As witnesses and participants in the Zhiqing Movement — the “educated youth sent to the countryside” — my mother and maternal grandfather were relocated to the village of Longwo (‘The Niche of Dragon’ in Chinese) during the Cultural Revolution (1950s–1970s). The village lies in Guiding County, Guizhou Province — a mountainous and rural region in southwest China, among the most remote and least developed in the country. Through this unprecedented social reconfiguration, my mother met my father, who was also from Guizhou. Their marriage marked the beginning of our family and the start of its long trajectory.

Later, in the 1980s — ten years after my brother was born — the factory where my parents worked was relocated, following the massive wave of urbanisation and internal migration known as ‘Third Front Movement’ (a Chinese government campaign to develop industrial and military facilities in the country’s interior), to the district of Xingsha — a city incorporated into the greater metropolitan area of Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. The relocation brought with it the entire community of factory workers and their families, driven by the hope that the next generation might gain access to better social resources.

When my paternal grandmother passed away in 2017, I was about to leave for France to continue my studies. Unlike previous deaths within my family, I felt, for the first time, the dissolution of a bond — that of the most elementary political cell, the family itself, belonging to another generation.
Two weeks after her funeral, on the eve of my departure from Beijing to Paris, I asked my father how he felt and what his plans were for the future. In one of the four video channel, instead of expressing grief, my father — who had left his village at fifteen to earn a living — simply said: “There’s nothing to be done. Focus on your career — that’s what truly matters.”
Indeed, our family’s trajectory reached a new destination through me. I was fourteen — almost the same age as my father when he left his village — when I left alone to Beijing to attend the High School affiliated with the Central Academy of Fine Arts. I was twenty-one when I began a new chapter in France.

Anchored in the primary political cell—the family—this four-channel video installation oscillates between the rituals of reunion and the mourning of separation, presenting a living fresco of contemporary China. It functions simultaneously as a territorial traversal and a study of social stratification.

This body of work has evolved into a long-term series of intergenerational and international site-specific research. Employing ethnographic methods and imaginative modeling, I inhabit the dual roles of artist and researcher to explore symbiotic forms of experience. By carving out space for alternative modes of being-in-the-world, I investigate how the collective and the individual are reconfigured by velocity: the accelerating speed of infrastructure, of image production, and of history itself. Distinct from the historical state-led ‘Third Front Movement,’ this artistic construction claims its own definition: The Fourth Front—to refuse the status quo in a fully precoded era.

Exhibition view - DNAP (BFA.)
2020 © Chongyan LIU
14 Rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts