The Humanities Center welcomes Ellen Larson (History of Art and Architecture). Ellen's respondents will be Carla Nappi (History) and Ruth Mostern (History).

“The streets and alleys I used to know so well, the friends I used to hang out with are all slowly disappearing from my memory. The water once wild and surging is now as calm as a lake. Millions of people are starting another life in another place. Millions of buildings are being erected in new towns. My hometown has become a construction site; or maybe it is just the smallest epitome of the urbanization process that all cities in China are going through. I am only the person that records; with my own eyes and senses I record this small piece of history that I have experienced.”

Contemporary Chinese artist Chen Qiulin’s (b. 1975) video projects are inspired by her own personal anamnesis, emotions, and autobiographical connection to space and place. Her slow, meandering video landscapes reflect temporalities seeping in nostalgia; lamenting the irrevocable loss of the physical structures and natural environment that have shaped her childhood memories. Chen came of age in the small Sichuan city of Wanxian, near Chongqing. Like millions of others, her homeland was demolished in advancement of the Three Gorges Dam Project (1994-2012). Through a combination of documentary and surrealist dreamlike aesthetics, Chen’s spatially subjective temporalities reveal particular Chinese notions of time, evoking historical legacies of regional traditions and forms of nostalgia which function as a fluid placeholder for memory. Chen engages both post-industrial and natural landscapes to construct her moving image narratives, all which respond to China’s rapid urbanization during the early 2000s within the Yangzi River region.

Discussion will focus on a dissertation chapter. You can access the precirculated material here.