Zimeng Liu

About

In my hometown of rural Chongqing, every household holds an annual tomb-sweeping ceremony, which is an important way for family members to come together. The holding of this important ceremony is often a manifestation of the pattern of reciprocal interaction with gods and spirits that has arisen from the spiritual conception of the local population, but its significance has also been interpreted as a way of protecting the land occupied by the family, as well as as a demonstration of the family’s power. This is because the graves of ancestors are usually in the middle of family land or next to neighbouring land. Graves act as markers or boundaries for those who own the land. More and older ancestral graves can be evidence of the family’s long history of use and occupation of the land and its crops. This can put the family in an advantageous position in case of land conflicts with other people, or make it less likely that others will take offence at the family’s property (land). One can also get an idea of the family’s population and wealth through the number and frequency of traces left around the graves. This project focuses on exploring this second significance, as it is often overlooked, even though there are many phenomena that arise due to this significance. The development of the tomb-sweeping ceremony is integrated with local productive life rather than with beliefs. This allowed me to find the direction of the rise of the tomb-sweeping ceremony as well as its gradual disappearance. Nowadays, the location of graves has changed from the living area to the wilderness due to the massive loss of population in the countryside and other reasons. At the same time, as a new generation, we no longer have the same direct productive and emotional connection to the land we live on as previous generations did, and we know very little about the owners of the graves. Even I could not locate the graves in the fields. In the field, natural organisms gradually cover the traces left by people as a result of grave-sweeping ceremonies. During each year’s ritual experience, I gradually felt the disappearance of human activities in the environment of the graves in the field. By using ritual objects and combining human activities with the natural environment, this project reveals the often-neglected role of the grave-sweeping ritual and considers the survival of this ritual as an important local folklore.

The exhibition site consists of an objective presentation part and a subjective part. The connection between the images in the subjective part, and the way they are exhibited and the rituals is direct. It comes from my experience of ritual and the emotions that arise during it. The installation placed on the table shows the location of the graves of the ancestors. The number of handmade stones on the map represents the number of graves, and the stones also represent the location of the graves. Echoing the table are three images on the wall, which are fixed in the form of niches, showing the parts directly related to the rutial. The objective presentation section focuses on reflections on the context in which the rite exists and the future development of the rite. It takes a dispassionate look at other parts of life that have commonalities with the rutial, attempting to find the rutial’s cut in life.