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Yun-Fei Ji

Yun-Fei Ji’s handscroll depicts a crowd of villagers making their way along the Yangtze River. This migration was provoked by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric plant, which displaced approximately 1.5 million people. Human figures, bundles of clothing, and other belongings intermingle with twisted trees and cragged rocks in this densely packed composition. Extending 10 feet in length, Ji’s scroll—printed from hand-carved woodblocks rather than painted with ink—engenders a sense of visual exhaustion that echoes the migrants’ wearing journey. Interspersed amid banal details of waiting, smoking, and sleeping are ghostly and fantastic figures that extend the upheaval of forced resettlement beyond the human world. With former townships and villages now submerged by the flooded waters of the reservoir, Ji made this work as a record to remind us of the costs of reconfiguring the land for exploitation.

— Wenshu Wang