Through the iconography of opera and martial arts to a burst dam, the artist’s video and photoworks interrogate the nature of human displacement
Chen Qiulin grew up in what’s now Wanzhou, a small county in Chongqing in southwestern China. Her hometown fell directly in the path of the Three Gorges Dam, the completion of which, in 2003, when the artist was beginning her career, submerged close to half of it.
This profound change prompted Chen to interrogate the nature of human displacement: when everything that anchors memory has vanished, where does the past reside? In Heartland the artist reveals a particular sensitivity to the concept of home, the exhibition showcasing a selection of the artist’s better-known works spanning more than two decades of Chen’s practice.
In Farewell Poem (2002), a single-channel videowork filmed at a demolition site in her hometown before it was submerged, she dresses as Consort Yu, wife of the third-century BCE warlord Xiang Yu, and acts out passages from the classic Chinese opera Farewell My Concubine (1918), channelling her childhood martial arts and dance lessons undertaken in a neighbourhood surrounded by opera performers. The visual contrast between her brightly coloured attire and the monochromatic ruins echo the disparity between ideal and reality, evoking a poignant sense of absurdity while capturing the dissonance felt by individuals confronting traumatic change.
The Three Gorges Dam project precipitated migration on a vast scale, forcing more than 260,000 residents of Wanzhou to relocate within Chongqing. Turning her lens towards this uprooted population, Chen created the videowork The Garden (2007), in which she hired a group of Chongqing’s bangbang men, the city’s once-ubiquitous porters, and instructed these workers to carry oversize, trophylike bouquets of artificial peonies and wander aimlessly through the urban landscape to the distorted soundtrack of Wahaha (1956), a patriotic Chinese children’s song. In Chinese culture, peonies traditionally signify prosperity and belonging. As the title implies, the workers form a mobile garden, yet the flowers are fake – symbols of rootedness abstracted and drifting in the hands of manual labourers who have lost their homes.
While Chen’s earlier works drew mainly from personal experience, the process of recognising, understanding and reconciling with change is a collective phenomenon; over the past 40 years, rapid urbanisation has taken place across all of China. In the Another Day series (2014–16), she examines communities in rural Guizhou, in which elderly unmarried women choose to remain in their ancestral homes in impoverished villages while the rest of their families move to larger cities for work or study. Chen asks how we come to terms with ourselves and our place in an ever-shifting world: for local visitors at Pingshan Art Museum, such a question hits close to home. Set within a newly developing district of Shenzhen defined by raw construction sites and transient communities, the exhibition venue mirrors the very societal shifts Chen interrogates. Here, displacement is largely voluntary – driven by young people leaving their hometowns for megacity opportunities – yet the psychic weight of uprootedness lingers all the same.
Chen Qiulin: Heartland at Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen, 30 May – 30 August
From the October 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.