Feminist Studies

 Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. CHristina yuen zi CHung and sasHa su-ling Welland Wandering Geographies: Aesthetic Practice along China’s Belt and Road Initiative Patty chang’s The Wandering Lake (2009–2017) assembles an associative journey of loss, gendered labor, embodiment, and environmental geopolitics through video, photography, sculpture, and performance. For this project, instigated by a 1938 account of the same title by Swedish colonial-era explorer Sven Hedin, Chang traveled to Uzbekistan, China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and other sites along China’s Southto -North Water Diversion Project. Following Hedin’s impulse, which wassupported in his time by Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist Party) interest in irrigation engineering and construction of a new Silk Road passable by car, Chang pursued Lake Lop Nor, a migrating body of water in the Chinese -Central Asian desert. Along the way, she pumped breast milk for the child she had left at home, photographing the expelled liquid in cups and bowls, and engineered urinary devices from plastic bottles to pee through every time she came upon diverted water. Glass sculptures of these improvised adaptations of genitalia make material the “embodiment of making,” Chang’s term for her wandering aesthetic inquiry. Bodily fluids intermix with bodies of water altered by human imposition. This altered environment in turn alters gendered divisions of labor— moving workers from fields to fishing to factories—and reconstitutes bodies through state campaigns like forced sterilization. Christina Yuen Zi Chung and Sasha Su-Ling Welland 373 Wandering geograPHy as metHodology This essay begins with Patty Chang’s itinerant anticipation of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also known as the New Silk Road, the global development strategy first announced in 2013 as the centerpiece of Xi Jinping’s China Dream to expand Chinese influence through investment in infrastructure projects, including ports, railways, highways, power stations, aviation, and telecommunications, across dozens of countries.1 With the Belt and Road comprising overland and sea routes, respectively, the plan aspires to create a China-centered global trading network. We expand upon Chang’s fluid wanderings, placing her work in relational comparison with other artworks that reflect upon these shifting world relations. Our curatorial vision in this essay is intentionally unruly. It draws upon Gayatri Gopinath’s argument for grouping together “seemingly unrelated objects of analysis not typically placed in conversation” in order to upend dominant narratives and normative curatorial practices that privilege area studies framings of the Global North, Global South, and/ or nation.2 The BRI Afro-Sino Exhibit, held in Beijing in 2018 and Harare in 2019, exemplifies the use of art to shore up ideas of national culture or, in this case, South-South alliance.3 We aim instead to make visible minor transnational connections along the edges of the China Dream. Through our unruly selection of artists, we argue that their aesthetic attention to the materiality and movement of bodies, things, resources, and ways of seeing gives form to hidden histories of gendered labor, care work, environmental extraction, diaspora, and displacement. Their art unmoors taken -for-granted notions of China, North, and South, cautioning us against using these terms as shorthand in feminist analyses of China’s global reach. Narratives about China in relation to North or South are always already unstable. As a participant nation in the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, the new People’s Republic of China (PRC) embraced an ethos of Third World anti-colonial socialist solidarity 1. “Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative (brI),” Green Belt and Road Initiative Center, accessed July 1, 2021, https://green-bri.org/countries-of-thebelt -and-road-initiative-bri. 2. Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 9. 3. Lewis Ndichu, “Sino-African Cultural Exchanges Play Key Role,” China Daily Global, October 29, 2019, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201910/29/WS5d b799a5a310cf3e3557421b.html. 374 Christina Yuen Zi Chung and Sasha Su-Ling Welland but did not join the post-Bandung Non-Aligned Movement. PRC leadership exercised economic and military influence during the Cold War, although their alliances could cross ideological lines in unexpected ways, such as when they invaded...