San Yuan Li Project and Urbanization in China Today

The rapid urbanization of China today has no doubt caught the global attention. With the extraordinary opening of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and grand planning of 2010 Shanghai International Exposition, China is eager to prove to the world its growing power and flourishing economy. However, behind these urban spectacles, there are other urban phenomena that are the “downside” of today’s prosperous China. The phenomenon of Village in the City (VIC) is one among many.

VIC is often viewed as part of the urban terrain of erasure and transformation: the structural shift from agrarian life to urbanity. It is most often depicted as a single surviving, washed-up rural community surrounded by a sea of urban high-rises, where ex-farmers use the vestiges of their land-rights to cash in as landlords. The VIC phenomenon has in recent years become a hot academic topic in architecture and urban planning field to generate innovations. By contrast, not long ago, this phenomenon was perceived as merely a social incident by majority of Chinese, thus being purposefully neglected and forgotten. However, early in 1999 artists Ou Ning, Cao Fei and their U-theque film organization friends have started research this phenomenon through a case study of a VIC called “San Yuan Li” in the city Guangzhou. Their artistic sensitivity has brought up the general interests and put the phenomenon into wider discussion. The result of the comprehensive research was San Yuan Li Project – a collaborative work composed of a documentary film and a publication.

The film San Yuan Li is currently on view in the exhibition Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from Sigg’s Collection at Berkeley Art Museum. Comparing to other large-scale, visually impressive work in the exhibition, this black and white video piece is played on a small monitor in the lower gallery of the museum and seems not significant at all. However, the stories behind the work deserve much more attention.

San Yuan Li is a representative of VIC situated at the edge of Guangzhou. In history, it has been considered as a landmark of China’s anti-colonial and revolutionary history because of the legendary uprising of the villagers against the British invaders in the Opium War. More than thirty years later, it has completely merged into the wave of urban expansion. San Yuan Li, which used to mark the physical and mental borderline of the city has now become a little dot in the endless urban network. All kinds of marginal activities such as illegal or unofficial immigration gathering, irregular construction, drug consumption and prostitution, etc. have rapidly spread through out this microcosm.

Using digital video as a main “weapon”, San Yuan Li not only displays the historical buildings, modernist style residential buildings, and various alternative public spheres in this little village but also recordes local people and their daily life. The opening scene of San Yuan Li is a series hectic shots and surreal montage of the skylines that are made up by a bizarre juxtaposition of historical buildings’ cornices and packed clusters of multi-stories concrete buildings. As Ou Ning mentioned in his article Shadow of Time, these skylines are actually “threads of light” because most of the daylight were blocked by buildings. There is a feeling of exceptional disorientation. These building structures also generated a usual public space – the rooftop of residential buildings. Tenant who lived in these buildings would gather on the rooftop for sunlight and fresh air. Former peasant-turn-landlords or owners of these buildings also made good use of the rooftop to grow flowers, vegetable, or even raise chickens. In a sense, the rooftops were turned into a small farm in the air, in the process of bringing back people’s pleasure of a former pastoral life, a life the former villagers no longer enjoy as city residents. Another interesting public space appeared in the film is hair salon. Hair salon in China sometimes relates to secret sex industry. Besides hairdressers, there is a kind of girls who work in salons as “hair wash girl” who are actually prostitutes.

Contrasting the heavy and serious problems it unveils, the film is in a rather vivid and poetic tone. Instead of using a journalistic documentary style, San Yuan Li is more like an analytical poem. The influence from Soviet Union filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s is obvious. Vertov was a pioneer of the Kino-Pravda (film truth) in early 1990s. He thought film should reflect the truth in life with naked eyes rather than staged performance. The surreal montage, fast moving and enthralling speed of the film as well as sequences and close-ups in the film San Yuan Li all remind us Vertov’s masterpiece Man with a Work Camera. Different from Vertov who strove to create a futuristic city with in a Marxist ideology, Ou Ning, Cai Fei and their friends reveal an essential part of China’s reality today. It might not be perfect and glorious but fresh and unaffected. If Kino’s aesthetic shined through Vertov’s work with its portrayal of electrification, industrialization and the alignments of workers through hand labor, the Kino in San Yuan Li is a portrayal of people who live in the bottom of the society and the very confrontments of their daily life.

It has been nearly 10 years past since San Yuan Li Project. The government has applied a lot of policies and rules to transform San Yuan Li village. Today’s San Yuan Li may be completely different from what it used to be. However, when most of the Chinese contemporary artists are still practicing self-indulgent or market-motivated art, practice such as the San Yuan Li Project that has strong social concern and broad social engagements is greatly deficient in today’s China. I hope more emphasis will be placed on practices like the San Yuan Li Project not only in terms of artists but also curators and critics.