Yang Yuanyuan

Inkjet prints, various archives, inkjet printed wallpaper, Size variable

Courtesy the artist and Ningbo China port museum

Yang Yuanyuan + Zhao Cong

Performance, 40'00''

Courtesy the artist

With Dalian’s history as its background, Dalian Mirage is presented in the varied forms of an artist book and an exhibition. Interweaving image and text into a “theatre play” set in the city, each chapter of the“6-act play” references a distinct urban space, including harbor, staircase, square, hotel, street and theatre. The narrative is a mixture of fictional and factual materials, where voices of various figures from different eras——a Japanese writer who was born in Dalian, a Japanese traveler and a Chinese worker from Shandong Province during the time of Japanese rule; a Japanese orphan after the time of liberation; a local Dalianer who currently lives on the old street and a Chinese person travels in Dalian with an old map——echo throughout. The project aims to explore a wide range of issues: the complexity of colonial history, the truths and fabrications in how history is written, and evolving functions and attributions of urban spaces across time. By answering these questions, the project blurs the spatio-temporal boundaries of the city. Among the fragmented monologues of various “foreigners”, there is an unfathomable question that echoes throughout a hundred year – “What is ‘home’? ”