Art May Not Revitalise the Countryside, But Guangdong Aunties Will Revitalise Art

by Posted on
● At the Nanhai Land Art Festival in Guangdong, gazing out across Taiping Market, Ma Yansong’s *Lighthouse of Time* rises in the distance, while Chen Fenwan’s *Earth Paper-cuts* floats on the water in the foreground.
The Central Government’s Document No. 1, released today, continues its unwavering focus on rural revitalisation. With rural development having dominated the theme of Document No. 1 for twenty consecutive years, there is an inevitable pressure on the media, the public, and policymakers alike to inject some novelty and “find a fresh angle”. Over the past few years, the integration of art into rural revitalisation has served as precisely such a talking point. Meanwhile, Japan’s “Land Art Festival” model is frequently held up as a benchmark, earning enthusiastic endorsement from both the press and cultural elites.

The Nanhai Land Art Festival, currently underway in Foshan, Guangdong, went straight to the source, enlisting Noriyuki Kitakawa—the curator behind Japan’s original iteration—to provide guidance. Several artists who have previously participated in the Japanese editions were also invited, prompting media outlets to exclaim: “So rural revitalisation can actually be approached like this!”

 

But can rural revitalisation truly be treated as a pastime? When artists and their works arrive in the countryside, what genuine interaction do they spark with the local landscape, communities, and heritage? How exactly are rural residents and farmers supposed to benefit from it all? Driven by these questions, Foodthink travelled to Foshan to examine the festival closely.

Yet after three days of walking the grounds, our doubts only multiplied…

I. Art or Commodity? Revitalisation or Gimmick?

Our first stop for the Land Art Festival was Taiping Market. A *xu* is a traditional market in southern China. Being someone who attends the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market every week, I figured we should follow local custom and spend the weekend browsing the market first. Official accounts place Taiping Market on the banks of the Xijiang River. Dating back to the late Ming Dynasty, it once flourished as a bustling trading port for merchants. Following its decline in the 1990s, only two shops remained in business. This year’s art festival aims to kickstart the revitalisation of Taiping Market.

Turning onto the street, we felt as though we had stepped into an abandoned film set. The buildings still stand, yet almost every shopfront is shuttered, save for the spaces reopened specifically for the festival.

Only three businesses were up and running. We stopped at Wuxing Bakery on the corner and sampled every single item on offer (six in total). We bought a bottle of sour plum drink from an eatery whose main draw was instant noodles, but alas, none of the three of us needed a trim that day, so we couldn’t justify visiting the last remaining old-school barbershop.

Any other doors that were open belonged to artists invited by the festival to “revitalise” the precinct through their installations.

As I was musing on the decline of traditional high streets, I spotted a supermarket with fully stocked shelves. It had to be the famous artwork known as “Fake Supermarket”!

Sure enough, the merchandise was nothing but empty packaging. At the till, a lady armed with the festival’s official stamp cheerfully welcomed visitors: “Why not come and check in here!” When she saw a perplexed tourist picking up one of the hollow props, she duly recited the artist’s statement: “This is a satire on consumerism.”

“Not quite, Auntie. Why do you have a ledger? Can these actually be bought?”

She beamed with pride. “Indeed! We keep a daily record.”

We chatted while flipping through the pages. “Incredible! You’ve already taken over 100 yuan today just from selling empty shells!”

She replied coolly with just three words: “Art pieces.”

● The checkout auntie (photo: Guohui) and her neatly kept ledger for recording sales.

That dry, ironic humour is impossible to put into words, but we were all in stitches anyway: “Auntie, what do you think counts as a work of art?”

“I don’t get it. If everyone could understand it, it would sell a lot. I’ve only made just over 2,000 yuan since the art festival opened, which proves most people don’t understand it either. Art is really hard to grasp!”

We assumed she had fully grasped Xu Zhen’s pithy quote from an interview—”What’s on display is merchandise; what sells is art”—but we were thoroughly mistaken.

We asked her, “So would you buy it yourself?”

