1.The Dream of the Dam

 

Dams represent a dream. From the United States to China, to Egypt and other parts of the world, the dream of the dam signifies the dream of modernist development. Such infrastructure projects cannot be reduced to a purely economic act; rather, it is a vivid legacy and symbol, embodying a certain grand vision of the nation-state. This vision is based on beliefs in modernization, the taming of nature, and economic growth; more crucially, it concerns "time." The protracted construction cycles of mega-infrastructures, alongside the massive investments of human, material, and financial resources, are predicated on the hope that these structures will remain functional well into the future. This temporality does not conform to the general laws of historical evolution, but rather imposes a coercive advance upon the future: the utopian promise is forcibly folded into the physical space of the present, treating the drastic geographic and social remodeling here and now as a necessary "price" in order to establish and realize the "imminent" bright future.

 

The reshaping of time and space by dams, in fact, resonates with Jason W. Moore's concept of geopower, implying that the dam is not merely a technological device, but is "enabled by a mix of science, power, and culture," fundamentally belonging to the "radically expansive, and relentlessly innovative quest to turn the work/energy of the biosphere into capital."[1] A dam requires not only the physical construction by experts and engineers but also specific cultural planning and discursive systems to allow its particular ideas about nature to permeate and propagate across all levels of society. Therefore, beyond its technological logic, the dam also represents a logic of governance wherein nature exists as a clear object of intervention and administration; it is no longer an eternal realm open to the unknown, but is redefined as a potentiality waiting to be processed, thereby becoming fully incorporated into the calculations of a certain planetary politics.

 

In fact, this strategy of viewing nature as potentiality and governing it relies heavily on the joint participation of visual culture and aesthetic mechanisms. As scholar Santiago Acosta reveals in his study of the Guri Dam in Venezuela, kinetic art (cinetismo) works integrated into the dam are by no means mere decorations, but rather crucial cultural devices in the operation of geopower[2]. Whether it is Carlos Cruz-Diez’s capture and extraction of color, or Alejandro Otero’s Torre Solar driven by solar energy and wind, their essence lies in dissecting complex ecological forces into controllable aesthetic elements like light, color, and wind. This aesthetic machine attempts to visually restore the brightness and elegance of the truncated river, translating the brutal appropriation of natural energy into imagery of harmonious coexistence between technology and nature, thereby dissolving the ecological trauma on an aesthetic level. A similar aesthetic transformation also occurred in the representation of China's mega-infrastructures. Art historian Wu Xueshan points out in his analysis of Wu Zuoren's 1950s painting series Sanmenxia on the Yellow River that to visually match such a grand construction vision, artistic creation had to mobilize a gaze directed toward the future: it was required to look past the "present" filled with chaotic scaffolding and the roar of construction to envision the glorious and radiant "tomorrow" after the dam's completion[3].

 

"Dams are fundamentally cultural edifices: not only do they organize waters but they organize meanings and relationships." [4]And this grants artists a privileged position within the complex network of relationships constructed by the state-nature-culture nexus: between intervention and representation, infrastructure has become their unique spaces of agency. Although they inevitably bolster the power of the state over nature and society, within the vast internal space of the infrastructure, artists are still able to articulate their own expression with immense agency—transforming mega-scale and violent physical alterations into human-perceptible experiences, stitching back together what the infrastructure has torn apart. In this sense, the artists themselves also attain the status of "agents of ecological transformation"[5].They not only shape the visual life of the infrastructure; their artistic practice also constitutes a precious attempt by humanity to re-understand, anchor, and even "redeem" itself through art when confronting planetary-scale remodeling.

 

2.Taming the Dragon and the New Sublime

 

The dam is merely one cross-section of the modification of nature. At the end of The Ming Tombs Reservoir Rhapsody(1958), known as New China's first science fiction film, an engineer demonstrates the technological capacity to locally control rainfall with just a phone call. This seems to illustrate that once mega-infrastructures like dams are realized, the will to transform nature will extend to the more elusive sky and climate. At this point, geopower will gradually evolve into the much grander Expanded Geoengineering. And in this process, a "new sublime" radically different from classical aesthetics will also emerge.

