Wang Yizhong’s artistic evaluation

When we are glad that we are finally rich and can make cross-border investments with dignity, what do we choose? Sustainable or disposable? The ecology on other people’s land has nothing to do with me? Does our luxury come from the overdraft of others, other places, and other years? When we are satisfied with the turn of events and can get a piece of other people's land, do we ever feel a trace of guilt? Looting and enslavement, these words we used to accuse the old colonialists in the past, can we also use them on ourselves now? Is it a sin to enslave people, and is it a sin to enslave animals? ......

When I went to Kunming last year, Wu Jialin told me that there was a man named Wang Yizhong who resigned from the TV station where he worked and went to the Golden Triangle to make films alone. He had been filming for more than ten years and suggested that I Go check it out. In this way, at Wang Yizhong's home, I saw a large amount of DV materials and photos that shocked me. Later, the Film and Television Anthropology Forum of the 16th Congress of the International Union of Anthropology and Ethnology commissioned me to organize some documentaries. I immediately recommended Wang Yizhong and his Golden Triangle, and invited him to participate in the Visual Expression and Cross-Cultural Observation Conference hosted by me. Thematic group of the symposium commemorating the centenary of Zhuang Xueben’s birth. At the beginning of this year, I was invited to serve as the final judge of the anthropological documentaries of the conference and went to Beijing to select the participating works. I was happy to find that Wang Yizhong’s documentary "People Living in the Golden Triangle" had stood out from more than 360 participating works and entered the 30 preliminary selections. A range of excellent works. In the final review of these works, Wang Yizhong's work was once again unanimously recognized by international experts and recommended as one of the six outstanding works at the Anthropology Congress.

For these reasons, I was able to observe the Golden Triangle photographed by Wang Yizhong many times. Unlike those things that are finished and forgotten after one viewing, Wang Yizhong's The Golden Triangle is shocking to me every time I watch it and is unforgettable.

Various legends about the Golden Triangle have been well-known before, but they are basically stereotypes similar to the Poison Triangle. What we know is that there, various local and ethnic forces have been competing for years, politicians and bandits are armed separatists, drug lords and profiteers turn drugs into gold, and murderous plots lurk everywhere in the subtropical jungle. Wang Yizhong's images record it all: the poppies all over the mountains and fields, the drug trade using bullets and pistols as weights, drug abuse and AIDS, the army that allows minors to carry guns and enlist in the army, the anti-drug conferences hosted by local financiers who used drugs to finance the military, The army raided the poppy fields, the anti-narcotics teams chased and shot them, groups of shackled women and teenagers... I was surprised how Wang Yizhong was able to photograph all of this! In the territory of various armed bosses, this independent photographer with no special background was able to come and go alone with a camera and camera. The process itself is legendary. Without extraordinary courage and strong communication skills, let alone recording, one's life would be hard to save. In fact, Wang Yizhong has been arrested many times in Laos and Myanmar. In his words, he only took pictures of these things with his head in his waistband.

But Wang Yizhong gives us more than just the adventure stories and curious images of a Golden Triangle explorer. He also showed another golden triangle: the tribes who grow poppies but are extremely poor, the hunger in the fertile land (without food for more than half of the year), the villagers who have to trade poison for food, the women and the elderly who harvest poppies for meager wages, Countless armed conflicts, soldiers who never returned and their poor and sick wives and children, deserters who sneaked home to wait for pursuit, young people who were sent to prison to do hard labor in chains because they got lost or bumped into their bosses (if they If you are forgotten by the captor, you will have to stay there for the rest of your life), ubiquitous disease and death, burning wasteland and forest sacrifices... Wang Yizhong uses a visual language full of compassion to delicately and helplessly record each living person. The stories of people, families and nations reveal the complex relationships between people and nature, people and people, and people and culture on that land, and reveal the sad fate of ordinary people in the struggle for resource possession and power. This makes such records different from general propaganda or exploration works, and embodies the anthropological spirit of sympathy for disadvantaged groups and profound humanistic care. When I see the families who have grown opium poppies but are still impoverished, and the mothers who have lost their children’s school fees and half a year’s food and clothing for their families because of the loss of opium poppies, weeping bitterly, I feel that I no longer have the right to blame or discriminate against these opium poppy growers. people.

