The Goddess’s Cloud: Hydropower Infrastructure as Techno-Mythological Complex

2025.02.15 Saturday 15:00

Location

Macalline Center of Art, 706 Beiyi St, 798 Art Zone, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing

Speaker:Mia Yu

On February 15, MACA invites researcher, curator, and moving image creator Mia Yu to present a performative lecture titled "The Goddess's Cloud: Hydropower Infrastructure as Techno-Mythological Complex." This lecture explores the imagery of the Goddess's Cloud, which bridges mythology and reality. Through poetry, traditional Chinese painting, propaganda posters, comic strips, films, and contemporary moving images, it narrates three stories of goddesses within the context of the early PRC's seventeen years of water conservancy construction and today's super hydropower infrastructure. By interweaving historical and fictional materials, Mia Yu seeks to imagine China's large-scale hydropower infrastructure as a complex space-time where technology and nature, history and mythology intertwine.

 

About the Speaker: Mia Yu

Mia Yu is a curator, art historian and artist-filmmaker. Her research-based practice examines the complex relationship between extractive landscape, infrastructure and eco-politics. Her creative work involves extensive field research centered around energy extraction and energy transition in Asia. Mia Yu combines images, folklores, cosmologies, dreams, poetry, and performances to construct speculative mythology and poetics about energy. Her Fushun Trilogy, consisting of three films and a performance, has been exhibited at Goethe Institut, Times Museum and CAFA Art Museum. She has curated exhibitions including "Fossil Sunlight, Sedimentary Bodies," "A Darkness Shimmering in the Light," "Counterpoints: Focus China," "2021 OCAT Biennale: Resonances of One Hundred Things," "Ecological Entanglements from Northeast China" and "From Vladivostok to Xishuangbanna." Mia Yu has lectured about her work at Harvard University, University College of London, Cornell University, University of Toronto, Peking University, The Courtauld Institute of Art and Goldsmiths. She is an adjunct professor at China Art Academy.

The Macalline Center of Art (MACA) is a non-profit art institution located in the 798 Art District of Beijing and officially inaugurated its space on January 15, 2022. Occupying a two-story building with a total area of 900 square meters, MACA unites artists, curators, and other art and cultural practitioners from around the world. Through its diverse, ongoing, and collaborative approaches, the Center establishes a new site on the contemporary art scene. Guided by the “work of artists” and backed by interdisciplinary research, the Center aims to bring together a community passionate about art and devoted to the “contemporary” moment so as to respond proactively to our rapidly evolving times.