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The system is abnormally strong this year, said Liu Junyan, climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace East Asia, but it is unclear whether it is caused by climate change. But he hopes people who see his work think about the conflicts he finds so compelling. “They said I was a good artist because I paid them every day,” Liu said, bursting into laughter. The process was filmed and is documented in the exhibition catalog in essays by Kelley and William L. Fox. The painting made at Fengjie is part of the project showcased in San Francisco, but it will debut at the Sydney Biennale, June 8 through Aug. 27.
The flow of life amid a dam’s rise
China’s dams — its primary guard against floods — are coming into question as they face increasing strain. On the same day, more than 16,000 people were trapped in Guzhen town in the same province as the waters surged 10 feet high and broke through levees. WHILE working on the “Three Gorges Project,” Liu took many photographs in the region to use as references for paintings made later in his Beijing studio. Last fall, as he wound up the series, he took a different approach, painting a monumental work on location at the riverside town of Fengji. He spent three weeks working with a group of male laborers hired as models on the roof of an apartment building, at the level to which the reservoir is expected to rise. It’s intended to provide tremendous benefits in terms of power and flood control, but at an enormous cost.
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In 1975, the dam broke during a typhoon, killing an estimated 86,000 to 230,000 people (the government figure versus an estimate from critics) from immediate impact, starvation and epidemics from the floodwaters. “These flood control engineering projects are not a panacea,” said Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs. With torrential rains, he added, the amount of water concentrated in each reservoir poses a risk of serious damage, even in small dams. The flooding, however, is directly linked to man-made problems. China’s overreliance on dams, excessive construction in low-lying areas, land reclamation in wetlands and lakes, and cities built with poor drainage systems have all exacerbated flood damage.
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As levees break and houses topple into rivers, Chinese farmers and migrant workers in rural areas of Jiangxi province struggle to survive. China’s hukou system ties every citizen’s access to healthcare, education and other social services to their place of origin. Villagers who move to cities for work cannot truly settle in urban areas and tend to send money back to their hometown. Flooding villages and small towns costs less overall than flooding a city, but it means that those with less cushion for survival are hit hardest. “If the government just gave us half a day’s warning, I could have saved $14,000 to $28,000 in damage,” Shao said. He’d lost at least $43,000, he said, and had received no government relief, a maddening, if typical, setback in this region.
Ma calculated more than $143,000 in damage to his machines and pickup trucks. The factories, which were paying him a few thousand dollars each to clean up, had lost much more. Their workers swept out brownish-yellow water from the floors; the smell of rot lingered in the air.
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Much like the people in the “Three Gorges Project,” they seem to be waiting and hoping for something. Both series deal with the migration of Asian people, some displaced by growth and development, others by economic necessity. One painting in the exhibition, “Wolf Smoke (Smoke Signals),” pairs a smudgy landscape with bright blue mountains in the background with a striking image of a young man squatting on a precipitously high wall. Lost in thought, he looks away from a modern bridge that divides “nature” -- a swath of grayish water -- from the man-made clutter of ramshackle buildings.
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The son of factory workers, Liu was born in 1963 in the village of Jinchen, northern China. He went to Beijing in 1978 to study at the secondary school division of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and continued in the college program, majoring in painting. He was awarded a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1988 and a master’s degree in 1995. Liu learned the official Socialist Realist style but absorbed Western influences as China opened to the outside world.
“The ‘Three Gorges Project’ is an epic narrative about loss,” Kelley said. “This is painting in the service of social issues, but it’s also some of best painting I’ve see in my career. It unfolds over time.” But it has nothing to do with heroic spectacles.
He has taken a high vantage point on the left side of the four-panel work, looking down on the dam, which connects a town on the near side of the river with distant hills. Building dams and binding rivers with concrete are methods China learned from the West. But many ecologists there have also begun advocating for fewer dams and giving space back to nature.
“It’s the antithesis of Chinese Propaganda painting,” he said. Liu views the dam as “a typically grand-scale Chinese project without human feeling.” But his monumental work has “many complicated meanings,” he said. “Chinese society is very complicated,” he said at the museum, speaking mostly through his wife and interpreter, Yu Hong, also a highly accomplished figurative painter. They live in Beijing, where both artists teach painting and drawing at the Central Academy of Fine Art, China’s leading art school.
Plus, it has a great view of the city, she said, making it the ultimate LA outdoor space. Putman said the architect does not design much anymore, but she believes this is one of his greatest homes. "This is definitely the exact kind of house where you would dream," Gambino said in an interview with USA TODAY. "It's a very special house where people immediately get, you know, emotionally connected when they're there." Designed by LA architect William King and built in 1982, the listing comes with several gathering spaces in and around the home, with charming gardens, a wraparound deck and a garage that could be used as studio space.
At the center of the painting, where two sections of land plunge into a V-shape, his viewpoint shifts. Three nasty little kids confront viewers, face to face, with menacing expressions and toy weapons. As the riverbank veers up to the right in a sharp diagonal, a pair of men in dark suits turn their backs and watch the rising water in silence. Two other men stare out of the painting with an air of angry resignation. On the far right, scantily clad adolescent prostitutes and cheeky young men appear to have been interrupted while striking a sex-for-money deal.
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The dam is shaping up as the world’s largest hydroelectric facility and one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects in history. But these days, President Xi Jinping has called for China to build an “ecological civilization,” and Yu has found enough government support to start “sponge city” projects in dozens of Chinese cities. Fears are intensifying over the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam, where the reservoir has risen 50 feet above the warning level, to its highest point since the dam was completed in 2006. Working from photographs affords many conceptual opportunities for Liu, who sometimes repeats images of particular people -- and pigs -- in different compositions. Yu studied design at Harvard and returned to China a year before catastrophic flooding along the Yangtze River killed more than 4,000 people in 1998.
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