We have all experienced this situation. Although we are not growing poppies, under the influence of power manipulation and the temptation of interests that cannot be resisted by individuals, haven't we also done a lot of harmful things: such as burning trees to make steel, such as reclaiming lakes for farmland, such as lying about high yields and starving people to death, For example, adding harmful substances to food. I went to Laos this spring and felt that many of the scenes were very similar to what we had more than thirty years ago: similar scenery, similar ethnic groups, similar poverty, and similar helplessness. In the era of educated youth, we lived and walked on the China-Myanmar border, and the memories we left behind often overlapped with Wang Yizhong's images. If we continue like that, I don't believe we will be any better off than the people in the Golden Triangle.

The people of the Golden Triangle sow beautiful poppies and harvest poison. They must bear poison, bear poverty, bear stigma, and even bear death. According to a 2002 survey of people's income in the region by the United Nations Counter-Narcotics and Development Agency, the average annual income of these flower farmers, who have made many drug lords, military and power groups rich or maintained, is only US$56.12, which is equivalent to a day's salary of a worker in developed countries. . [1] This money was only enough for them to survive for half a year without food.

The Golden Triangle is not their Golden Triangle, but an authentic poisonous triangle. They are direct victims of drugs, and drug abuse and AIDS have spread among them; they are guided by old colonists and various warlords to grow poppies, and when the leaders need to act righteous, they have to bear the stigma and have no choice but to become scapegoat. Those who do not appear on camera or speak impassionedly in front of the camera are the real winners of the Golden Triangle. Wang Yizhong's scene of poppies everywhere under the British Tower symbolically presents a true history. The locals told him that the poppies here came with the British who built the tower. Although the tower imitates the traditional local style, people still call it the British Tower. The way it is so localized and localized reminds me of the example of opium entering China more than a hundred years ago.

Under pressure from the international community, the rulers of the Golden Triangle finally promised to comprehensively ban drugs. Drug alternative cultivation and various alternative industries came into play in the Golden Triangle. People expect the poisonous triangle to become a real golden triangle.

Wang Yizhong, as always, paid attention to and recorded this process from the standpoint of an independent recorder. At nearly 60 years old, he is still running there, focusing his camera on the mining of mines and forests, and on new developments. So we were shocked to see these scenes again: gem and jade mining sites that hollowed out mountains, hellish mines, coolies on their backs, female workers who were monitored and searched in every orifice of their bodies, prostitution, gambling, forest... Deforestation, miserable elephant slaves... We unfortunately see that the Golden Triangle, which is rich in precious jade and precious wood, is still not the Golden Triangle for the people there. In order to survive, they are entering a new round of exploitation and enslavement. This kind of development includes exhausting the development and advancing the resources of descendants. This kind of enslavement includes enslaving people and non-human creatures.

My consternation was not merely a result of witnessing such suffering. What shocks me even more is that we have also participated in this new round of plunder that started in the name of globalization. According to Wang Yizhong's recent video data and my own preliminary understanding, Chinese businessmen who are not short of money (including some people who have the power to do so) have already stretched out their hands. Especially those industries that are prohibited in the country, such as gambling, prostitution, deforestation, etc., are taking on new looks and integrating with international standards: gambling is called specialty tourism, transvestites and pornographic performances are called body art, and deforestation is called green industry... ...

After being astonished, I had some questions, very roundabout questions: When we are glad that we are finally rich and can make cross-border investments with dignity, what do we choose to do? Sustainable or disposable? The ecology on other people’s land has nothing to do with me? Does our luxury come from the overdraft of others, other places, and other years? When we are satisfied that the wind and water are turning, and we can get a piece of other people's land, do we ever feel a trace of guilt? Looting and enslavement, these words we used to accuse the old colonialists in the past, can we also use them on ourselves now? Is it a sin to enslave people, and is it a sin to enslave animals? ...

Although these issues about resource plunder and inhumane slavery in the post-colonial era are often said in vain even in China, our mining disasters, our child labor in black kilns, Our melamine, our magnificent projects, are world-famous. But to put it bluntly, it may be the reason why the world needs something other than gold. At the end of the symposium I hosted at the Film and Television Anthropology Forum of the 16th International Union of Anthropology and Ethnology Congress, I highly recommended the screening of Wang Yizhong's unfinished work "Elephant Slave". Although it only lasted a few minutes, I saw that many viewers were already in tears.

I know that when people still shed tears for the fate of others (including animals), there is still hope in this world