Through films, installations, and performances, Bao’s practice combines historical investigation, ethnography and speculative fiction in examining the ever-shifting structural relationships between geopolitics and ecology, self and other. Attempts to re-touch the histories and memories of lands on the basis of materiality, embodiment and perception, explore indigeneity and the entanglement of temporalities, as well as its potential for alternative narratives outside of nation-state and imperial frameworks.
Residual Light / Beneath the Floating Land - The film is based on the daily landscape along the Chaotianmen Dock and riverbank in Chongqing, a city in Southwest China. The sight follows the lens as it wanders between the riverside and the navigation, and travels through different spaces and gatherings. At the same time, intertwined with these gazes at the landscape, the tourists and the locals, is a description of the landscape that spans time and space, narrated by a dialect voice-over, excerpted and adapted from the diary of a 19th-century British merchant adventurer Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Little on their voyage through the Three Gorges into Western China. Contemplating the relationship between the residues of history and modernities, the film traces an ambiguous zone that accommodates the complexity between history and reality through these fragmented landscapes and memories.
Float Down the Stream - A journey through the streets of Katendrecht in Rotterdam during the pandemic, wandering between the scenes of port, water, the history of Dutch Chinese immigrants and global trade logistics with an ghostly perspective. In the film, the artist juxtaposing the landscapes of a nameless port along the Yangtze River in his hometown and the port of Rotterdam, which this two places are linked to the starting and ending ports of the China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” respectively. The narrative seems to be a metaphor for 'mobility' in the post-epidemic era, with the relentless global flow of capital, technology and viruses on the one hand, and the fate of individuals and the 'past' suspended and forgotten in the context of mobility on the other.
The Mountain City Defense System - performance lecture | multi-channel video installation | 2019
The "Mountain City Defense System" refers to the connection between the topography and waterways of southwest Chongqing and its special mountain space, and the way of life and production presented by the settled civilizations that emerged from this combination of geological conditions. The performance lecture takes the waterway from Jialing River to Yangtze River as a geographical clue, traces back to the local history of Chongqing, imagines a local future under the global "apocalyptic" background, and tries to explore the modernity potential of agricultural settlement civilization with southwest mountains as a sample from the perspectives of technology, survival strategy and geo-social form. The presentation consists of three main sections and structures, corresponding to three different local spaces and time points. It involves the ancient battlefield relics of the Song-Mongolian battles in Chinese history - the Diaoyu Castle in Hechuan. A small-scale mountain fortress on the southwest frontier that used the natural terrain of Sichuan and Chongqing and the defense mechanism derived from it to stop the progress of nomads sweeping across the Eurasian continent; the history of the national industrialist Lu Zuofu who put into practice in the southwest town of Beibei, China's earliest model of a modern urban democratic special zone; and the history of the internal migration history of the Third Front Construction extended by Chongqing artillery school during the War of Resistance.
Waterway Project: Civilian Park - video installation
Rear Area - "Rear Area" as the continued practice of the artillery school project, it turns and extends the focus to the investigation and retrospect of the local spatial history and technological change itself. It involves the history of the war of resistance against Japan, the strategic affiliation under the background of the Cold War and the post-Cold War, and the Third Front Construction in Southwest China. During this period, the concept of the "rear area” also changed its form at different historical and social moments, which constantly consolidated and deepened, ghostly embedded in the geological surface of Chongqing.
Song of the Vortex - installation view
