Nation sets out to change village landscape
Arts events and festivals aim to spark rural revival
The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, the world’s largest art festival that spans 200 villages in northwestern Japan’s Niigata prefecture, closed at the end of last month, but its influence is still being felt in China.
Fram Kitagawa, the festival’s founder, received more than 10 invitations from China recently to give lectures on the festival, which is held every three years and has attracted more than 2.3 million visitors to the remote mountainous area since 2000.
Labeled “the art festival of earth”, it invites celebrated artists worldwide to create works in sprawling rural areas, including rice paddies, schools that have been closed and empty houses.
Hundreds of works by well-known artists scattered among villages attract not only visitors, but have also sparked a revival in rural areas that are populated mainly by the elderly and children.
The festival’s influence has extended its reach to Chinese art circles. Dozens of art events and festivals have been held or planned in villages since the start of this year.
Most are initiated by curators and artists asking the same question -can China stage a similar event in rural areas to revitalize its “empty villages”?
Sui Jianguo, dean of the sculpture department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, said:“The Echigo-Tsumari art festival is a very successful way to solve the problem of empty villages in Japan. China faces the same problem now.”
A leading sculptor, Sui’s large-scale works can be seen in many cities. But this year, he has received many invitations to create works for art events in remote villages.
This month, Sui completed his art residency project in Shijiezi, a poor village in Northwest China’s Gansu province, which some people never leave due to poverty and poor transportation.
The village was transformed into an art space, with each of its 13 houses functioning as small galleries through collaboration between artists and villagers.
Sui is a judge for a competition aimed at supporting artists to produce tailored works to be installed in the vast mountainous village district of Lishui, near Nanjing, capital of East China’s Jiangsu province.
Bamboo forests, rice terraces, mountains covered by tea plants, and vacant factories in Lishui, where dozens of villages are located, have been recommended as exhibition spaces for artists. The project aims to use the power of art to attract tourists, as the Japanese art festival did when it was launched in 2000.
Sui said the popularity of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial among Chinese artists and the rise in the number of art events being held in rural villages in China can largely be attributed to the emphasis on rural revitalization.
For the past decade, rural construction and revitalization have been at the top of the central government’s agenda as it aims to inject new energy into “empty villages”. President Xi Jinping made rural revitalization a priority for governments at all levels at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China last year.
“Many artists are joining the trend to find creative ways to become involved in rural construction. We can find more interesting ways than the Japanese art festival,” Sui said.
Villagers migrate
Tian Ye, an artist who works in Beijing and Paris, became involved in rural revival this year in his home village of Tianjiatang, a remote location about 200 kilometers from Yinchuan, capital of Northwest China’s Ningxia Hui autonomous region.
“You can’t imagine how poor it is if you have never seen it in person,” Tian said.
The village, which is home to 24 families, including the artist’s brothers, uncles and some other relatives, was without electricity until 2005.
Villagers mainly plant rice and corn. The infertile soil has forced many of them to move to cities to make a living, and according to one local joke, farming a vast field for one year can only produce a hatful of rice.
Tian decided to save the village through art, as he has become influential in the artistic community.
He helped to renovate houses in the village that were in poor condition. Next, he intends to build an art space, a library, a theater, a health clinic and an art school as part of a highly ambitious plan that will take several years to complete.
In March, construction of the art space began. The work attracted about 500 people, most of them from nearby villages. Tian said Tianjiatang had not seen so many people gather together for many years.
“Everyone is excited and expects to learn about the outside world through art, although they have little idea of what art is,” he added.
Tian has lived in France for 10 years and his work includes oil paintings, sculptures and installations.
He plans to invite friends, writers, musicians and performers to visit his home village for artistic activities that can help locals to improve their global knowledge, and also to attract tourists.
Tian, curator of the Western China International Art Biennial, which was launched in 2010, said he will bring the biennial to the village, which has a history of more than 1,000 years.
Tianjiatang, which lacks beautiful scenery and cultural relics, has its work cut out to attract tourists. But Tian said its history makes it stand apart from newly built cities in China.
Clay walls, which can be seen throughout the village, are hundreds of years old, making it “a history museum” he said of Tianjiatang’s appeal to artists.
Since the start of this year, Tian has travelled to the village frequently. He decided to set up his art studio there, a space that can also be used by other artists to create works in the future.
“I return to my village for two simple reasons: to let my people earn money by offering services for future visitors and to let them learn about the outside world,” he said at his studio in Beijing.
