The Cartography of My Heart

我心的制图学

—漂过潮白河，飞跃鸭绿江，行至西北太平洋

This journal entry stems from my trip back to China at the end of 2024, starting with emotional projections through the geographical coordinates of Northern China’s mountains and rivers. It includes observations on the art ecosystem in Northern China, an ice exhibition on the Chao Bai River, the Mou Village Theatre Festival in my hometown (which I never had the chance to attend), and anecdotes related to an exhibition I curated in Beijing. The piece also explores the emotional entanglements between myself, my hometown, and Northern China, as well as the struggles and contemplations of an emergent curator.

I. The Northern Blues

“Thongchai Winichakul, in his book Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation, introduces the concept of the geo-body, which encompasses not ‘merely space or territory,’ but constitutes an essential part of national life. It is ‘the source of pride, loyalty, passion of love, prejudice, hatred, reason, and unreason,’ it is the mountains and rivers that carry emotions, identities, and historical memories.”

As I write this journal entry, I am trying to understand the artistic ecosystem in Northeast China. For a long time, the region has remained largely absent from the dominant narratives of contemporary art. The emergence of the Northeast Asia Art Archive(NAAA) responds precisely to this void, taking on a sense of mission to reframe questions of locality, peripherality, and regionality. Together with Da Bian Lu (打边炉), a text-centered art platform rooted in Southern China, NAAA launched the Spring of Baishan (白山之春) forum—a cross-disciplinary gathering that focuses on the cultural ecology, artistic practices, and local narratives of Northeast Asia. Indeed, the protagonist here is the Changbai Mountain (长白山)—a geographic and imagined entity of equal weight—standing witness to the desolation and silence that linger over Northeast China in the post-industrial era. Descending from the snow-covered ridges, the Yalu River (鸭绿江) basin unfolds—another region where geography and politics are deeply intertwined. Recently, an article titled Retreat: Small Places Are Becoming Today’s Frontline (撤退: 小地方正成为今天的前沿) circulated in the Chinese art world. Starting with the Yalu River Art Museum, located on the China-North Korea border, the article explores a broader phenomenon of ”retreat”—both physical and psychological—among Chinese artists, who are leaving first-tier cities, relocating to smaller towns, or returning to their hometowns. In this context, the Changbai Mountain and the Yalu River are reimagined. Once overlooked, they are now reimagined as protagonists in a peripheral narrative, imbued with almost mythic meaning. They signal a different site of emergence for Chinese contemporary art.

“Northeast Asia” is a relatively unfamiliar geographical concept to me. It generally refers to Mongolia, Japan, Northeast China, South Korea, North Korea, and the Russian Far East, or more broadly, to the land regions bordering the Northwestern Pacific. My hometown, Shandong, does not belong to this map; at best, it lingers as an echo of Northeast China, a footnote resonating at the edge of the winter wind and snow. In between lie Hebei and Beijing, sharing the same piercing frost. The train heads north from Shandong to Beijing, the view outside the window unfolds—chimneys rising in dense layers, silent industrial plants standing solemnly, fields stretching endlessly, interwoven with the distant cold tones of steel, forming a landscape both vast and tender.

“The cultural and artistic discourse of Northeast Studies has clearly established its own distinct narrative paradigm and continues to expand its conceptual territory. However, if we shift our perspective from the Northeast to a broader Greater Northeast, the significance of Northeast Studies lies not only—and perhaps not primarily—in anchoring itself to a specific region characterized by psychological distortion and a sense of loss. This is exemplified by The Long Season (漫长的季节), which departs from the conventional depiction of the Northeast in harsh, snow-laden winters and instead sets its story in the autumn. In this context, Shandong—often criticized for being ‘Northeast-ified’—and Zibo, with its landscape of old industrial factories, can undoubtedly serve as the next footnotes to the expanding discourse of Northeast Studies.”

The Chaobai River (潮白河) winds its way further north along this rail journey, serving as the administrative boundary between Beijing and Yanjiao in Hebei. At certain times, this river has fully embodied its administrative function, becoming a natural barrier that insulates Beijing from outsiders.

