The Goddess’s Cloud: Hydropower Infrastructure as Techno-Mythological Complex

2025.02.15 Saturday 15:00

Location

MACA Art Center

Speaker:Mia Yu

On February 15, MACA invites researcher, curator, and moving image creator Mia Yu to present a performative lecture titled "The Goddess's Cloud: Hydropower Infrastructure as Techno-Mythological Complex." This lecture explores the imagery of the Goddess's Cloud, which bridges mythology and reality. Through poetry, traditional Chinese painting, propaganda posters, comic strips, films, and contemporary moving images, it narrates three stories of goddesses within the context of the early PRC's seventeen years of water conservancy construction and today's super hydropower infrastructure. By interweaving historical and fictional materials, Mia Yu seeks to imagine China's large-scale hydropower infrastructure as a complex space-time where technology and nature, history and mythology intertwine.

 

About the Speaker: Mia Yu

Mia Yu is a curator, art historian and artist-filmmaker. Her research-based practice examines the complex relationship between extractive landscape, infrastructure and eco-politics. Her creative work involves extensive field research centered around energy extraction and energy transition in Asia. Mia Yu combines images, folklores, cosmologies, dreams, poetry, and performances to construct speculative mythology and poetics about energy. Her Fushun Trilogy, consisting of three films and a performance, has been exhibited at Goethe Institut, Times Museum and CAFA Art Museum. She has curated exhibitions including "Fossil Sunlight, Sedimentary Bodies," "A Darkness Shimmering in the Light," "Counterpoints: Focus China," "2021 OCAT Biennale: Resonances of One Hundred Things," "Ecological Entanglements from Northeast China" and "From Vladivostok to Xishuangbanna." Mia Yu has lectured about her work at Harvard University, University College of London, Cornell University, University of Toronto, Peking University, The Courtauld Institute of Art and Goldsmiths. She is an adjunct professor at China Art Academy.

MACA Art Center is a non-profit contemporary art institution housed in a standalone building of minimalistic industrial style and futuristic design in Beijing's 798 Art District, a major hub for arts and culture in the city. Through forward-looking and experimental content, MACA aims to enable communication traversing disciplinary boundaries while forging international dialogues grounded in the specificities of a Chinese perspective. Our programmatic scope, which spans exhibitions, research initiatives, pan-performance practices, and alternative communal engagement, signals a commitment to exploring ideas outside established epistemic frameworks. MACA seeks to position itself as a new institutional mode, proposing an alternative coordinate within the topology of Chinese contemporary art. Through art, we address our radically transforming times.