28th April 2011. First Day at Chongqing
I finally arrived at Chongqing. This is my second trip to the Yangtze River. For the first trip, I went to Yi Chang, the downstream border city of the Three Gorges Dam (Chongqing is the upstream border city of the Dam).
My initial motivation for the project was to pay a proper visit to my Mother River. However this imagined relationship with the river was completely broken during my visit to Yi Chang. The river has been transformed by the completion of the Dam and it isn’t beautiful at all (at least compared to my imagination of it). The landscape along the river was of a massive industrialisation and urbanisation process, during which nature seems to be taken for granted. I found it hard to grasp or to take photos for. So this time at Chongqing I hope to somehow build a relationship with the river.
For the first afternoon I visited Chongqing Fine Art College. The campus was full of peach blossoms and rape seed flowers. Ancient－style stone bridges, pavilions and farming tools were bought from other places to decorate the campus. It was beautiful but in stark contrast to all the new urban areas outside of the campus. It seems to me that these things are being abandoned and destroyed daily outside, while other people are paying a fortune to re-build them in this campus.
The photos with this post are from my trip to Yi Chang.
