Yun-Fei Ji

Begun in 1994 and completed in 2006, the Three Gorges Dam was built to curb flooding of China’s Yangtze River and provide hydroelectric power for a portion of the country’s population. But this massive public works project was also controversial, since it swamped more than 1,000 historical and archeological sites, inundated villages with water, and forced millions of people to relocate.

In Three Gorges Dam Migration, Chinese-born Yun-Fei Ji focuses on the people who were displaced by this epic construction project, who he calls “floating weeds,” using a term he adapted from an ancient Chinese phrase. He worked in the style of classical Chinese landscape painting and developed his narrative into a hand scroll measuring 10 feet long. But Ji subverted the traditional serenity of Chinese landscape painting with images chronicling the problems the dam brought with it. Among bamboo shoots and rocks, for example, he shows children impatiently pulling on their mothers’ shirts, a woman sleeping on the ground, and displaced families surrounded by bags filled with their belongings. He also incorporated fantastical imagery into his scenes, including a monstrous beast. At the ends of the scroll, Ji included calligraphy describing Chinese leaders’ longstanding wish to tame the Yangtze river.