Art in the Field: Can Public Art Help China’s Villages Prosper?
当艺术节落地乡村，会是一场双赢吗？
For centuries, the sprawling terraced fields above Hanxi village, Fuliang county, had nurtured the highland region’s famous black tea: “The merchant cared more for money than for me, one month ago he travelled to Fuliang to purchase tea,” goes the poem “The Pipa Player” by BaiJuyi (白居易) in the ninth century, describing the attractions of the tea from the viewpoint of the merchant’s wife.
Yet in May of 2021, Hanxi’s tea terraces had new company—a huge lantern-like installation standing at the top of the hill made of see-through fabric. By daytime you could see the tree encased within it, while lighting up with ambulating contours at night.
This is The Light of the Earth, created by Chinese architect Ma Yansong and inspired by Fuliang’s mountainous landscape. Located outside China’s porcelain capital of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, Fuliang was once where artisans gathered in the Song dynasty (960 – 1279) to produce porcelain directly for the emperor’s stores. But today, artists, architects, and musicians are flocking here under a different sort of invitation: to turn Fuliang’s unremarkable village buildings, abandoned warehouses, barren land, and empty tea gardens into an open-air gallery.
Art at Fuliang, the first Chinese edition of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field Triennale festival, began in May of 2021 with 26 artists from five different countries invited to give new life to Fuliang’s landscape and cultural heritage. Deploying local resources and workers, even turning locals’ stories into visual exhibits, the artists completed 22 projects that drew in around 50,000 visitors in May last year, and tried to create a new model for rural revitalization.
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