PROCEEDING PROJECT OVERVIEW
Funerals in the northern Jiangsu (Subei) rural area and weddings in the eastern Henan rural area
This project takes the current rural folk culture at the border area of Jiangsu, Shandong, Henan, and Anhui provinces as a trigger to approaching the intertwined past of floods, famine, war, and vagrants' "Jianghu[1] (江湖)." Based on the various disasters of the lower Yellow River and Huaihe River system, the project connects the ecology, geology, species clusters, and historical changes of folk customs, beliefs, and indigenous survival logic in the watershed and the sociopolitical issues behind them.
Journey through mythology, witchcraft, patriarchal clan system (宗法制), nationalism, socialism, modernization, globalization, and many other discourses from the ancient Zhongyuan (Central Plains) and now on. This project tries to establish a dialogue with the broader space and time from the current art practice and re-narrate the intricate regional patterns of "human-society-ecology" from a de-anthropocentric standpoint.
[1] A flexible Chinese slang that can describe a fictionalized version of rural historical China or a setting of vagrant folk artisan groups and the people of that community.
Current/Historical Rural Folk Culture in this Area: Striptease, Acrobatics and Lahun Air[2], etc.
Fireworks launchers at eastern Henan rural weddings
Chinese Civil War archive
Striptease, fire-related acrobatics and physical endurance acrobatics on Subei folk shows
Current lahun air artistes
Lahun air artistes as vagrants in times of disaster and war, stills from film Heart Twisting Around the Opera
1938 Yellow River Flood archive, 4K AI Restore
[2] Lahun Air is a regional drama formed in southeastern Shandong and northern Jiangsu during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty. This region has been an influential center of witchcraft culture since the Neolithic period when the Dongyi people lived there. At that time, the local ecological environment was so bad that the "Qing Shilu" (清实录) not infrequently used "nine years out of ten in disasters" (十岁九灾) to describe. The Yellow River overflowed, and the flood receded, but with sand storage, the land could not grow crops. Many poor farmers were forced into vagrants, fleeing and begging for food. In this process, they combined their tragic stories with the local popular witch singing, gradually forming the Lahun Air. Its trademark tail note is melodious and touching. This feature is evolved to impress the benefactor more quickly when they beg for food.
Presently, the project is doing fieldwork and follow-up filming on the current status of folk culture in the lower Yellow River and Huaihe River system, gradually developing towards short films, corporeal experience-based practices, and folk props-based installations through historical literature research, and film archive collection on floods, droughts, famines, and wars.
The next phase will focus on the intertwining and influence between water system changes and ecological events of recent centuries and local society and culture, as well as the existence of humans as one species in the ecological niche.
Figures Sources︎︎︎
Figure 1, Scope of the Yellow River Basin and paleo-channels of the Yellow River in the lower reaches
Figure 2, Schematic map of the alluvial fans and deltas formed in the lower reaches of the Yellow River during different periods in the historical time
and the main paleo-channels since 400BC
Winter trees and crops in the Subei rural areas in recent winters