min. 2022，影像装置，现成物品（空鱼饲料袋、渔药罐和水桶）、水管、电烛灯、单通道录像（循环、彩色、声音），13:55 分钟。Installation views, Chronus Art Center, Shanghai.
Installation views, Chronus Art Center, Shanghai. 装置照片，新时线媒体(CAC)艺术中心，上海。
Video Project. 影像投影。
Flourished in the Ming and Qing dynasties, Sangyuanwei Polder (桑园围) is a large-scale water conservancy and irrigation project in Foshan spanning the Shunde and Nanhai districts, where I conducted fieldwork for more than half a year.
After Sangyuanwei Polder had been honored as a World Heritage Irrigation Structure in 2020, a city-scale eco-cultural tourism project themed on the amphibious traditions of Sangyuanwei Polder was initiated. While walking on site, visitors can easily find the disconnection between the cultural tourism project and the reality. This tourism project spares no effort to praise the mulberry-dike fish pond system an iconic local landscape. However, this local traditional amphibious circular agriculture has been almost replaced by modern intensive aquaculture, in which a separated land-water relationship is dominant. In other words, this tourism project promotes itself with an amphibious narrative that lacks an amphibious reference in contemporary reality.
Taking this as the background, I produced an installation “Two eels in the park” to reveal the contradiction of such an amphibious narrative with reality by exaggerating its logic. In this work, I depicted a fairy tale story about two eels that escaped from a modern intensive fish pond of today’s Sangyuanwei Polder, reaching the birthplace of the Longmu (龙母, Mother of Dragons, a local goddess of the Xi River basin) in the upper reaches of the Xi River and obtaining magic powers. While they were migrating to the ocean to spawn, they decided to return to the fish ponds and rescue their kin but ended up lost in the giant cultural tourism project—wherein the story, the future Sangyuanwei Polder is transformed into a huge theme park. In today’s Sangyuanwei Polder area, eels are also considered a new cultural icon by local amphibious tourism. Likewise, in reality, eel farming has already declined due to a series of ecological and economic reasons.
By referring to Lingnan mural painting (岭南壁画), new countryside wall art (新农村壁画), folk myths, the hydraulic history, and my fieldwork experience of aquaculture in Foshan, I have created a series of paintings depicting the speculative story and made them into a slideshow with voiceover projected onto a temple. The temple is made of local aquaculture leftovers, which are found objects that I collected during my fieldwork. Traditionally, local temples also serve as amphibious venues where people pray to the water deities and discuss dike repairs.
在明清时期蓬勃发展的桑园围堤围系统是位于佛山顺德和南海区的大型水利灌溉项目。我在该地进行了大半年的田野调查。
2020年，桑园围被选为世界遗产灌溉结构。于是，当地启动了以其两栖传统为主题的城市级生态文化旅游项目。行走于现场时，游客可以轻易发现该文化旅游项目与现实之间的脱节。该项目不遗余力地赞扬桑田鱼塘系统作为标志性的地方景观。然而，这种地方传统两栖循环农业几乎已被现代密集水产养殖所取代。而主导着后者的是一种分离的陆水关系。换句话说，该旅游项目宣传的两栖性传统是被构建出来的。
以此为背景，我制作了一个装置作品《二鳗游园》，通过夸大该文旅项目的逻辑来揭示这种两栖与水产现实的张力。在这个作品中，我描绘了一个童话故事。故事讲述了两条鳗鱼从今天桑园围的现代化密集鱼塘逃出，到达西江上游龙母的诞生地，并获得了法力。当它们迁徙到大海产卵时，决定返回鱼塘救出同类，但最终迷失在巨大的文化旅游项目中——在这个故事中，未来的桑园围被改造成了巨大的主题公园。在今天的桑园围地区，鳗鱼也被地方两栖旅游视为新的文化标志。同样，在现实中，由于一系列生态和经济原因，鳗鱼养殖已经衰落。
借鉴岭南壁画、新农村壁画、民间神话、水利史以及我在佛山关于水产养殖的田野调查经验，我创作了一系列描绘这个推想小说的画作，并将其制作成配有旁白的幻灯片，投影在一座庙宇上。这座庙宇是由我在田野调查期间收集的当地水产养殖剩余物质制成的。在前现代的桑园围，寺庙也是一种两栖性的场所，人们在这里向水神祈祷并商议堤坝维修事宜。