The First Line of China | 2017-2019-Ongoing

12.30.2023
Archival Inkjet Print
40×32 inch (100×80 cm)

Intro

The First Line of China is a long-term artistic research project initiated in 2017. Through a first-person perspective and narrative, it investigates the contemporary conditions and recent history of an isolated industrial town in Northeast China. The project comprises three interconnected works:

A film, The First Line of China (2019);
A photobook, Zhong Guo Di Yi Xian (2018);
An ongoing photographic series, The Sheep Pen Town (2017–present).

The title The First Line of China originates from a phrase once used locally to describe the town in the 1990s, recovered through oral histories. Detached from its original context of socialist collectivism, the phrase has gradually become a floating signifier of a broader ideological grand narrative—a lingering symbol of post-socialist nostalgia.

The town was established alongside a state-owned cement factory to accommodate the workers who migrated there. Emerging from China’s top-down urban planning policies of the 1980s and its rapid industrialization, this factory-town model fostered a distinctive form of communal life. Today, the town’s physical and social landscape serves as a repository of collective memory and personal histories, shaped by the tensions between its industrial past and post-industrial present.