Transcorporeal Temporalities at the Three Gorges Dam

Extract

In the second panel of Liu Xiaodong’s Wenchuang Zhiyi/Hotbed No. 1 (2005), a series of life-sized en plein air oil paintings depicting migrant workers at the Three Gorges Dam, two men stand atop a dilapidated building that they will soon demolish (see fig. 1).¹ While the megadam itself is not visible, its unseen presence dictates the impermanence of the time captured in-frame. In just two short years, the city of Fengjie, Chongqing, which lies in the midground of the painting, will be submerged beneath more than 500 feet of water. Its 30,000 urban residents will be displaced, and the migrant workers will have long disappeared from the floodplain towns they helped to demolish.² Such is the power of what Rob Nixon calls “the imaginative force field of the megadam” (153), which insidiously disappears inhabitants both local and migratory, human and more-than-human. For Nixon, this imaginative capacity is what underlies the visual spectacle of the megadam and exerts its “temporal violence” (162): by designating local inhabitants, ecologies, and histories as “backward” obstructions to national development, the megadam heralds a linear temporal order of technocratic modernity that permits no anachronisms. Indeed, although Liu’s painting intentionally neglects the visual monumentality of the megadam for a gritty, realist glimpse into the lives of those that labor in its shadow, the unfinished canvas—painted in situ, Liu did not have time to complete the panel³—suggests that the time of the megadam is already here, encroaching readily upon the vanishing present.