KAN XUAN: MILLET MOUNDS is at once a meditation on China’s imperial past and a broad survey of its present, in the form of 173 stop-action videos, each of which unfolds before one of China’s known extant imperial tombs. The largest and most significant project by leading female artist Kan Xuan (b. 1972) to date, MILLET MOUNDS is the result of over 100 days and 28,000 kilometers of continuous, on-the-road research and shooting with a crew of four in early 2012. Kan Xuan’s lens claims, catalogues, and personalizes a centuries-long lineage of history and power. Through the process of searching out and recording these ancient sites, some of which are major tourist sites while others linger in disrepair, Kan Xuan engages with contemporary rural China in all its twenty-first century complexity, as a persistent past incorporates itself into the quotidian realities of the present. The exhibition takes its title from the name used by villagers in Northern China to refer to tomb mounds that resemble piles of their staple crop at harvest time.

《闞萱：大穀子堆》用173組靜幀錄像短片，分別攝下各個已被發掘的、建於中國封建制時期的皇陵遺址，以此方式重新思考中國的過去，進而深入理解中國的現在。作為闞萱迄今為止最大規模、最具標誌性的項目，本展的最終實現建立在超過100天、逾兩萬八千米的持續性沿途考察的基礎上，攝製團隊達四人，並在2012年初最終完成作品。這些鏡頭宣講著、訴說著、領會著縱貫幾個世紀之久的歷史與權力的沿襲。通過對古陵遺址（其中一些是主要旅遊景點，另外一些則年久失修）的調查和記錄，闞萱介入當下中國農村在新世紀所呈現的深刻和復雜，將永久過去的歷史照進今天人們所司空見慣的現實。展覽題目來源於中國北方農民指代“墳塋”的土話，因其外形類似於農忙時節處處堆起的農作物而得來。