Born in 1975, one year before the death of Mao, Chen Qiulin seems fated to personally channel the shocks of China’s relentless social metamorphosis. Five years ago, the artist, trained in printmaking at the famed Sichuan Academy, saw her hometown near the Yangtze River wiped out by the rising waters of the Three Gorges Dam. Her efforts to commemorate this loss have included carving 100 common Chinese family names in tofu and displaying the characters along a roadside, as well as having several abandoned buildings reconstructed, brick by brick, inside the Long March exhibition space in Beijing. But her most widely known riposte comprises richly colored videos and photographs in which she and a few accomplices, ornately costumed and made up as traditional Beijing Opera players, cavort amid demolition rubble with new high-rises soaring around them like unnatural cliffs.



