China

Xu Jiang is a famous Chinese artist and curator. His Sunflower painting series are representative of Chinese contemporary freehand paintings. He ever organized solo exhibitions in National Art Museum of  China, National Museum of China, National Museum Dresden, Germany; his works have been exhibited in many significant art events, such as São Paulo Art Biennial and La Biennale di Venezia. Being famous as a curator, he curated for many times of Shanghai Biennial, Biennial of Chinese oil painting, Hangzhou Biennale of Chinese painting, promoted mass communication and international communication of Chinese contemporary art.

Yuan Liujun is a young landscape artist, is committed to the contemporary local experimental creation of landscape design, his works focus on the oriental quality of the natural landscape in the global situation.

Farewell Song for Landscape is an experimental work of Xu Jiang and Yuan Liujun on Chinese industrial landscape from the overall point of view and art.

Datang, a small town situated in Ningshao plain in Zhejiang Province, is the hometown of the gathering production groups of hosiery. Depending on the rise of China's national folk industry in the last century, nowadays 60% of the global hosiery production comes from here, therefore Datang is called the hosiery capital of China.

Once upon a time, hosiery industry in Datang faced the purge requests of ecoprotection, with the rising price of work force and raw material and severe shrinking in the international market. Various challenges urgently summoned new accumulation and restructuring. When we first went to Datang, it was just about to reform. Not only did we see thousands of old looms lying idle in the wildness—the advent of global challenges just like the severe winter, but more importantly we noticed the new plants gradually rising—this was the brilliant sunset of the hosiery industry.

Hosiery, as the cloth wrapping the feet, is the minor detail of clothes, generally cannot be seen but it is an indispensable part in people’s life nowadays. Although it is hidden, it is regarded as a symbol of civilized people and its production is considered as a measure to the earth. We then felt certain signs of global production, and further used loom as a platform to confront the capital and market, eco and technology, industry and individual, as well as involving in the global field reaching everywhere.

Loom once accompanied us to earn a living, but now it is like an old steed, lying idle. Loom once deeply shaped the hands of knitters, and profoundly changed the emotional relationship between the textile and the people. The first generation of knitters hasn’t been old yet, but loom has already been abandoned and restructured.

The loom calls for a new form of knitting. Once the mother of textile is now parceled like a cocoon by its offspring, which not only mourned the earlier industry, but also expressed the reminiscence of certain passed life, and a kind of modern materialized emotional experience being shaped by the fast pace of revolution day by day. Through the replacement of iron and steel by yarn and the restructuring state of structure brought about by the parcel trapping, old versions of steel and loom were softened into a dream, a feeling of homesickness intertwined by the complication of local industry. It constantly transmitted the poetic restructuring happened in our lives.

This is the farewell song of modern textile industry. This is the real industrial landscape.