“No way. If I brought this thing home, it would just take up space!And look, the lids on these are completely intact. It means all style, no substance—hollow inside. What he’s trying to say is that under today’s consumerism, we’re already over-consuming.”

Well, perhaps the artist himself, who is so busy collaborating with luxury brands, ought to have a conversation with this auntie about consumerism.

● On the same street, mixed in with the fake supermarket, are a few pop-up shops selling genuine goods.
Stepping out of Xu Zhen Supermarket, we came to realise that perhaps the volunteer aunties greeting visitors and prompting them to take photos beside the exhibits are the true stars and hidden treasures of this art festival. As we continued our tour, we encountered many such volunteers: retired women who once worked in nearby factories, local university students volunteering during their term break, a breakfast stall proprietor who had dedicated over a decade to volunteering, and newcomers who had migrated to Foshan for work years ago and are now planning to put down roots for the long term.

We remain sceptical as to whether local art can truly revitalise the countryside, but there is no doubt that these local aunties and volunteers have brought to life the very works they are ‘interpreting’.

II. Where is the promised ‘sense of place’?

On Pingsha Island, we viewed three iron sculptures by Japanese artists Seizo Tanashima and Junichi Ankake: *The Composed Dancer*, *The Contemplative Dreamer*, and *The Successful Mycologist*. The works are housed in a restored abandoned cocoon house, where the pungent smell of fresh paint left the air thick and barely breathable. Visitors were similarly bewildered; the pieces were so abstract that their deeper meaning seemed utterly elusive, no matter how hard one tried to grasp it.

● The foreground features the “Composed Dancer”. Photograph by Guohui.

As my eyes kept darting back and forth between the artwork and its placard, the volunteer auntie decided to pitch in again.

“Give it another look and it’ll make sense! This ‘Mycologist’ is straightforward enough – it’s just got a mushroom on top! As for why this one is called the ‘Dreamer’, I couldn’t say. But it’s got black and white, which must stand for day and night. You can only dream at night, after all.” Her breezy delivery was much like a tour guide pointing out the scenery: “Look at that mountain over there – doesn’t it look like a reclining beauty?” The other visitors were likely sharing a knowing smile.

Like us, this auntie – a self-styled master of deconstruction – probably struggled to understand why a piece imported from Japan was on display here. As part of a land art festival, it ought to resonate with the “land” – at the very least, echoing the surrounding social, cultural, and natural environment. This sense of place, or “site-specificity”, was precisely the organisers’ original aim.

● A familiar face at Japan’s Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, Tajima has previously created highly site-specific masterpieces: he transformed a closed-down primary school into a “museum of picture books”, attempting to bring back the students, teachers, and even the monsters that once roamed its halls. Image source: Official website of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale.

Yet this abstract metalwork did leave us rather bewildered. It is also a recurring flaw with some of the works at this year’s festival: pieces appropriated from elsewhere, set in borrowed venues. Some installations seem designed solely for social media hotspots, offering little artistic merit. With quality proving so hit-and-miss, it’s frankly a shame.

● One of the festival’s social media favourites. The artist intended the piece to represent a dog, but one passerby mistook it for a special Lunar New Year installation at the Xiqiao Mountain scenic area and asked: “It’s the Year of the Rabbit this year; is this a rabbit?”
● One of our favourite pieces: “A Gift of Five Hundred Million Years”. Artist Yusuke Asai mixed pigments from more than ten different shades of soil gathered around Foshan, using them to paint on the floor of a derelict collective canteen. Rather cleverly, visitors can crawl beneath the flooring to experience the sensation of plants sprouting.

III. Artworks: Whose Meaning?

At the art festival, Foodthink’s primary interest, naturally, lies with agriculture. One of the festival’s exhibition zones is situated in the Yugeng Yueyun scenic area at the foot of Xiqiao Mountain. The renowned mulberry–dike–fish–pond system is said to have been pioneered by farmers in this very region, and the local government now protects it as an agricultural heritage site.

Because materials are so efficiently recycled within the system (mulberries planted on the dike beds, their leaves fed to silkworms, silkworm droppings used to nourish the fish, fish waste fertilising the ponds, and dredged pond mud enriching the mulberry trees), it is today recognised as a form of circular agriculture devised by ancient practitioners.

● Fish ponds on Pingsha Island.

Yet, as locals tell us, farmers have long abandoned this model of production. The only remaining trace is this small patch of fish ponds preserved within the scenic area for agritourism. However, it is currently the agricultural off-season; with neither fish nor silkworms in sight, we were unable to take the opportunity to examine the local agricultural sector firsthand.

Here, however, we met a gem of a volunteer auntie. She had been raising silkworms since childhood, continuing until the local sericulture industry gradually faded after the 1990s. She told us she loved all the silkworm-themed works, particularly *The Book of Trays*.

● Artist Wang Yuexin’s *The Book of Trays*.

For this piece, the artist incorporates silkworm trays – shallow containers woven from bamboo strips, traditionally used to house silkworms before they spin their cocoons. Hand-drawn animations are projected directly onto the trays.

The auntie explained that even in the era of industrialised sericulture, where many processes could be automated, the silkworm tray remained irreplaceable, just as it was during the traditional days of manual labour.

Another piece she particularly admired was *The Silkworm Room Project*, which features silkworm mats – surfaces on which the silkworms spin their cocoons.

She told us she was drawn to both works precisely because she was so familiar with objects like silkworm trays and mats. She added that the mats they used back in the day were even more closely woven than those featured in the artwork.

● Shi Weina’s *The Silkworm Room Project*; the silkworm mats support an array of objects.

We asked her whether anyone still raises silkworms today. “It’s a thing of the past,” she replied. “Nobody does it anymore.” A few villagers still work in agriculture, but only the aquaculture component of the traditional mulberry-dike fish-pond system survives; sericulture has all but vanished. Although the nearby Nanhai Silk Factory remains in operation, it now sources its cocoons from other regions.

Other aunties we spoke with confirmed that silkworms require an exceptionally clean environment, or they fall ill easily. Following the industrial boom in the Pearl River Delta after the 1990s, air pollution worsened considerably; nowadays, even farmers keen to revive sericulture would find it nearly impossible.

● An auntie who once raised silkworms.
Without the aunties’ narratives, the abstract placards accompanying the exhibits—‘circular regeneration’, ‘harmony between people and nature’, ‘the tension between tradition and modernity’—would likely amount to little more than hollow phrases. In truth, every other aunt, sister, and woman we encountered had her own story to tell, and each was more than happy to take part in the festival. Those with the inclination would do well to record these oral histories. Could there be a more fitting wellspring of inspiration for land art?

IV. So What Comes After the Critique?

A three-day, cursory visit by art amateurs will hardly yield a professional critique. Yet, as a festival that steps beyond the confines of the gallery and takes root in the countryside, it calls for reflection. At Foodthink, where we closely follow issues facing farmers, rural communities, and agriculture, we feel compelled to share what we hope to see from this ‘Land Art Festival’ format: If art is to genuinely engage with rural communities, we want to see more proactive voices from locals, rather than artists using the countryside as a mere backdrop for far-fetched, muddled, or utterly nonsensical concepts.

If art is meant to document cultures and ways of life that have already faded, we want to see genuine reflection and action, not hollow theatrics that trivialise the past.

If art is to contribute to rural revitalisation, we want to see it unearth and nurture the countryside’s inherent strengths and cultural heritage, rather than simply engineering viral tourist attractions to boost local tourism.

We believe that the land itself, and those who till it, possess an inherent artistry. If curators and artists at these festivals detach themselves from that foundation, any claim to genuine local rootedness falls flat, and the event becomes indistinguishable from a conventional gallery exhibition.

Our thanks go to the local volunteers who hosted us at the festival, particularly the wonderfully warm aunties, who showed us the true vitality and value of rural life beyond the artworks themselves.

A final note for readers planning to visit: please keep a close eye on your festival ‘passport’.

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are by Foodthink

Edited by: Foodthink

Published by Foodthink