I flew from Chongqing to Hong Kong on the 11th December and after a weekend of tourism I returned to Manchester on the 13th December.
As our residency in China is now over, this blog will now be paused. It will be resumed in the spring when we will present our work in the UK during a symposium that we are organising at the Chinese Art Centre in Manchester.
For further information about the planned symposium, or on the work of Jessica Longmore or Nina Chua, please contact us:
Throughout the latter part of my time in Chongqing, I had the overwhelming urge to seek out something old and something green. With this in mind I took a mini bus into the Sichuan mountains to visit Dazu.
Dazu is a Unesco World Heritage Site, about 2 ½ hours drive from Chongqing. It contains thousands of Buddhist cliff carvings and statues scattered over 40 sites. I visited Baoding Shan one of the most popular sites. Individually the sculptures are beautiful; exquisite faces with fragments of technicolour and gold leaf – collectively they are astounding; the scale, the quantity and the complex stories being told – however too soon you are herded round the site, bundled back into the mini-bus and driven back to Chongqing (via a knife superstore where we had a demonstration on chopping radishes).
Re-entering Chongqing after a brief visit to the Sichuan mountains was far more shocking than our initial drive from the airport. It doesn’t take long to leave the lush (although still shrouded in ‘mist’) green of the mountains and bamboo groves and again be surrounded by the concrete of the city. This time the concrete seems utterly unrelenting. The density of the tower blocks is more apparent and the skeleton skyscrapers – abandoned mid construction – are abundant. We’ve been told that the tower blocks are built with a life expectancy of 20 years. We are viewing them after 10 and already they look diseased and decrepit. I don’t want this to be my lasting impression of Chongqing.
Jessica Longmore
Thursday 9th December