 

Beyond film, this will to forcibly intervene in nature also found extremely vivid expressions in other areas of visual culture in 1950s China. During the "New Mural Movement" that swept the country at the time, painters like Gu Yuan depicted images of peasants holding swords and leading a giant dragon with iron chains. The dragon, originally the embodiment of rain-bringing deities and uncontrollable natural forces in Chinese mythology, was not only thoroughly subdued in these images but also forced to obey labor commands from the people. Echoing the era's slogans such as "Making the high mountains bow their heads and the rivers give way" and "Tell it [the dragon] to generate electricity, and it generates electricity," nature was no longer an awe-inspiring, mysterious object, and traditional deities lost their transcendent status. The dragon was reduced to a disciplined machine obedient to the trajectory of human modernization and development—even though the tension between the "dragon" and "realism" always persisted[6].

 

This visual production of Taming the Dragon perfectly interprets the unique Ecological Sublime in the Chinese context. In classical Kantian aesthetics, the feeling of the sublime often stems from the awe and sense of insignificance humans feel when facing the violent, mighty forces of nature. However, the development-based "new sublime" completely inverted this relationship. The state apparatus, equipped with formidable mobilization capabilities, operated as "the mechanistic producer of beauty and utility in nature"[7]. People no longer revered nature itself, but marveled at the capacity to intervene in earth systems and transform the natural world through technology. In his research on the Three Gorges, Corey Byrnes defines this as a "techno-poetic landscape"[8], possessing a forceful, dominant aesthetic characteristic, so as to establish the state's absolute authority in reshaping the natural order. In the contemporary era, this has further developed into geo-aesthetic engineering[9]—for example, using highly intensive administrative and technological means to disperse smog and "manufacture" blue skies during major international events, bringing these climate phenomena directly into the display realm of governance and aesthetics.

 

At the same time, this aesthetic of Taming the Dragon also marks a profound epistemological rupture. Scholar Yuriko Furuhata, in rethinking the relationship between "dragons" and geoengineering, points out that before the rise of modern meteorology, attempts to alter the weather were usually closely linked to cosmological explanations of atmospheric phenomena, such as rituals of praying to the dragon god for rain[10]. However, modern geoengineering, represented by seeding clouds with silver iodide (artificial rainmaking), has fundamentally shifted the medium of weather control from the "dragon" in mythology to "chemical elements." In this process, the atmosphere is no longer a mysterious realm where deities manifest, but is completely "disenchanted," thus becoming a precise target for intervention by laboratory science, national security, and even geopolitics. As geoengineering continually expands to a planetary scale, human epistemology of climate has further evolved from chemical means into a cybernetics model. The Earth is viewed as a hybrid ecological-machine system, and humanity attempts to install a virtual "thermostat" for it through feedback loops, reducing the originally complex and turbulent Earth ecosystem into an object that can be monitored and manipulated. It is precisely within this "new sublime" that the nature goddess formerly known as "Gaia" is stripped of her natural divinity, transformed into a controlled and highly mediated planetary-scale cybernetic project.

 

3.Empire and Resistance

 

In Feng Xiaogang’s 1998 New Year film Be There or Be Square, there is a widely known scene. The male protagonist, played by Ge You, seriously discusses a "fantastical" transformation plan: blasting a fifty-kilometer-wide gap in the Himalayas to draw the warm winds of the Indian Ocean into the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, thereby turning the "Roof of the World" into a land of abundance. In reality, however, this seemingly crazy imagination is not an isolated case. For example, we encounter a similar fantasy in Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, even if it points to the Sahara Desert:

 

Dammed out? Then I could—? The ridge is narrow. Dammed out? It wants but a gap, a canal,—like a flood of life would the waters rush in through the channel, and fill the desert! Soon would the whole of yon red-hot grave spread forth, a breezy and rippling sea. The oases would rise in the midst, like islands; Atlas would tower in green cliffs on the north; Sailing ships will skim south like lost birds along the trails of the caravans. The life-giving breeze will dispel the suffocating vapors, and moisture will emanate from the clouds. People will build their towns one after another, and green grass will grow around the swaying palm trees. The southland behind the Sahara will become a new seaboard for civilization.

 

These seemingly wild imaginations precisely capture the nexus of desire between "Empire" and geoengineering. If the "new sublime" is about the state establishing its aesthetic authority to conquer nature through grand technological spectacles, the geoengineering logic of "empire" is even more covert: it no longer merely pursues visual shock, but seeks to fundamentally reorganize the Earth's natural systems into a logistical networks to support its expansion. Nature is reduced to the prey of "resource imperialism," and everything on earth is viewed as an energy reserve waiting to be maximally extracted.