Residency project
Unlike Tian, whose mission is to lead his fellow villagers out of poverty, curator Yang Xiaobo focuses on the villagers’ involvement in artworks.
Yang was in charge of an art residency project last year for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial. He worked with several Chinese artists to transform vacant classrooms into art spaces in a mountainous village in Niigata prefecture.
“It’s not simply about displaying artworks in villages or how many visitors are attracted after the twomonth art festival is over. We should care more about the artistic influence on locals when art events end, ” Yang said.
He fears the sudden rise in the number of art festivals being held in villages throughout China may be just a passing fad.
This year, Yang brought three artists to Longquan, a village about an hour’s drive from Hefei, capital of Anhui province. Longquan is still poverty-stricken, as many people have moved to cities.
Yang’s team stayed there for about four weeks in May and completed several works with locals.
They transformed a primary school of about 50 classrooms into a large exhibition space. The school had only three students and three teachers. One month later, when the team departed, the school was left without any students when all three boys graduated.
Artist Wang Mao invited one boy to write a poem on a blackboard as part of a classroom installation. The poem told the story of a man looking for the source of a river.
The boy, abandoned by his mother as a baby, believes that one day he will find her, and waits for her at the entrance to the village every day. He added a sentence on the blackboard, “It’s a road to find my mom.”
Yang said: “The boy understands the artwork. That’s how art works.”
The villagers love to read poems and produce calligraphy. Yang and other artists invited them to write poems and combine their work with installations in classrooms. They also turned the school playground into a giant installation, which attracted locals for dancing.
Yang said the villagers’ engagement with artworks had taught them about what art represents and offered the children other opportunities for the future.
“I hope our art event can be a regular program the villagers can join. It will gradually change the people here,” Yang said.
Public artist Hu Quanchun has been working on projects in rural villages since 2013. Every year, he has visited different villages to explore the role of the artist in rural construction, but said some areas had been damaged as a result of changes brought by artists.
He said some artworks may not match the natural environment and could possibly ruin ancient houses renovated by artists. “The landscape of a village might be totally changed in a bad way, ” Hu added.
Last year, Hu and his team stayed for a month in Yubulu, a picturesque village in Guizhou province that is surrounded by mountains.
When they arrived in the village, locals thought they were singers or dancers, because that was all they knew about art. The villagers, from the Miao ethnic group, excel at both singing and dancing.
Hu did not create sculptures or installations, as he has done in cities. Instead, he paid the villagers to build a 12-meter diameter stone drain in a rice field to record the village’s history.
Many years ago, it often rained heavily in the village, turning rice paddies into a river. Locals made many drains in rice fields to disperse the water. But it seldom rains there now and the old drains no longer work due to lack of maintenance.
“It’s a thing I made to remind people of the village’s past, and it also can work as a drain if there’s a storm,” Hu said.
The huge drain has become a popular site in the village, and many drive for hours to Yubulu just to see it.
Demanding work
Hu also used videos to encourage villagers to take part in his work. Every night, he put up a screen in front of the village’s ancestral temple to project a short film he made to record people’s daily lives, from farming in the fields to cooking at home.
Everyone was intrigued and asked Hu to play the video repeatedly. Afterward, they often danced and sang folk songs together.
“What I did can’t offer financial rewards for them, but it made them proud of their lives and their village,” Hu said.
He said artists who create works in villages should first respect the locals, as opposed to intervening in their lives and forcing them to accept artistic ideas.
“We should learn to talk to them and respect their lives and history,” he said.
Sun Xu, organizer of the art competition in Lishui district with Sui, said persuading villagers to accept an artwork is very demanding.
For years Sun has looked for ways in which art can play a role in rural construction. In June, he flew to Japan to visit the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial to look at how the model for this event could be applied to the program in Lishui.
He learned that one local had started to farm his field again after seeing that figures placed there by an artist had attracted many visitors. Earlier, he had repeatedly refused the artist permission to erect the figures.
Now the farmer views working in his field as a kind of performance on a natural stage because he has realized the beauty of such work.
Sun said: “I think that art festivals in rural areas are a kind of exploration of the relationship between humans and earth. It’s a method to revitalize the earth.”
He added that it had taken two decades for the Japanese festival to be a success, while China’s exploration of this type of rural revival through art is only just beginning and needs time and artists’ persistence.
“I hope our artists can be stubborn about it,” he added.
produced at a Japanese village hit by an earthquake, features at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial.