Liao Wenfeng

Flower tree village,single channel video, 16’42’’, stereo track, 2006

This video work was filmed in the summer of 2006, and records some incidents in my hometown “FlowerTreeVillage” which occurred during that period. In 2005, the village was involved in the “New Rural Construction Movement,” and in order to make the village look more proper, all the kitchens were torn down by the township government. Because most of the kitchens which were attached to the main building were built from the 1950s to the 1970s, the residents had no deeds or property certificates, and the kitchens were regarded as be illegal. The villagers had no place to cook, so some of families built new kitchens in the same place. In the summer of 2006, the higher-level officers wanted to inspect the results of the “movement,” so the township government demolished the kitchens again, and decorated the ancestral hall and along with other public works.

During this time, I asked some young people to plant two rows of pine trees without roots in the middle of the river and to make it look like a road with a strong sense of perspective, and after that I organized a performance in the river. The background of to this absurd performance is the construction of a hydropower station upriver, which will eventually influence and divert the river’s path. The view of the river as it seen in the video will disappear after the construction of the hydropower station and will, due to the lack of water, transform itself into a sort of road. The action of planting trees finds its echo in the video’s documentary of the “New Rural Construction Movement.”