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Chen Qiulin

Migration - Peach Flower Orchard / Color Lines, 2005

Mixed media installation and single-channel video projection
Video "Color Lines": 8 min 8 sec, video "Wanzhou Evening News": 24 min, Color, Sound

Qiulin Chen's Migration – Peach Flower Orchard is an installation work from Xinsheng Town, Zhongxian County, Sichuan Province which has been “migrated” and completely restored. Xinsheng Town is one of the areas affected by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. A great majority of it will be submerged by the rising water level. Migration – Peach Flower Orchard, a “massage parlor” is a representative of Chinese service industry. The work is recording a process of a reality that has disappeared, and then restored and migrated to somewhere else. Real life experiences have always been the basis of Chen's work. As such, over the past few years, her work has been closely connected with changes in urban environment. When construction of the Three Gorges Dam began, her hometown was directly affected. Those familiar sites of buildings, streets and friends have slowly faded from memory. “My hometown has already become a giant construction site, but perhaps it is only a small snapshot of the urbanization process occurring throughout China. I am just a witness and observer, using my own eyes and experiences to record this period in history which i have once experienced.”

*1975 Hubei Province, China