“Lately, we’ve been planning a three-day exhibition on the frozen Chaobai River—performance, installation, video, sound, anything goes. Someone suggested pre-freezing food from their fridge to embed in the ice, while another proposed using powerful firecrackers to shatter the frozen river. So many wild ideas—can’t wait!” This was an excerpt from an open call for an ice exhibition on the Chaobai River, initiated by an art collective called 粗 Zoo.

I never witnessed the exhibition in person, nor have I ever visited the Chaobai River. Yet, through the WeChat moments shared by my artist friends from the North, I caught glimpses of this fleeting exhibition on ice. My favorite piece—and perhaps the one that best embodied the vision of the participant who proposed “blowing up the frozen river” during the open call—was artist Jia Rang’s installation 啪! (Pa!). In this installation, two elastic cords were anchored to a tree on the riverbank, with the other ends attached to a small plastic bucket frozen into the ice. Inside the bucket was a single bag of snap pops. As the temperature rose and the ice melted, the bucket would be released, catapulting the snap pops toward Beijing, where they would detonate upon landing. I’m not sure if the firecracker eventually hit the ground, but given its small size, it probably wouldn’t have caused much of a disturbance in Beijing.

II. The Burnout Society

“Handke envisions a this-worldly religion centered on weariness. This ‘fundamental weariness’ dissolves the isolated subject and gives rise to a collective community without the need for kinship ties. Such a community evokes a special rhythm of life, an atmosphere of solidarity, and leads to an intimate neighborliness without familial or functional bonds. ‘A weary person is another Orpheus; around him, the wildest animals gather, and together they partake in this weariness. Weariness grants isolated individuals a shared rhythm.’ Inspired by the Pentecostal movement, this way of life stands in contrast to the active society. Handke imagines them ‘idly seated on benches.’ They form a community of weariness in a special sense. If ‘Pentecostalism’ is a synonym for the society to come, then that society may also be called a society of weariness.”

Weariness, like a thin mist, has always shrouded my memories of my hometown and northern Chinese cities. This weariness can be described as a familiar yet hollow feeling—one that rushes toward me the moment I land in Beijing. It brings no sense of pleasure; instead, I always need the nearly hour-long taxi ride from the airport to the city to quietly process it. The purpose of this trip to Beijing is to organize a group exhibition. When working on a site-specific project, the most direct and effective approach is often to first establish an emotional connection with the place—whether through food or through shared experiences with the people there. Yet weariness represents a posture of disconnection. To break through this emotional isolation means to reappear in the Chinese social sphere—one that feels at once familiar and estranged. It requires adjusting oneself into a state of practiced ease—composed, unflustered—as if to prove you are still present. It is a process of return after a long absence, accompanied by a quiet unease and that ineffable feeling of being most timid when closest to home. Since I started working as a curator, every exhibition setup has felt like a kind of training exercise—an intense preparation that seems to exist solely for the release that comes after the opening. As the steam from a copper hotpot rises and drifts into Beijing’s crisp air, I finally begin to form tangible and authentic experiences with this city.

The exhibition took place at Groundless Factory in Beijing. Beyond its name, which already hints at a strong industrial aesthetic, its most striking feature is a towering water tower. Spaces with this kind of industrial character are often favored by curators for offsite exhibitions, lending them a certain anarchic spirit—a sense of resisting the confines of all the white cubes. But Beijing is just as well known for its rigorous censorship of art and culture, which makes me reconsider any bold gestures for the exhibition. In my concerns, even if the exhibition is held in a non-mainstream club space outside the Fifth Ring Road, where the club owner might rely on personal connections to navigate a simplified approval process that keeps most music events running smoothly, the exhibition would inevitably, to some extent, be subject to the same art censorship system as that of 798 Art Zone, a well-known contemporary art hub in Beijing. I found myself still wondering, even as I was about to board my flight: if a work were to be censored, would it be as simple as taking it down? Or would the entire exhibition be shut down, with everyone involved placed on a blacklist?

For instance, participating artist Ye Wuji’s video installation Central Asia Journal challenges censorship on a politically sensitive level. The work consists of a multi-screen collage of footage shot by the artist and video fragments sourced from the internet, forming a fragmented and eclectic impression of “Central Asia.” It also features imagery related to Central Asian iconography, accompanied by a voice-over narration from a supposed friend named “Abliz.” Ironically, it was precisely this “Abliz” that led to one of the videos being censored and removed from a previous exhibition—perhaps simply because the name bears a distinct Uyghur linguistic identity. Yet, in reality, this “friend” never actually existed. The censored video depicted the artist reminiscing about his “friendship” with this fictional close friend, but in truth, this figure was merely the artist’s projection of the region—a manifestation of his own heroic imagination. After careful consideration, we decided not to screen the video related to this “friend“ and instead only exhibit the remaining three-screen installation.

On the opening night of the exhibition, we hosted a dough figurines workshop, led by the participating artist twomoons1Q84. She suggested that one of the most effective ways to establish a tangible connection with a city is through organizing workshops. A vision of “community building” born from our shared diasporic struggle as Asians in European cities—the hopeful idea that, from an organizer’s perspective, it should be easy to gather two tables’ worth of engaged participants—was effortlessly achieved that night at Groundless Factory. Around a dozen participants sat together, their hands covered in flour, creating a scene reminiscent of making dumplings for the Lunar New Year Eve. But that night was merely Christmas Eve, filled with a quiet sense of warmth. The workshop started with an introduction to how indigenous Himalayan communities use rituals to confront fear, which led to a discussion about contemporary spirits and monsters—those strange figures from modern life. Participants were encouraged to visualize these fears using flour, and their enthusiasm was palpable, resulting in a collection of imaginative and endearing little figures. The most memorable one was a “wind-blocking sun (挡风太阳).” When we asked the creator why she chose this name, she laughed and said that Beijing’s winter is too cold, and she needed a tiny monster to help shield her from the harsh wind. We all loved this thoughtful little creature. But when the next participant said she wanted to feed her little figure with “love,” we mercilessly turned her down, teasing: “There’s no love here—only vegetables.” All the creatures are later performed in the ritual together with some contemporary scriptures based on keywords provided by participants, undergo a ritual of deliverance—some were released into the wild (there was a stretch of wasteland right next to the venue), some were washed down the drain, and others were placed atop the highest object in the venue (a large speaker), presiding over the entire exhibition.

III. The countryside is on the brink of desolation; why not return?
田园将芜，胡不归？

“July brought relentless rain, flooding every ditch and hollow. In the village, a few cherry orchards—once imagined as the ‘white, misty garden’ in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard—now lay waterlogged. Even a pump weighing five or six hundred pounds had to run day and night without pause, yet the water still hadn’t receded enough to reveal the clumps of mud. After two days soaked in water, the cherry trees began to shed their leaves in waves.

Mu Min-san of the Xingguang (Starlight) Art Troupe brought out his front loader, cutting openings at various field entrances. First the big basin was drained, then the cherry orchard, followed by the cornfields, apple orchards, vineyards, melon trellises, vegetable sheds, chicken coops, and pig pens. Water, channeled through thick white hoses as wide as a person’s leg, flowed westward into the Fengshou River, ceaselessly, day and night.

In the ditches, corn still clung to the stalks, turning from green to yellow to pale white. The soybeans had lost their tops. Sorghum, standing tall and proud, was harvested early. The old and young gathered in the passageways to strip the husks with sharp blades, scraping the pith from the white, red, and speckled cobs, then weaving them into little floral-patterned mats.

As we tried to gather information for upcoming performances, one completed village play faced the harsh reality of being unable to travel due to funding constraints. This autumn, the elementary school in Mujiayuan Village was officially closed, and the children have scattered in all directions.”

This is not the cherry orchard overflowing with childhood memories to which Lyubov returns after five years in fashionable Paris. Instead, it is a four-act play reading staged in various locations across the western slope of Mou Village, against the backdrop of the Mou Village Theatre Festival, featuring real local cherry farmers and staff from the local cherry orchard guest house in the roles. I only came to know about the festival through a friend working in rural development. As someone from Shandong myself, I hadn’t even heard of this festival happening in my own hometown until its sixteenth edition. In small places, artistic trajectories are often closely tied to methods of field research. I’ve encountered several cases of rural practitioners and field-based artists, such as Xi Lei. His recent work Two Eels in the Park is the result of over six months of field research in Suangyuanwei, between the Shunde and Nanhai districts of Foshan. During this period, the artist examined how intensive modern aquaculture has replaced the area’s traditional amphibious circular agriculture. The work, presented as a fairy tale, reveals the tensions between the local cultural tourism industry’s romanticization of amphibious traditions and the harsh reality of modern aquafarming. To carry out this project, Xi Lei attended local government-run agricultural training and even obtained an officially issued farmer’s certificate. Another artist, Cheng Xinhao, embodies a different kind of fieldwork spirit, one that unfolds through a series of conceptually defined walking routes. In his video work Don’t You Go to the South, nor to the North (你不要到南方去，你不要到北方去), he fills a jug with water from the Lancang River (澜沧江) and hikes westward across the semi-abandoned Salt and Horse Trade Route (盐马古道), crossing the Biluo Snow Mountains (碧罗雪山), and finally reaches the Nu River (怒江), where he pours the water from the Lancang into it. This kind of poetic journey and geographic romanticism is rare among today’s artists who approach fieldwork with speculative intentions. Those who chase only idyllic, pastoral scenery often struggle to endure the rawness of the reality behind the landscapes—whether it’s the hard labor of the land or simply sitting on a folding stool (mazha), eating a humble meal of scallions and garlic wrapped in a flatbread and dipped in fermented bean paste (卷葱卷蒜抹大酱).

I find it hard to resist the desire to participate in the pleasure-producing mechanisms of contemporary art events, and the pursuit of a festival experience wrapped in a highly structured logic of cultural consumption—perhaps a dopamine rush driven by professional passion and a touch of hedonism. While attending the Santarcangelo Festival—a theatre festival that also takes place on a geographically modest scale in a small Italian town—I would often take a detour to the seaside in Rimini to sunbathe and enjoy seafood risotto. This leisurely rhythm transforms the festival trip into what feels like a “high-quality vacation.” The festival’s shows were undoubtedly brilliant, yet it is that bowl of seafood stew and the salty breeze blowing in from the Adriatic Sea that linger most vividly in my memory. Both Santarcangelo and the Mucun Theatre Festival take place in rural or small-town contexts, and at first glance, they seem to share comparable spatial structures and curatorial strategies: locality, community engagement, and a decentralised, non-urban approach to theatre-making. However, “locality” is never a universal experience, and “rural” is not a globally interchangeable category. The “locality” of Santarcangelo is embedded in the historical continuum of European modernity, backed by relatively stable cultural infrastructures and an existing audience for the arts, and often integrated into cultural policies and long-standing artistic networks. In contrast, the latter—Mucun—is rooted in the rupture between urban and rural, and in the specific transformations of an agrarian society. Here, the merging of “rural” and “contemporary” often happens through the proactive intervention of practitioners, who build everything from scratch in the absence of infrastructure.

Mucun’s theatre model appears as a wholly different, unfiltered experience—uncomfortable, unromantic, and unembellished. The theatre conditions are raw and improvised, and it is precisely this sense of directness, wildness, and sincerity that brings about a kind of experiential “purity.” This comparison is not about determining which is more advanced or more “legitimate,” but rather prompts a deeper reflection: when we bring the working knowledge and aesthetic judgments we’ve acquired from the Western contemporary art system into rural China, do we also carry with us an overly self-aware curatorial posture? With what kind of gaze do we “participate”? Have we already internalised a certain standard of what constitutes “valuable artistic practice”? Are we unconsciously using the language and gestures of global contemporary art to interpret all artistic acts—even those taking place beside a cornfield?

By the time this piece gets published, the 18th edition of the Mucun Theatre Festival will likely have just concluded. A gentle reminder on the event’s promotional materials reads: “小麦绣穗，春玉米出芽，请勿进入农田 (Wheat is heading, spring corn is sprouting—please do not enter the fields).”

