As soon as winter blocks the earth, our earth will be full of cracks. From the south to the north, from the east to the west, a few feet long, a ten-foot long, and several ten-foot long, they have no direction, so anytime, anywhere, as long as the harsh winter arrives, the earth will be cracked open.
——Xiao Hong, Tales of Hulan River
For historical reasons, the national border of Northeast China is mainly outlined by six natural rivers: the Ussuri River, Heilongjiang River, and Erguna River, which serve as the border between China and Russia; The Halaha River, which forms the border between China and Mongolia; and the Tumen River and Yalu River, which mark the border between China and North Korea. These rivers outline political borders but also as sources of life for neighboring countries and ethnic groups. During the long winter in the Far East, frozen rivers become a crucial public space for communities on both sides, especially for transportation and trade—in this way, riverine borders become quasi-bridges, where transboundary communication is vibrant. By connecting ports and urban and rural settlement spaces, riverine borders are no longer the end of their respective countries in the geographical sense. Rather, they, with people surrounded, form a center and are no longer separated. This exhibition tries to examine the riverine borders in Northeast China as a whole. It presents the divergent perspectives of artists from different countries and with variant identities over the past century.
Echoing the panoramic landscape shown on highway systems or maps, we can first turn our attention to photographers Sun Haiting and Xu Shengzhe, who have completed their observations of river borders at different time and presented them in various media. Wang Tuo's video "The Northeast Tetralogy" focuses on Northeast China as a whole, exploring the history, space, and individual destiny of this land and its border nodes. Pu Yingwei presents his comprehensive reflection on globalization in today's political environment. All of their works mirror some classic literature: the film Urga (1991) by Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov and Purple Sunset (2001) by Chinese director Feng Xiaoning. These two films explore the stories that take place at the intersection of China, Mongolia, and Russia/USSR from different perspectives of space and time, respectively.
In the far north, capricious historical dramas and heterogeneous identity narratives seem to hover perpetually in the calm nature of Russian-Chinese borderland. Vladimir Arsenyev, a tsarist geographer, was on an expedition to the Ussuri River region at the beginning of the 20th century. During his expedition, he finished his travelogue In the Mangrove of Ussuri, which later became a classic of naturalistic literature. Japanese director Akira Kurosawa used this story as the background for his movie Delsu Uzala in the early 1970s. The Herzhe nomadic hunter depicted in the mangrove of Ussuri has even replaced the statue of Lenin as a symbol of Russian Far East. After the vicissitudes, contemporary Russian artist Alexander Gaidalym revisits this region a hundred years later and documents the survival of Udege people, who are considered to be the descendants of Uzala. On the other side of the coin, influenced by the German invasion of Russia in World War I, some Russian refugees were forced to cross the border to villages of Hongjian. China. In the 1960s, after the Sino-Soviet Split, some Russian refugees living in these villages were suspected of espionage, leading to the village being falsely convicted as “villages of spies". In his work "I am Chinese", artist Shen Shaomin documents how these ethnic Russians struggled to integrate into Chinese society. The author Wu Dada translates and reworks the text "Lao Maozi" by the Soviet Far Eastern poet Arseny Nesmailov. He later turns the text into a role-playing game to find out the origin of naming for Russians in China. Artist Ma Haijiao explores the landscape of Xingkai Lake (the Sino-Russian border lake) and the surrounding area, as well as the migration of people from a dual spatial perspective. As mentioned earlier, these works would remind us with Nikita Mikhalkov's significant film Urga released in 1991.
Yet border is not a concept that exists solely in grand narratives. From a more microscopic standpoint, photographer Sun Yibing records mysterious moments of the journey from Shiwei to Manzhouli, all the way south along the Ergunar River. In his famous book The Last Quarter of the Moon, writer Chi Zijian, who was born in a village of Mohe, Heilongjiang, tells the vivid story of the Ewenki people, who migrated from the shores of Lake Baikal in the 17th century and lived with the reindeer. Photographer Gu Deqing photographed the Ewenki community in the 80s and published Diary of a Hunter's Life. Gu Tao, who often worked with his father in the borderland, represented by the documentary series Ooluguya Trilogy, presents a series of vivid images of Ewenki people such as Vijia, Liuxia, and Yuguo. Gu Hanru's drawing of monsters on wooden boards unintentionally echoes the totems on trees in the forest documented by his father Gu Tao and his grandfather Gu Deqing. Artist Hou Zichao also has a brief encounter with the Ewenki people in Daxinganling, and then in his solo exhibition "Erta", he focuses on his in-depth investigation of trees.
At the border, materials rich in local features often come to life through hands of sensitive artists. Mongolian artist Erdenebayar Monkhor’s explores the duality of horse and wheel on nomadic tradition through installation art. Born in the border area between China and Mongolia, dancer NiNi Dongnier pushes a giant grass ball across grassland like Sisyphus. Artist Qinga's Fence Project explores the transition from nomadic to set stocking in inner Mongolia. In the section of Kherlen River that flows through the border between PRC and the Mongolian People's Republic, artist Li Nu extracted water from the river and froze a 36-meter-long, 2.4-meter-high, 60-centimeter-wide ice wall on the river’s frozen surface. Splitting the river in two, the ice wall formulates a boundary as well as a bridge. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that, in The Book of Strange Birds, Haruki Murakami once explored the Battle of Nomonhan, a war between Japan and Soviet Union that took place along the Sino-Mongolian border in 1939. While working on the third volume, the author decided to travel to China and Mongolia to observe a border from two perspectives. Later, Haruki’s travelogue was included in his book Far Border, Near Border, and the accompanying photographer, Eizo Matsumura, left valuable images of the border area in 1994.
As we travel to the southern end of China’s Northeast riverine borders, interaction between China and North Korea might present a more intimate society of spectacle. Artist Liu Yuja's video presents the story of a Korean shaman living in the Changbai/Beakdu Mountain area. While South Korean photographer Cho Chon Hyon presents his on-the-spot record of raft traditions on Tumen and Yalu Rivers in China, as well as North Korean landscapes taken from the Chinese side. We also invited North Korean painter Kim Yoo Kwang to Dandong, China for an artist residency, looking back at his homeland from the other side of Yalu River. An anonymous author will also present his observations and documentation from DPRK. Moreover, Dandong serves as the northernmost point of Zhang Xiao's Coastline Series, which has become a key node of his photographic journey across river borders.
It is well worth noting that the seemingly distant Northeast riverine borders also contain a deep spatial resonance with the exhibition site. As a city that has also been highlighted by rivers and bridges since ancient times, Nanjing is visible from the 200-meter-high G Museum exhibition hall. Meanwhile, linking the two towers, G Museum also serves as a bridge to build up the fluidity and boundaries of the city's high point. Here and now, we are juxtaposing the stories and memories of artists from different countries, nationalities, languages, and cultures on both sides of China’s Northeast borderline in a bridge-like museum, where space and works are related to each other, where viewers can even see the same protagonists, objects and landscapes inside and outside the works in this liminal space.
For we will understand, bridge space will eventually become a river, like a river that bridges cracks in our land and nurtures everything to happen.
Article by Liang Chen
Translated by Yao Meng
