The Brooklyn Rail

What do the massive infrastructures of Southeast Asia feel like? Jingru Cyan Cheng and Chen Zhan’s exhibition at the Storefront for Art & Architecture shared their pilgrimage to the hydro-electrical network connecting the mountains of north Thailand to one of the largest hubs of global travel.

In Cyan Cheng and Chen Zhan’s exhibition How Much Wattage Is One Handbreadth of Water?, video footage of an artificial waterfall was projected onto a white curtain, hung across the width of the gallery. This is the Jewel Rain Vortex, a massive water feature at the center of Changi Airport in Singapore, where water pours off the building’s roof and falls seven stories down through the building. At the bottom, the waterfall falls into a plexiglass funnel, giving airport travelers the experience of something crossed between an aquarium and Niagara Falls. In the gallery, the sheets of water perpetually fall down the projected surface, making the fabric almost appear wet. The outstretched hands and fingers in the video seem to have the same idea, reaching towards the powerful flow of water as if to prove to themselves that the deluge cannot touch them. It is this uncanny feeling, the disconnection between action and consequence, that is at the heart of Cheng and Zhan’s journey along the massive energy infrastructures of Southeast Asia.

When the Vajiralongkorn Dam was built forty years ago, it flooded a mountainous area inhabited by the Karen Hill Tribe community. Rather than move their homes uphill, or find housing in another area, some of the Karen people moved their homes onto rafts, which float in the dam itself. This is because the water level changes in the dam every day, as water is released to generate electricity, and over the course of the year, the water level changes up to six storeys in depth. Their rafts float above the flooded remains of the deep forest home where they had lived decades before.

The image of floating homes above a flooded landscape resembles a dark premonition of what the world might look like after a climate catastrophe. By sharing their pilgrimage along the largest electricity infrastructure in Southeast Asia, Cheng and Zhan’s work suggests that one way for us to understand the environmental consequences of our actions is to pay attention to the world around us more carefully.

In his writing about the visceral feelings of climate change, the novelist Amitav Ghosh describes the thick and tangled forest of the Sundarbans, filled with signs of the tigers that live within. From the fresh paw prints in wet mud to the red rags tied on branches to mark where people have been killed by tigers, the presence of tigers is all around. And yet, the tiger remains invisible in the forest, their stripes blending into the dense growth. When you finally do see a tiger, you meet them eye to eye, a moment of recognition in which you realize you are seeing something you knew was there all along. This is what it feels like to live through a climate catastrophe: to be suddenly confronted with what we knew was there all along but could not feel. Cheng and Zhan’s work tries to bridge this gap, between the intellectual understanding of the enormous infrastructures that support our lives, and the bodily sensation of what these flows of energy might be.

Along the wall of the gallery, a long aluminum rod was hung diagonally, emitting a throbbing, buzzing hum. There was a moment when Cheng and Zhan were walking through the deep forest of Laos, underneath high voltage lines that connected the electricity to its users thousands of miles away, where they thought they could hear the electricity flowing above them. “Beneath those high voltage lines, you felt electricity,” said Cheng, “sometimes you cannot see the voltage lines, but you can hear them, and you can feel them. The bodily sensation of vibration of sound, also of the wind, and the birds, all that is a sensation of electricity.” The aluminum bar does not emit a field recording from the mountains of Laos but produces a version of what it felt like to stand under those power lines. The sounds are produced by combining underwater field recordings with live audio of the environment around the gallery. While in the mountains, the sound of power lines intersects with the sounds of birds, in the gallery, the electric buzz is punctuated by the sound of wailing sirens and rumbling engines outside. You can hear the buzz blend with the puttering sound of a motorboat, skimming across the surface of Vajiralongkorn Dam, from the black box hidden behind the projection of Jewel Rain Vortex.

Cheng and Zhan learned of the floating rafts of the Karen people through a Buddhist abbot in the Forest Tradition, which has a network of forest temples, including in the area around Vajiralongkorn Dam. The Thai Forest Tradition in Buddhism stresses the importance of walking and meditating in the forest to understand the interconnectedness of the landscape. These practices permeate Cheng and Zhan’s work:

Falling asleep and waking up on a raft on a vast water surface arouses bodily sensation. We can feel every movement—the waves, winds, birds, boats, and sometimes even fish passing below. When talking on the raft, every step triggers a series of movements and sounds. There is a very strong awareness of sharing this place and moment with many other beings. It’s also a learning experience—learning how to be a tiny part of our surroundings, learning to be a pebble joining the ripple, learning not to be a big stone.

The Forest Tradition monks walk in the forest until they can communicate with the trees and the other beings in the forest. How Much Wattage is One Handbreadth of Water? tries to impart some of that great interbeing, by connecting the rushing waters of the Jewel Rain Vortex with the hydro-electrical network spanning Southeast Asia.

The title of the exhibition alludes to the famous quip made by Buckminster Fuller, “How much does your house weigh?” This question was first used by Fuller in marketing for his Dymaxion House in the twenties and later posed to Norman Foster in the late seventies. Foster credited this question as initiating a new phase of design, one where he focused on reducing the amount of material in the structural frame, which he described as having an environmental benefit. Cheng and Zhan’s exhibition suggests that instead of analyzing the amount of material used in building practices, we should pay attention to the energy networks around us. To do so may require hearing, seeing, and feeling the world around us anew.