IV. After we sailed together, your return is yours, and mine is mine.
在曾经同向的航行后，你的归你，我的归我

“In July 1991, I left the farm and went to Qingdao to resume my art studies. The following year, after still failing to get into university, I returned to the farm. My days were spent listening to Tat Ming Pair and Liu Zheng’s songs, fishing at Haichazi (海叉子), or setting traps for rabbits in the open fields. My best friend got into a technical school at the oil field, and whenever he came home during breaks, we’d wander through the wilderness, reciting his poems: ‘A cigarette to sting my lungs; a glass of baijiu to burn my stomach. (抽一根香烟，刺激我的肺；喝一杯白酒，刺激我的胃)’ When we were bored, we’d just sit on the wall and stare into the distance.”

It was after the gaokao that I set out for Italy to begin my studies. During the gap between my undergraduate and graduate studies, I coincidentally returned to Beijing for an internship at an Italian gallery in 798. During those brief months, I lived in an apartment near 798, spared from the daily Beijing‘s subway rush. Each morning, I would walk ten minutes to the gallery, cradling a cup of warm breakfast porridge, unhurried and calm. I absorbed the nourishment of art with quiet joy. As my understanding of the industry deepened, the spark that was once ignited by passion was gradually overshadowed by a deeper weariness—one that settled like a slow, silent snowfall in a northern winter, mingling with an emotional frost that crept in unnoticed. Faced with that vast system, I chose to retreat to the farther North—beyond Northeast Asia, at the other end of Europe. “Hiding in Europe” became my shield; “躺平”—lying flat—was my quiet rebellion. I thought I had become an insignificant shadow outside the system, but inevitably, I found It was merely another kind of alignment with the center. I had assumed I was escaping the rules of the domestic art game, only to realize I had entered another system—one whose boundaries were more invisible and whose logic was more entrenched. Here, my “foreignness” became a subject for exhibition and discourse. My narratives were expected to fit into specific frameworks—decolonial, alternative, post-globalization. These terms were in frequent circulation, yet they rarely truly broke through systemic barriers. My “marginality” became something to be observed, discussed, even commodified—it granted me certain privileges but also made me realize that my so-called retreat had not freed me from systemic control. Meanwhile, I saw artists who had retreated to small towns in China, seeking alternative possibilities in rural areas and fourth-tier cities. Their paths were entirely different from mine, but were they any freer than I was?

Sources:
Dabao An. “泰山与民族主义：一座象征国家的圣地” (Mount Tai and Nationalism: A Sacred Site Symbolizing the Nation). Translated by Liu Xiao. Folklore Studies (《民俗研究》), no. 2 (2018). https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/b-_zddr8tKu7INYkD78YIQ.
“撤退：小地方正成为今天的前沿” [“Retreat: Small Places Are Becoming Today’s Frontline”]. 打边炉ARTDBL, 2025. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/-17sgxPNUPLVcBdvqXxlVA 
“解冻｜潮白河冰上展览招募“ [“Thawing: Open-Call for Participants for the Chaobai River Ice Exhibition”]. 粗 Zoo Art Group, 2023. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/SHrL7tcYzy7nh_VtkkZM_Q 
Kaiwen Wang. “再回首后的向前：《漫长的季节》、淄博烧烤与本雅明”（Looking Forward After Looking Back: The Long Season, Zibo Barbecue, and Walter Benjamin). 澎湃思想市场 (ThePaper.cn), 2023. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/VU8F9Izvkw_9BIpdrCxmrg 
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler, Stanford University Press, 2015.
“第十七回 乡村戏剧节来啦” [“The 17th Edition of the Rural Theatre Festival Is Here”]. 见山经济 [Jianshan Economy], 2024. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/6KCGlfKIrmghlUe_fcLJSw 
Lin Li, “黄河农场：孤岛、废墟和后代记忆” (Yellow River Farm: Island, Ruins, and the Memory of Its Descendants). 假杂志(Jia za zhi), 2020. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/uSdd5QYsuTpBz-R9fDQjxg