“一方水土养一方人 (Yi Fang Shui Tu Yang Yi Fang Ren)” is a Chinese idiom that has long been associated with regional ecology. The many ways nature nurtures our communities resonated with me on a personal level as I began to pull apart the phrase in order to grasp its literal meaning: What we are is shaped by the water and soil (水土, Shui Tu) surrounding us.  

“Water and soil” is supposed to be a figure of speech describing natural conditions. A similar term would be “river city,” a concept brought to my attention thanks to the trans-disciplinary scholarship dedicated to waterfronts (for example, River Cities, City Rivers 2018). As a result, I uncovered a new line of inquiry. Animated by drawings and maps found across Eastern and Western civilizations, this body of scholarship tells us how rhythms of life have aligned themselves to the ebbs and flows of great rivers, lakes, and oceans. But the concept of a “river city” also hints at a looming question—would these traditions still have a place if that rhythm fell out of balance? 

Plum Rain Season

I am part of a generation brought up in Central China that has coexisted with the Three Gorges Project (TGP), the planning process that preceded the Three Gorges Dam. These combined experiences paint floods in a particular light. I understand floods in their most regional and literal sense: as a phenomenon integral to the East Asian rainy seasons, or 梅雨 (Mei Yu, Plum Rain). This is a time to be inundated with weather forecasts and flood advisories, to spot along the river banks sandbags and, more recently, aluminum alloy flood barriers, and watch until river tides submerge a good half of the roadside trees. Each year, the informational abundance of the flood season and its pervasiveness is marked sensorially by a trail of sand, mingled with the moisture in the air and the crashing tides. What is put into perspective, over and over, is life around the Yangtze River scaled down to the local realm.

These patterns aside, what makes each flood season memorable is the history it leaves behind. Seasonal flooding is an inspiration for monuments and landscapes. There are historic sites galore. In the Wuchang district of Wuhan, a monument called Statue for the Civilians and Military People Fighting the Floods (《武汉军民抗洪雕塑, Wu Han Jun Min Kang Hong Diao Su) is addressed to the locals and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who helped evacuate residents near the Yangtze’s shores during the 1998 floods, when months of rain led to the Yangtze drowning millions of houses. Devastating floods are a theme animating other mid-twentieth-century monuments, such as the 1969 pillar commemorating the 1954 floods near the Yangtze River Bridge, and The Memorial Museum of the 1998 Floods in Xianning, in southeastern Hubei—perhaps the most comprehensive collection of this kind of monument. Until recently, public art still consciously incorporated these themes and stayed in conversation with those events. Floods have been statistically less damaging since the Three Gorges Dam came along. 

Retracing a Landscape

Visiting the Three Gorges Dam in my early childhood was a fun experience. By then, the Dam had become a sightseeing place. It was years after its completion in 2003, and decades after the TGP had become known to the public as the nation’s largest flood prevention complex and reservoir, and even longer since it became the subject of oral histories and global scrutiny. But the story of the Dam and its precursor, the Three Gorges Project (TGP), is much more profound. 

The Dam and TGP resemble a palimpsest. From a top-down viewpoint, this palimpsest is a crisscrossing of elements, including technology and sensorial experiences–a patchwork of interpretations composed across time and space. If the TGP was a plan that started from the Maoist metaphor “smooth lake rising in the narrow gorges (高峡出平湖, Gao Xia Chu Ping Hu),” then the actual project must have evolved since that decision was made. The project proposed a solution based on a net beneficial gain in energy and efficiency, but as construction began, the immediate outcomes were vanishing topographies and mass displacement. 

Between the late 1990s and early 2000s, residents in the Three Gorges region were relocated to make space for TGP’s reservoir. This process is better known through the work of New York-based artist Yun-Fei Ji, who approached this history by comparing the ghost stories he heard growing up in the suburbs to the social environment experienced by Three Gorges migrants. His scroll, Three Gorges Dam Migration (2009-10), communicates a sense of perplexity through the migrants’ bodies. In the multitude of motions and emotions, from aimless walking, and blank stares, to reclining on the side of the path waiting for the crowds who are lining up to get onboard, Ji extracts one of the ghostly traits of humanity: anxiety in the guise of emotionlessness. The painting freeze-frames a generational moment, but it also speaks to its long-stretch construction process, which looking back, was characterized by a lack of consideration for the mundane concerns that locals hoped to address.

The memories of the entire Three Gorges landscape, now gone, are still ghostly. They were written down, years before Ji finished his Three Gorges painting, and defined by close-up descriptions of the migrants, moments of the demolition (which erased the built forms in seconds), and focused ruminations on how the ruins would soon be cleared out and rendered under water. There were even accounts of the mental conflict the older generations of Three Gorges residents were facing. And how, according to reports from local newspapers, some attempted suicide for fear that the homes and the landscapes would be gone, leaving them with only their memories, “uprooted” from their homeland. Commemorating floods, in this sense, is to be part of a past with no corresponding traces in our present.

The Good Project

The topic of floods and ecology was brought up again in the spring of 2023 when I attended a presentation on flood control infrastructures in New York. Familiar keywords and phrases like “coastal floods” and “raising the shorelines” compelled me to think of TGP again. I thought of the consequences it inflicted and the way it enacted a defense system while (inevitably) sweeping ancient architectural structures and established homes. Meanwhile, the paradox that flood prevention is done at the expense of changing our waterfront-built environments remains a constant today in the underlying philosophy of flood barriers. Engineers maintain that change will be the new status quo as traditional preventative methods like dredging are considered insufficient in the face of more imminent dangers such as global warming. 

In the philosophy of science, there is a term called standing reserve. Behind it is a two-way principle: people are disposable resources as long as technocracy enables resources to be at the disposal of humans. I came to experience this dynamic first-hand as I visited the southern shore of Texas last winter and saw the Coastal Barrier Project. Although coastal barriers are advertised as benign and sustainable, driving along the straightened shorelines of the Ike Dike confirmed my suspicion that more than a few things were altered after the Hurricane (the last time I stayed there). In place of the scattered beach houses with footings admittedly weathered by Hurricane Ike are concrete slabs, beach resort complexes, and, as filmmaker Fred Schmidt-Arenales pointed out, the largest petrochemical plant in the U.S. All of them are now under the Project’s protection. In IT IS A GOOD PROJECT AND SHOULD BE BUILT, a multimedia installation contrasting the “stopgap” known as the Texas Coastal Barrier Project and the natural shorelines, Schmidt-Arenales questions to what end nature and ecology can win the battle against capital accumulation and a system governed more and more by profit-driven "directives."

When another hurricane hit Texas this summer, Schmidt-Arenales’ exhibition traveled to the Galveston Artist Residency (GAR) Gallery, a few blocks east of Rosenberg Library, where an exhibition on the 1900 Galveston hurricane is on view. These installations ought to belong to separate spacetimes, but the curatorial ethos that brought them side to side evokes a valid line of discussion. No matter what stance one might take, the question of how the before and after of large-scale flood control infrastructure is represented should compel us to consider their impacts. While they may differ in terms of ideology, both the case of TGP, a techno-political undertaking that remade a central Chinese landscape, and the ongoing redrawing of shorelines to accommodate coastal dam areas remind us of how local histories and ecologies can be recovered as climate resilience becomes a global topic.