The Naming of A River

Cheng Xinhao (b.1985, Yuxi, Yunnan Province, China) currently works and lives in Kunming. Cheng focuses on the mountains, rivers, and ecological changes in Yunnan as well as the sociopolitical issues and discourses behind them in his works, which he takes as a point of departure to initiate dialogues and connections with the broader time and space. The Naming of A River is an action of approaching rivers that Cheng Xinhao has been practicing since his childhood and a process of developing and constructing a space-time; it is also a photobook, a series of installations, image works, and exhibitions, as well as a medium through which the artist continuously investigates perception and expression while creating channels for people to experience the environment. As Cheng invents the river, the river is also inventing him and his works. The viewer and the viewed accordingly shift their positions from time to time and, even, exchange their places at certain moments.

“The "river" in The Naming of A River refers to the Panlong River. The Panlong River originates from Baishapo (Baisha Hill) at the western foot of Liangwang Mountain in the northwestern part of Songming County, the northern suburb of Kunming. It flows through the Songhua Dam Reservoir, running from north to south across Kunming City into Dianchi Lake with a total length of 108 kilometers. Though it would seem melodramatic to say that Cheng Xinhao’s life is bound up with rivers, his relationship with rivers is undoubtedly a close one. In 1992, Cheng Xinhao moved with his family to Kunming, where they moved around several times. All this time, the family lived no further than one or two kilometers from the Panlong River. The river thus provides a reference system for Cheng to grasp an understanding of his living environment: “It seems that only the river has not changed, right? I remember many things (I saw) riding along the river. For example, the rice fields on riversides, the eras of rice that the farmers paved along the road, and a small lime kiln next to the river.”

Cheng Xinhao’s exploration of rivers started rather early in his life. He likes to search for fossils by the riverside, where he also encountered for the first time indigenous wild plants like the Wild Cotton. When he was in the sixth grade, Cheng used to ride a bike to trace over and over again the source of the Panlong River but never succeeded: “now that the Internet is well developed, you can find any place instantly by searching the web; the river sources are also clearly marked (on the Internet) so you can predict and plan your journey ahead. At that time, only paper maps were available, and the map of Kunming only extended as far as the outskirts of the city. (Thus,) I would explore the routes on my own, riding a bike, traveling 20 kilometers for the most at a time – I could never go further than beyond the winding mountain passes near the Songhua Dam. Yet, though I always had a sense of lack of proper beginnings and endings for my journeys, the feeling of heading towards the unknown was particularly good. That way of experiencing things would be a rare opportunity nowadays. Try to imagine this: following the river, you walk out of the town you know well to find everything ahead unfamiliar and unknown to you; deep in the strangeness, the only certainty is the river that, however, leads to an uncertain destination …”

Cheng Xinhao became interested in arts when he was studying for a Ph.D. in chemistry at Peking University. He then participated and initiated many photography projects about his hometown while systematically studying the research methods in anthropology. All these have made him rethink his relationship with his hometown. During the winter break in 2012, he rode a bike along the Panlong River, upstream from Dianchi Lake, and took many photographs along the way. Following the sight of the artist, we see highways slowing turning into dirt roads, garbage lying under the bridge, and people walking, herding the sheep, and going to the market; gradually, farmlands, small factory buildings, and sheep began to appear. That was the time when he rode to only near the Songhua Dam. Later, Cheng drove with his father to Baiyi Village (now known as Dianyuan Town), the source of the Lengshui River that is one branch of the Panlong River.

In 2013, Cheng Xinhao moved back to Kunming from Beijing after graduation and began his career as an artist. The first subject that came to his mind was, again, the Panlong River, which led him into the project The Naming of A River. Unlike his 2012 photography project that started from personal observation and intuition to take the space covered by the river path as a leading thread, this project was carried out under a clear framework of creative production set by Cheng. This time, the artist intended to understand the river and its surroundings under transformation, for which he then made representations. Meanwhile, he took the river as a metaphor for time, deconstructing the current space-time to unfold its layers that are beyond the reach of comprehension.