 

In the history of imperial expansion in the twentieth century, infrastructure amounted to more than just physical steel and concrete, but was invested with biological and cybernetic connotations. As scholar Yuriko Furuhata points out in her examination of the history of transpacific climate control, "the imperial vision of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was made possible through a combination of the spherical thinking of wartime geopolitics and network thinking based on the logistical infrastructures of railroads and telecommunication cables." In this grand geopolitical imagination, "Both of these infrastructures were compared to the biological structures and functions of a living organism, especially those of the nervous system, on which the healthy growth and operation of the empire depended."[11] The empire itself was analogized to a gigantic living organism; its violent acts of plundering resources and expanding were whitewashed as its innate, irresistible biological needs. In short, "the geopolitical need to expand its territory was naturalized through the language of biology."[12] This logic of viewing the empire as a "living organism" and infrastructure as "nerves and blood vessels" inevitably spawned the highest form of control—the comprehensive "terraforming" of colonized lands. Ecology consequently became a political weapon.

 

However, this imperial expansion and the proliferation of infrastructure are by no means merely the unfolding of a "nervous system"; they inevitably cast deep cultural shadows and even trigger fierce ontological conflicts—as revealed by scholar Laur Kiik in his study of Myitsone in Kachin State, Burma[13]. This region is the confluence of two rivers and the birthplace of the Irrawaddy, Burma's mother river. When an overseas hydropower project hoped to land here, it encountered strong opposition from local indigenous beliefs. Faced with a geoengineering project attempting to sever the river and flood villages, local Kachin people and activists did not merely stop at claims of ecological or economic loss. Instead, by evoking "more-than-human" actors, they completely "sacralized" this natural hydrology. In their narrative of resistance, Myitsone is not only a geographical landmark of the nation but also the birthplace of their ancestral "dragon-kin deities." Ancient legends warned the world: once the waterway is blocked by the dam and the dragon gods are disturbed, devastating natural disasters will ensue. This strategy of elevating the natural river to an inviolable "spiritual commons" became the most resilient grassroots force against imperial geoengineering.

 

More significantly, faced with this sacred resistance from nature and deities, massive infrastructural capital did not remain indifferent; it similarly attempted to seize discourse in this "sacred politics." To grant legitimacy to this megastructure that cuts off the river, the dam construction company once propagated a Buddhist prophecy, claiming that the dam's construction was a predestined cosmic order: the prophecy depicted that after the dam was built, the widened and deepened rivers would make it possible to travel to foreign lands to worship

the "Buddha's tooth relic." This almost magical detail reveals an alternative logic of imperial expansion: it seeks not only to reshape natural physical hydrology with concrete, but even attempts to appropriate and rewrite the cultural values and cosmology of indigenous peoples, packaging transnational infrastructure as a "sacred passage" to prosperity and faith.

 

The "sacred politics" of infrastructure reveals a profound reality to us: in this era, infrastructure is never a neutral block of concrete; it is a "commons" where different worldviews, cosmologies, and ways of life fiercely collide. When the empire's nervous and metabolic systems (dams, networks, and power plants) attempt to devour and homogenize the earth, nature offers an unyielding resistance through local deities, transnational beliefs, and more-than-human entities. In this planetary-scale reshaping, where visible global engineering entangles with invisible beliefs, we are compelled to return to the initial question: is the goddess known as Gaia utterly subdued amidst the rumbling bulldozers of the empire, or does she still retain her unyielding whispers and the possibility of being remaining intact within those hidden, vibrant "spiritual commons"?

 

 

 

 

[1] Jason W. Moore, 

[2] Santiago Acosta, The Aesthetics of Geopower: Kinetic Art, the Guri Dam, and Environment-Making in Venezuela.

[3] Wu Xueshan, Toward the Future Socialist Realism: The Problem of Temporality in Wu Zuoren's Sanmenxia on the Yellow River Series.

[4] Max Haiven, The Dammed of the Earth: Reading the Mega-Dam for the Political Unconscious of Globalization.

[5] Santiago Acosta, The Aesthetics of Geopower: Kinetic Art, the Guri Dam, and Environment-Making in Venezuela.

[6] Wu Xueshan, Taming the Dragon: Realism and Fantasy in 1950s China.

[7] Jesse Rodenbiker, Geoengineering the Sublime: China and the Aesthetic State.

[8] Corey Byrnes, Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges.

[9] Jesse Rodenbiker, Geoengineering the Sublime: China and the Aesthetic State.

[10] Yuriko Furuhata, Of Dragons and Geoengineering: Rethinking Elemental Media.

[11] Yuriko Furuhata, Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control.

[12] ibid.

[13] Laur Kiik, Sacred politics of Chinese infrastructure: Christians, Buddha’s tooth, dragons, and conflict at Myitsone, Kachin, Burma.