“The period of ‘from the city to the villages’, of the city leading the village, has now begun.” Mao Zedong, 1949.
Xu Hongjie, On the Rim of the Sky, 2014. All rights reserved.Gulu perches on a remote cliff top in China’s Sichuan province. Arriving with a camera, Xu Hongjie recorded the final decline of Gulu’s village school, the struggles of Shen – the teacher there since 1982 – and the sense of loss running through the community. Her intense, controlled shots of the natural world continually interrupt the slow rhythms of village life. As the rain descends, the school is often shrouded in cloud – transforming it into the school “on the rim of the sky”, as Shen explains.
And what clouds! Xu’s slow, tender pan renders them scarlet-tinged, streaked across the sky in Turneresque smears. These static frames, brushed with merely ambient sound, are composed in radiant ignition. The sky becomes one of Xu’s characters, and beneath, she reflects on what happens on the borders of modernization. Xu draws out the small narratives, as they trickle across the great social transformation of post-Mao China.
