Clear Waters and Green Mountains

Project Overview

This project focuses on the poor images produced by the official propaganda of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s political slogan on environmental policy “clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as gold and silver mountains” policy. It aims to reflect on the blatant manipulation behind the power operation by imitating and exaggerating the poor production methods of its images.

In recent years, with the promotion of “Clear Waters and Green Mountains” campaign, landscapes of farmlands and mountains across China have been shaped into obsequious “landscape art” by graphic software. Majestic mountains, layers of wheat waves, and vast sandy lands seem to be transformed into canvases, invariably inscribed with political propaganda slogans. Under the reflection of the green water and green mountains layer, the language of environmental protection becomes a command brutally imposed on the land. Clumsy, anti-intellectual, and barren image production has become widely disseminated and praised propaganda in China’s political media. This not only reflects the hypocrisy of political propaganda but also mirrors the continuation of a political vice in the narrative of China’s communist revolution history, which overly emphasises formalism and personal worship.

Based on this, I created an essay film, trying to reproduce this grand political spectacle through even more absurd typography.