Cheng Xinhao’s adoption of time-space as a subject is both motivated by his complex feelings about the changes of geographic landscapes along the riversides due to sprawling urbanization and founded on his longitudinal research and reflections on riverine time and space conducted through the sustainable practice of reading, walking, fossil collecting, plant observing, among others. Cheng is greatly influenced by The Map of the Six Major Rivers in Kunming (reprinted in the sixth year of Guangxu Reign) made by Huang Shijie, a water conservancy official of the Guangxu Reign (1875-1908) in Qing Dynasty. On the map, Huang delineated in detail the six major water bodies in the area around Kunming, providing the later generations references for water management. Among these six water bodies, the Panlong River is the largest one that flows through the Kunming city, of which the defensive walls portrayed on Huang’s map was dismantled in the 1950s. Today, the city has greatly expanded beyond its original boundaries marked on the map. The waters have also undergone tremendous changes. Particularly, the Yinzhen River has completely disappeared; meanwhile, though the Panlong River is still running, many of its tributaries have vanished, either turning into sewers or entirely gone. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Kunming was known for eight sceneries, among which the “Misty Willows on the Ba Bridge” describes the early spring scenes on the Liuba River – one branch of the Panlong River. Now that scenery can no longer be seen.

Like the driving force since childhood to find the river sources, walking is the artist’s instinct, mixed with his memories, emotions, and the perceptions of the present. Therefore, the subjectivity of the artist as who names the river has come into substantiality, identifying each other with the river in the process of naming. As Cheng Xinhao emphasizes in the preface of his photobook, The Naming of A River is an encounter between the river and himself as who carries personal histories along his path; the subjects included in the body of work are thus all those which bring him certain “corporal pains.” Yet, at the same time, to be immersed in an environment also means to embrace the new thoughts generated from being in that environment and to open oneself outward, rather than projecting one’s inherent ideas onto the surroundings. During this course of more than a year, Cheng walked along the upper and lower reaches of the river section by section for over twenty times. Most of the time, he would walk alone; occasionally, he walked with the people he met along the road, such as Mr. Zhang, the bee-hunter who taught him how to splash through the rapids, and the elderly sheepherder who told him stories. Once again, he came here with his high school classmate to search for fossils. Many of these companions have appeared in his works.

Walking and reading are also crucial methods for Cheng Xinhao to frame his works: “… what is the rationale that underlies the curiosity (for rivers)? If we are talking about the river and time, then what kinds of synchronicity and diachronicity are presented by the discussion? The river constitutes an anchor point – its existence allows a sense of synchronization to emerge from the various scenes on the riverside. Things that appear in these scenes, however, come from different histories. For stance, those over a hundred bridges, the leaves, fossils, rocks, the margarya hulls mixed into the body of the clay house … and the river in dry and rainy seasons. All these things have their unique trajectories and logic.

In 2016, Cheng Xinhao turned this body of works into a photobook titled The Naming of A river. The book is made into a long gatefold printed on both sides: the front side shows, in scattered perspectives, the riverbank sceneries from the river’s source to end, while the back side presents images that dissect and deconstruct the river through associating it with different temporality – for instance: people met one another in certain locations at particular moments, drastic geological changes manifested on rocks, eucalyptus leaves constantly undergo metabolism and accordingly changes their forms, etc. The book offers a journey through the dry and rainy seasons of the river, allowing the readers to examine the margarya shells and bridges in diverse forms through the gaze of the camera. In this way, the artist intends to structure what underlies the imagery representations of the riverside landscapes into a logic of multiplicity.

In Cheng Xinhao’s subsequent projects, the artist began to expand his exploration of the time and space of the Panlong River with a variety of media. For example, he uses video to document certain moments related to the river: the birds flock flying by, a passerby gazing, a balloon hanging on a riverside tree, tumbling, and strangers presenting themselves in the scene set against the river. The artist himself has also appeared as one character in the scene: he is captured “restaging” the scenario of him, a few steps a time, photographing the riverbank in his previous project. In Stones Away from the Earth, the artist dripped saturated Borax solution onto limestones collected from Changchong Mountain north to the Panlong River. As the water gradually volatilized, new crystals would grow on the limestones, forming a karst-like texture. Limestones on Changchong Mountain emerged 300 million years ago in the Permian Period. As the rocks gradually dissolve, a karst landscape was formed with rugged rocks and the white ridges that can be seen from inside the Kunming city.

