Part of Capture Photography Festival 2022, Weng Fen’s solo exhibition The Vanishing Landscape was presented in Canton-sardine gallery in Vancouver’s Chinatown, a hub for diverse cultures and arts. On view were two parallel series, including The Vanishing Landscape (2021), which depicts places in Hainan where not only the natural landscapes but also the fundamental social-justice systems and careful land management have been compromised. China’s southernmost province, Hainan has ten cities and ten counties that are home to diverse ethnic groups and indigenous languages. Since 1988, Hainan has been a Special Economic Zone, and in 2020, plans were rolled out to transform it into a free-trade port by 2025. Though The Vanishing Landscape did not explicitly place blame on any single party, texts on the walls—such as “Our preserve land has no irrigation water, while the agricultural company rented our fertile land without completing the payment”—pointed to short-sighted economic development, mismanagement, and corruption as explanations for the utter disregard for the richness of the natural land. These statements resonate with me not only because of the prevalence of such issues in China but also in colonial Canada, and no doubt are shared concerns in other places of the world.
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