Coming Soon

The use of calligraphy is a long-standing cultural tradition in literati landscape painting, and with Gobi Desert Reverie, Yang Liu continues this history using both text and ink painted images on paper and silk scrolls. The project is based on a re-interpretation of his parents’ fragmented memory of their time spent in the Gobi Desert in the 1980s  as Chinese engineering soldiers working on the earliest Qinghai-Tibet railway project. In the centre of each silk and paper scroll the artist has painted an image of the  Gobi Desert landscape as described to him by his mother. His parents’ story will be printed on the left section of the scroll in Chinese characters using letterpress. The title will be written in calligraphy on the right panel. Published in a limited edition of 12 copies Gobi Desert Reverie will be available early 2025.

“沙漠里什么也没有，除了我们和沙子，”我妈妈说。 “那么沙漠里的风景怎么样？”我问。 “只有沙子，被风吹得挡住视线，到处散落。在荒野中没有什么风景。我们看不到，也不在乎。”她回答。 “我们工作，我们生存。就是这么简单。”我妈妈继续说道，“欣赏沙子毫无意义。我们没有时间做那种事情。” “你觉得你的经历是一种苦难吗？”我问。 “我不是诗人，我不用那种词。我只是接受了安排，我不纠结于过去。”她冷漠地说道。 沉默，这就是我们谈话的结束。

青海省的柴达木盆地是中国西北部的一片荒凉之地。位于青藏高原的东北侧，柴达木盆地海拔约3000米，约三分之一的区域被沙漠覆盖。在1980年代，我的父母作为中国工程兵，参与了最早的青藏铁路建设项目。他们在这片偏远的沙漠中度过了三年艰苦而纪律严明的生活。作为通信兵的一员，他们负责改善区域基础设施，特别是在通信领域。经过三年的辛劳，他们几乎不记得那些荒野景色的细节。三年来，他们每天都在黎明前起床，将夜间渗入帐篷中的沙子铲出去。尽管这听起来很单调乏味，但在沙漠中，唯一能让他们走出临时的栖息地，开始新一天工作的办法就是处理沙子。铁路建设期间的这种重复性工作仍然在他们的记忆中鲜活存在，他们记得最多的就是这种重复。

青藏铁路，包括连接西宁和格尔木的这段，是在2006年才全面完成并投入运营的。这是第一次将西藏自治区通过铁路与中国的其他省份连接起来。我的父母为他们的贡献感到自豪，因为到1984年他们参与的这段铁路工程已经完成。多年来，我听到他们一再计划重返沙漠，沿着他们曾经参与建设的铁路轨道旅行。然而，至今他们仍未实现这一梦想。

沙漠的宏伟超出了我父母的视野。尽管在那三年间他们生活在辽阔的空间中，但他们没有足够的个人空间去感受这辽阔的景象，相反，他们必须专注于工程项目的实际工作。也许对风景的欣赏在当时的工程师思维中显得无关紧要。我的父母就像工蜂一样，作为蜂巢中默默无闻的劳动者，高效地建设着蜂巢。在这种工蜂一般的结构中，他们个人的牺牲融入了铁路这一辉煌的集体成就之中。铁路作为人类力量的象征，穿透了无尽荒凉的寂静，成为了风景中唯一明确的线条。

English translation:

“There is nothing there in the desert, except us, and sands,” said my mother.
“So how about the scenery in the desert?” I asked.
“Just sands, carried by wind and blocking my vision, scattering around all over our place. There is no scenery in the middle of nowhere. We don’t see it, we don’t care,” she answered.
“We worked, and we survived. It is just that simple.” My mother continued, “It is meaningless to appreciate the sands. We have no time to do something like that.”
“Do you see your experience as some kind of suffering?” I queried.
“I’m not a poet, I don’t use terms like that. I just accepted the arrangement, and I don’t dwell on my past.”

She spoke each word indifferently. Silence, and that is the end of our conversation.

The Qaidam Basin, Qinghai Province, is a barren land in the northwest of China. On the northeast side of the Tibetan Plateau, the Qaidam Basin is about 3000 meters above sea level and approximately one third is covered with desert. As Chinese engineering soldiers working on the earliest Qinghai-Tibet railway project during the 1980s, my parents lived a very hard and disciplined life in this remote desert for three years. Belonging to a detachment of signalers, they were part of the railway project and were responsible for improving regional infrastructure, particularly in the field of communications. After three years of heavy labour, they hardly remembered details about the wild and barren scenery. For three years, every day, they woke up before dawn to shovel sand out of their tents, sand that had crept inside during the night. No matter how tedious this sounds, the only way to get out of their temporary shelter and start another day’s work in the desert was to deal with the sand. This repetitious work during the railway construction remains fresh in their memory; what they remember most is the monotony.

The Qinghai-Tibet railway, which includes the section between Xining and Golmud that contains the efforts of my parents, was only fully completed and opened to traffic in 2006. This was the first time that the Tibet Autonomous Region had been connected by rail to any of China’s provinces. My parents are proud of their contribution and think of themselves as pioneers because, by 1984, the section they worked on had already been completed. For many years after that, I heard them planning, again and again, to re-visit the desert and to travel along the railway track they helped create. However, to this day, they have never yet made that dream come true.

The grandeur of the desert was beyond my parents’ vision. Even though they lived in the wide-open spaces during that three-year timespan, they didn’t have the individual space necessary to process the vastness; instead, they had to focus on the actual engineering process of the project. Perhaps aesthetic appreciation for landscape seemed rather pointless for those with an engineering mindset. My parents were like worker bees, the nameless ones of the colony, working efficiently to construct the hive. Within this structure of swarm-workers, the sacrifice of their individuality was subsumed into the splendid collective accomplishment of the railway. As a symbol of human power, the railway pierced the silence of the endless desolation and became the only definite line in the landscape.

As a member of the Chinese diaspora and citizen of the People’s Republic of China, Dr. Yang Liu is actively and creatively engaged in the making of landscape representation as both a scholar and an artist. His scholarly work is an inquiry into the ever-shifting perception of the human-nature relationship in the evolvement of Chinese art. It addresses key questions in relation to the social, political and cultural dynamics towards the nonhuman world in the process of the ongoing Chinese landscape art transformation.  As a painter he explores collective memory, weaving personal re-interpretations of the past into imaginative landscapes.

Yang Liu working with Jacob Maddison (master printer) in the Farallon Book Arts Lab at the University of Victoria