By Anna Moss

Neo Jiapu Gao’s practice spans moving image and sound, whilst being deeply rooted in the academic disciplines of ethnography and anthropology. As both a multimedia artist and researcher, Gao’s work invites a contemplation of how problematised stories — of past and present — can be told through layered, polyphonic visual and sonic tapestries.

Pepper Indulging — Alluvial Voice is an extended moving image piece that reckons with one of the most complex cases in China’s geographic and political landscape. It is well known that China is the second most populous country in the world.

Lesser known, however, is that the nation also holds the record for some of the largest migration programs. The film focuses on one such project: that of the development of the Yangtze River, otherwise known as the Three Gorges Project. Over the course of phases, which took nearly twenty years, an estimated 1.3 million people were displaced. The scale and impact of such an undertaking feels hard to reduce to mere statistics or geographic analyses, which are also open to dispute. To produce the film, Gao travelled to Chongming Island to live alongside two generations of a Three Gorges family. Pepper Indulging — Alluvial Voice documents two days and one night in their lives, but within this short time frame, Gao is able to unveil some of the most salient issues faced by involuntary domestic migrants.

As first-generation migrants, the anchors of the film are the elderly Grandma and Grandpa Zhang, who moved from Chongqing to Chongming Island, a suburb outside Shanghai. The audience feels Gao’s experience as an observer almost immediately. His held shot settles closely on Grandma Zhang, who, having never been filmed before, approaches the camera and stares directly at its lens.

Her initial discomfort with observation points to the sensitive nature of ethnographic research, where the ethnographer also becomes acutely aware of their own cultural ‘otherness.’ Gao does not correct or resolve lingering moments of tension in his work; they are central to the fragmentary and poetic nature of his filmmaking. As we become immersed in the Zhangs’ daily routine, it is evident that dialect is one of the main hindrances in assimilating to their environment. Speaking not quite Mandarin and not quite Cantonese, involuntary migrants in China bear the difficulties of linguistic and political changes. Borrowing from George Marcus’s principles of multi-sited ethnography, Gao finds metaphors and allegories embedded in the everyday lives of the family, ultimately transcending a complex language barrier to create a common vocabulary of displacement.

The green Sichuan peppercorn is one of the most poignant symbols of transformation used by Gao. Native to the Zhangs’ home in Chongqing, but taken with them to the Island, the plant has had a constant presence in their lives. In a scene reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s treatment of nature — where nature’s life force is palpable — we see Grandma Zhang pick peppercorns in the reflection of rippling water.

The nexus of this superimposed imagery arguably points to the most important facets of the artist’s research. Throughout the project, Gao became fixated on the joint dislocation of geographic elements alongside inhabitants, carefully building a framework of comparative analysis.

The very formation of Chongming Island has been shaped by alluvial deposits from the Yangtze River, something he highlights as a ‘poignant parallel to the immigrants uprooted from their homelands, who find themselves “forcibly deposited” in a new socio-ecological reality.’ Thus a seemingly peaceful, quiet scene in fact condenses the most vital aspects of the Zhangs’ livelihood: how the river has changed, how it has remained the same, and what they have taken with them.

The choice to bring the Sichuan peppercorn, aromatic and renowned for its medicinal properties, highlights their agency. The powerful plant species appears as a protagonist even when it is not entirely visible on screen.

In another scene, Gao lingers on Grandma and Grandpa as they prepare to sleep, gazing out of the window onto their garden of peppercorn trees. Feeling through sight and scent, an understated sequence becomes filled with questions: ‘I contemplated this aroma’s impact on their sleep and dreams — does it deepen their dreams or evoke homesickness? Does it help to create a more familiar living condition? And to what extent does the relocation of a species of plant, due to migration, invite a change to the new place’s ecology?’ The filmmaker and researcher’s questions are as anthropological as they are existential, emphasising an embodied, experiential portrayal of displacement.

This embodied, experiential quality is taken further in Gao’s auditory practice. Whilst the film is replete with vignettes that are the foundation of the family’s daily life, more expansive historical narratives unfold in Gao’s installation work. In a piece that directly draws upon the artist’s research on Chongming Island, Gao creates a synaesthetic, ancestral allegory of the Three Gorges Project.

In his signature method of layered composition, Gao montages a lone diver searching for artefacts on the riverbed alongside close-ups of faces and sonar scans. Prose poetry, dialect, and subtle samples from the river itself all coalesce. In turning to archaeology, as well as oral and poetic histories, it feels as though Gao has a deep understanding of the epistemic limits of one line of inquiry. In order to truly ‘excavate’ (another prescient metaphor) the ongoing effects of involuntary migration, we must take on a wavering, drifting journey that combines both fictional mythologies and real recollections.

About Artist

Neo Jiapu Gao (@neodasein) is an ethnographic researcher and inter-media artist whose practice encompass writing, sculpture, sound installation, and moving image. His work often initiated from with autobiographical and poetic writing, through which he re-narrates histories and identity politics embedded in archival objects. His recent research focuses on pan–East Asian ecological migration histories, multi-faceted ethnography, and the evolving characteristics of social noise cultures in the post-millennial era. Through these inquiries, he examines how memory, displacement, and environmental transformation are mediated across multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Selected projects and exhibitions include Oriented by Dialect: Those Diffracted Scenes Among Us (University of Women’s Club, London); BIBLIOTEKA Art Book Fair (The Warburg Institute, London); Play Week (WIELS, Brussels); Sound Field Folding (Hundred Year Gallery, London); All Fish Are Dead Fish (Hanger Space, Royal College of Art, London); The Mimetic Game Now-Showing (solo exhibition, 798 Cube Art Museum, Beijing); and Tate Exchange Night Fair (Tate Modern, London).

About Critic

Anna Moss (@anna__petrovna) is a London-based curator and writer. She studied English Literature and Philosophy, followed by a master’s degree in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. This background formed her interdisciplinary approach to the arts, and writing is an integral part of her practice.

Anna has held positions at the Whitechapel Gallery, Sotheby’s auction house and as a researcher for an independent dealer. Now working with emerging artists, she strives to uplift artists early on in their trajectories.

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