Changbai spring 2025: de/re-territorialization

Changbai Mountain stands at the junction of China’s three northeastern provinces and the Ryanggang province in North Korea. Called Paektu Mountain in North Korea, it is like a white giant overlooking the vast territory of Northeast Asia. From the perspective of satellite imaging, Heaven Lake, which was formed by a volcanic eruption in the Quaternary about 2.6 million years ago, is like a deep dark eye, sending out “heavenly questions” to the creator.

Over the long stretch of geological time, human beings constructed their lives according to nature, creating customs and cultures through reliance on local conditions. Then, the people condensed into nations and states in order to claim land rights and political power and launched wars for the resources as well as the conquest of culture. The enculturation of history, coupled with long-term cultural immersion, has strengthened awareness of this land as its people's own living territory, making it an idiographic human geographical unit, a process of territorialization.

Approaching human history from distant geological time, but also from recent times, territorialization can be seen as a continuous and repeated process. When Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari put forward the concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization for the first time in their philosophical work Anti-Oedipus, they were criticizing late capitalism. Deterritorialization and reterritorialization can then be understood to be an almost simultaneous displacement of historical territorialization, driving the operation of the capitalist desire machine and leading to schizophrenia.

Territorialization was developed as a concept in political geography to define national territory and Lebensraum. After Deleuze and Guattari first used the terms deterritorialization and reterritorialization, geographers continued to use them to construct a theory of regionalism. The Changbai Spring research residency program, de/re-territorialization, attempts to grapple with how to break through stereotypes of Northeast China and even Northeast Asia from the perspective of culture and art, and discuss concepts of cultural nativity and locality, of this geographical region–to construct a new cultural subjectivity and regional identity.

Northeast Asia, as the birthplace of both the (Mongol) Yuan empire that conquered Eurasia and the Qing regime that entered the Central Plains, as well as where Japan developed the colony of Manchukuo, has always been of concern to historians. The territories of China, North Korea, Japan, Russia and Mongolia are also regarded as important points from which to observe geopolitical activity. However, academic research has long focused on the political and economic dimensions of Northeast Asia, and little attention has been paid to the interactive practices of its ecologies, cultures, arts, and multiple ethnic communities.

The Changbai Spring program is intended to fill this gap. In spring, the invited artists and scholars with Northeast Asian backgrounds and the signed-up research fellows will gather at the banks of Heaven Lake to discuss its big questions: Why am I here? What do I bring to humanity? What has humanity brought me?

The research residency is conceived by Ou Ning (founder of ISOGLOSS Academy) and Li Jiaqi (founder of NAAA), with more than 20 invited participants including Irina Adina Bucan (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Colin Siyuan Chinnery (Sound Art Museum, Beijing), Gu Tao (filmmaker), Liang Chen (architect), Michael Meyer (author of In Manchuria), Aki Onda (musician), Kyong Park (University of California San Diego), Hankil Ryu (musician), Song Nianshen (historian, Tsinghua University), Jeremy Tiang (writer), Yan Jun (musician), Yang Zhihan (writer), Mia Yu (curator and artist), Zhang Xianmin (Beijing Film Academy), Zhang Xiao (artist) among others. We welcome the signed-up research fellows to have mutual learning practices with us. The residency is limited to 20 participants, applicants are invited to join an information session about the program. Submit an application here.