When the Yangtze in China was dammed to harness the immense energy of the 4000-mile-long river, some 13 cities were flooded; over 1.3 million people had to leave their homes. It remains one of the largest single migrations of its kind in history.
Outside of China, the home country of transdisciplinary, London-based artist Neo Jiapu Gao, this story is little known. But for him, it is a pivotal and intimate part of his practice.
Gao’s practice spans moving image and sound, but is also deeply rooted in the academic disciplines of ethnography and anthropology. As both a multimedia artist and researcher, his work invites a contemplation of how problematised stories – of past and present – can be told through layered visual and sonic tapestries.
Pepper Indulging — Alluvial Voice is an extended moving image piece that reckons with this complex piece of history, known as the Three Gorges Project. The scale and impact of the undertaking, which took 20 years, feels hard to reduce to mere statistics or geographic analyses, which remove the potential for interiority or connection. To produce the film, Gao travelled to Chongming Island, a suburb outside Shanghai, to live alongside two generations of a Three Gorges family. Pepper Indulging — Alluvial Voice documents two days and one night in their lives. Even within this short time frame, Gao is able to unveil some of the most salient issues faced by involuntary domestic migrants.
As first-generation migrants, the anchors of the film are the elderly Grandma and Grandpa Zhang, who moved from Chongqing – submerged by the Three Gorges – to Chongming Island. The audience feels Gao’s experience as an observer almost immediately. His held shot settles closely on Grandma Zhang, who, having never been filmed before, approaches the camera and stares directly at its lens. Her initial discomfort with observation points to the sensitive nature of ethnographic research, where the ethnographer also becomes acutely aware of their own cultural ‘otherness’.
Gao does not correct or resolve lingering moments of tension in his work; they are central to the fragmentary and poetic nature of his filmmaking. As we become immersed in the Zhangs’ daily routine, it is evident that dialect is one of the main hindrances in assimilating to their environment. Speaking not quite Mandarin and not quite Cantonese, involuntary migrants in China bear the difficulties of linguistic and political changes. Gao finds metaphors and allegories embedded in their everyday lives, ultimately transcending a complex language barrier to create a common vocabulary of displacement.
The green Sichuan peppercorn is one of the most poignant symbols of transformation used by Gao. Native to the Zhangs’ home in Chongqing, but taken with them to the Island, the plant has had a constant presence in their lives. In a scene reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s treatment of nature, where nature’s life force is palpable, we see Grandma Zhang pick peppercorns in the reflection of rippling water. The nexus of this superimposed imagery arguably points to the most important facets of the artist’s research. Throughout the project, Gao became fixated on the joint dislocation of geographic elements alongside inhabitants, carefully building a framework of comparative analysis.
The very formation of Chongming Island has been shaped by deposits from the Yangtze River, something he highlights as a “poignant parallel to the immigrants uprooted from their homelands, who find themselves ‘forcibly deposited’ in a new socio-ecological reality.” Thus a seemingly peaceful, quiet scene in fact condenses the most vital aspects of the Zhangs’ livelihood: how the river has changed, how it has remained the same, and what they have taken with them. The choice to bring the Sichuan peppercorn, aromatic and renowned for its medicinal properties, highlights their agency. The powerful plant species appears as a protagonist even when it is not entirely visible on screen.
In another scene, Gao lingers on Grandma and Grandpa as they prepare to sleep, gazing out of the window onto their garden of peppercorn trees. Feeling through sight and scent, an understated sequence becomes filled with questions: “I contemplated this aroma’s impact on their sleep and dreams – does it deepen their dreams or evoke homesickness? Does it help to create a more familiar living condition? And to what extent does the relocation of a species of plant, due to migration, invite a change to the new place’s ecology?” The filmmaker and researcher’s questions are as anthropological as they are existential, emphasising an embodied, experiential portrayal of displacement.
This embodied, experiential quality is taken further in Gao’s auditory practice. Whilst the film is replete with vignettes that are the foundation of the family’s daily life, more expansive historical narratives unfold in Gao’s installation work. In a piece that directly draws upon the artist’s research on Chongming Island, Gao creates a synaesthetic, ancestral allegory of the Three Gorges Project.
In his signature method of layered composition, Gao montages a lone diver searching for artefacts on the riverbed alongside close-ups of faces and sonar scans. Prose poetry, dialect, and subtle samples from the river itself all coalesce. In turning to archaeology, as well as oral and poetic histories, it feels as though Gao has a deep understanding of the epistemic limits of one line of inquiry. In order to truly “excavate” (another prescient metaphor) the ongoing effects of involuntary migration, we must take on a wavering, drifting journey that combines both fictional mythologies and real recollections.
