“四线建设”是一个从2017年开始的长期视觉民族志项目，试图将个体与集体尺度之间的潜在空间加以主题化，并在每一特定的历史与地域的经济文化语境下，审视运行中的社会分层。每一个人物占据着怎样的位置？他们以怎样的方式与集体“融为一体”？ 项目旨在揭示国家动态、意识形态及其集体性的物质化——从宏观政策到基础设施——是如何塑造这个世界上人口最多的国家之一的。

这项研究的背后，是我自己家庭的迁移轨迹。文革期间，作为知青“上山下乡”的参与者， 我的母亲和外公被派往位于贵州省的龙窝寨——一个地处偏远山区、属于全国最不发达地区之一的村庄。后来在20世纪80年代，我父母工作的工厂顺应大规模工业化和城镇化浪潮——即“三线建设运动”——搬迁到了星沙，一个位于湖南省长沙市和长沙县城乡交界处的小镇。所有工人家庭带着让下一代获得更好社会资源的希望随之迁移。2017年，这条变迁轨迹在我前往法国时抵达了一个全新的目的地。

该项目关注的正是这些伴随中国工业化浪潮的人口迁移，以及由此产生的重大代际社会经济差异：20世纪80年代至90年代的工人迁往工业化地区；而这些工人又见证自己的下一代定居于沿海大都市。而婚礼和葬礼正是展现社会分层的契机。

项目以家庭这一最基本的政治单元为锚点，追溯家庭作为基本政治单元如何诞生、转变、乃至瓦解。项目跟随中国家庭的红白喜事。在团聚的仪式与离别的哀悼之间往复。在地理跨度上，作品在三个地域之间展开：从贵州的山区村庄出发，穿越湖南的工业化城郊，最终抵达沿海大都会。

与历史上的“三线建设”运动不同，“四线建设”以影像为媒介，采用比较社会学的框架，为‘此在’（Dasein）的替代性存在模式开拓空间，考察集体与个体如何被基础设施的加速、图像生产的加速以及历史本身的加速——即‘加速社会’——所重新配置。

Initiated in 2017, The Fourth Front Construction is a long-term visual ethnographic project that seeks to thematise the latent space between individual and collective scales, in light of the social stratifications at work, according to the cultural and economic context specific to each story and each place. What position does each character occupy? In what ways do they «embody» the collective? It aims to shed light on how state dynamics, ideology, and their collective materialisations—from public policy to infrastructure—shape one of the world’s largest populations.

Behind this research lies the history of my own family. As witnesses and participants in the Zhiqing Movement (the «educated youth sent to the countryside») during the Cultural Revolution (1950s–1970s), my mother and maternal grandfather were sent to the village of Longwo, in Guizhou Province—a mountainous region and among the least developed in the country. Later, in the 1980s, the factory where my parents worked relocated, following the massive wave of urbanisation and internal migration known as the «Third Front Movement»*, towards the district of Xingsha, a city on the margins of the capital of Hunan Province, bringing with it all the workers’ families in the hope that the next generation might gain access to better social resources. In 2017, this intergenerational trajectory reached an entirely new destination with me upon my departure for France.

The project examines these displacements that accompanied China’s industrial explosion and created major intergenerational socio-economic disparities: farmers saw their children migrate as workers towards industrialised regions in the 1980s and 1990s; those same workers now see their children settle in the major coastal metropolises.

Weddings and funerals are occasions to reveal these socio-economic fragmentations. The project follows Chinese families through two structuring ceremonies: the wedding, where one wears red, and the funeral, where one wears white. The narrative of the project oscillates between the rituals of reunion and the mourning of separation. Spatially, it unfolds across three territories: it departs from the mountainous villages of Guizhou, passes through the industrial periphery of Hunan, and arrives in the hyper-connected metropolis cities. The project thus traces the way in which the family, as a primordial political unit, appears, transforms and sometimes disintegrates, while drawing a descending geography of contemporary China.

Distinct from the historical «Third Front Movement,» The Fourth Front Construction—a gaze cast upon the status quo of a capitalist and digitised era. Employing a socio-comparative methodology and carving out a space for alternative modes of being-in-the-world (Dasein), this project examines how the collective and the individual are reconfigured by speed: the acceleration of infrastructure, image production, and history itself.


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