The installation piece "Sedimentary Rocks is developed from the previous stage of Cheng Xinhao’s photography project. It consists of various sedimentary objects – cement, Cambrian rocks containing fossils, bricks, relics of dismantled abode houses, upstream sands, among other natural or manmade things. The artist renders these materials into a composition of multiple layers arranged according to their locations from the upstream to the downstream. Thus, a river unfolding in space is compressed to a single point and, through the representations of the sedimentary process, granted with a sense of order across time. Space and time are thereby entangled, like the landscape developed along the river, the metaphors found on the path from the city to the wilderness, the architecture in constant change, the dry and rainy seasons in alternation, and those people who met here by chance.

Although the artist tried his best to withdraw his own feelings in his creation, he created a certain legitimacy through literature research, natural history collection, logical support of geography, and archival indexed shooting. With the deepening of the tracing action, tracing from the outside of the river seemed no longer enough. At the same time, when the artist looked back at the practice site, some experiences and physical perception slowly emerged, but he had not yet invented a language response. The boundary between distanced observation and one's own experience became less clear.

These factors made the artist's own feelings more extended in the follow-up creations of "The Naming of A River", which not only constituted the motivation of creation, but also became the object of reproduction and the language of art. For example, during a walk in 2014, the artist decided to go to the opposite bank of the river due to shooting needs. As a result, Cheng Xinhao, who made a mistake in judging the water situation and couldn't swim, was trapped in the river. This experience left a deep impression on the artist. So that when he recalled this series of works, what he thought of was not any specific photos, nor the logic and narratives he built, but this scene: a person standing in a river with chest-depth water, not knowing whether to move forward or retreat, and the turbulent river water in the rainy season is engulfing mud and sand, impacting this bewildered body. This was an exceptional event, because of the intensity of the feeling and its uniqueness, it cannot be placed in those logical sequences and cannot appear in the work. But it is also present forever, present in an absent way, and even finally becomes the core anchor point of the author's continuous retrospective. How to respond to this absent but intense event and incorporate it into the writing of the river? The artist's method was to return to this place and complete the unfinished river crossing in another time and space. In the middle of a winter in 2018, the artist carried a piece of wood and slowly entered the water, and drifted across the river. After several years of abundant precipitation, this narrow river channel with a width of 3 or 4 meters has become a wide water surface of more than 30 meters, and the time also changed from early summer noon with drizzle to cold winter night. These changes made it almost impossible to identify the location, and can only trust the author's own narrative. In his narration, these two separated times and overlapping locations are regarded as one with the past and present crossing behaviors. The body became a medium, measuring the width, temperature, and flow of the river, re-recognizing the relationship between oneself and the river, and constructing a framework for gazing, listening, and feeling this time and space. The still water surface waved under repeated strokes, distorting the light shining on the water surface. Fog, darkness, water flow, these inaudible and invisible are given new perceptions. This perception came from the author's memory and entanglement of a certain intense event, but also from this place, this river, and the terroir of Yunnan.

In an interview with Jiazazhi, published on its WeChat flatform in June 2019, Cheng Xinhao explains the role of the body in perceiving the environment with the example of his recent practices among the ethnic group of Mangs on the China-Vietnam border: “… if (we) have to define the practice, it is, by using my own body as a medium, to invent a method of perceiving the environment that is irreplaceable by other means … it pertains to certain geographical and relational qualities and is about how to reify the elements from Mangs’ living environment, such as the border, distance, monsoons, jungles, mountains, and rivers, etc, how to map out space with the body that travels, and how to generate perception and cognition of the concrete relationship between the body and other things that occupy this space such as rocks, streams, insects’ chirping, wight, darkness, and time – I have more faith in this corporeal experience that in discourses.”
To respond to “knowledge” of density and concreteness by ruminating on past feelings and various experiential means, and to get close to things beyond the reach of analytical discourses, thus creating a dialogical relationship with the surroundings, one needs to invent an array of alternative working methods based on different rationales. For example, to capture the tranquility of a quiet forest, the artist needs to work in the middle of the night, when the forest is free from the car lights. Also, the artist would need different lighting equipment in different environments. Sometimes, it can be a headlight or a flashlight; at other times, it can be a flashlight or lights for movie production. Naturally, the artist also has to consider safety issues: “to cross a swollen river, one needs to first conduct a hydrological study; if the risk of drowning is high, you should not go into the water. If you are more than 70 percent sure, then risk this!” Cheng Xinhao’s father is a firm supporter of his artistic creation. When the artist, who did not know how to swim, waded through the river, the father would be waiting aside with a lifejacket. With a closer look at Cheng’s video documenting himself passing through the flood in the Nanpan River during a rainy season, one can spot a figure standing afar from the riverbank, almost indistinguishable. That was the father of the artist. “No one would ever know this if I did not say. Yet, he was there.”

During this course, the time and space of the artist himself have acquired an increasingly prominent place in the work – the seven hours of tracing a river upstream to its source, carrying a trunk, in Here They Return Again (2019), the repetitive actions and dealing with natural forces in the series A Body in the Environment (2018-) … these were not so much contests but, rather, communicating and thinking together with the surrounding environment. The body of the artist was accordingly transformed in the process while the visual elements only contributed part of the work. Meanwhile, not all experiences have been transformed into the final work. For instance, during one shooting, Cheng was injured several times, tripped, and nearly fell from a cliff when walking and exploring. These incidental moments were, however, excluded during the final editing for the artist considered the silent, consistent actions as the most pertinent in responding to that situation. What was called for by that scenario was not accidents, not dramatic or performative events, but persistent actions and a body that continuously marched forward in environment and time, gradually tired out, staggering but still moving forward, upward, heading to the river source until it reached its limits, depleted of its strength, and until the end of the river. In this continuous process, the body became more than a body. In other words, this body was no longer a subject featured in the video but a medium that reflected the surroundings and perceptions of the environment, a brushstroke that delineated the mountain, the river, and the border.

Project Strange Terrains (China-Vietnam border)
There They Return Again (clip)

Three-channel video | 40′03″ | 2019
The project Strange Terrains pays attention to the Mangs, an ethnic group that lives dispersedly on the China-Vietnam border. The N village of the Mangs is adjacent to the mountain that sits on the border of the two countries. Due to the land erosion and degradation in the area, the village is often flooded by the mountain torrents caused by the rains that come along with the monsoon in the summer and autumn, during which time trees on the mountain can also be washed down and pushed ashore into the village. In June 2019, half of the N village was flooded, leading to the death of four villagers. During the period from the evening of March 22 to the early morning of the 23rd, 2019, Cheng Xinhao carried a log (about ten kilograms) flushed downstream by the flood, tracing the river upstream and taking the log back to the river source nourished by a waterfall. That location also sits on the borderline between the two countries. The artist was responding to the natural forces with the strength of his body: “No matter how the truck was washed down by the flood, I would send it back in the same way.” Before departure, he did not estimate how long it would the journey take. He believed that he could walk up to the river source eventually and thus gave his body to nature.

Cheng Xinhao constantly sets new rules and frameworks for work while continuously unfolding and expanding them, which is both an inevitable strategy for responding to the mobile, ever-developing experiences and a manifestation of his ambition in connecting multiple space-times that can encompass the relationships between the river and its surrounding, the artist and the environment, the audiences and the artworks, as well as the spectators and the contexts in which the works of art are situated. The artist lets go of the sense of security, the vocabularies familiar to audiences, and the attempt to structure the immeasurable time and space. In this way, he enters a more extensive and integral territory which is, at the same time, full of pitfalls. In this territory, it has become more incontrollable whether the environment will submerge the bodily existence of the artist and whether the audiences can enter space-time created in the artwork. All the artist can do is continue with this practice.