And Thus Is This Land is a participatory performance by Dai Guangyu, presented in conjunction with the Special Exhibition Canton Modern: Art and Visual Culture, 1900s–1970s. Dai invites professional artists and art students to collaborate on a recreation of This Land So Rich in Beauty (1959), a monumental landscape by Fu Baoshi (1904–1965) and Guan Shanyue (1912–2000), with each participant painting a segment of the artwork. The pieces will be made and assembled over one month in the Focus Gallery.

This Land So Rich in Beauty was inspired by Mao Zedong’s (1896–1973) poem Snow, which expressed a grand vision of the nation’s history and geography. The painting was unveiled in 1959 for the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. It hung in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing for over thirty years before being replaced by a replica in 1990.

The commission of Guangdong-born Guan Shanyue for This Land So Rich in Beauty reflected the rise of Cantonese art to national prominence. From conception to execution, the work was a collaborative challenge: Guan and Fu needed to reconcile their different painting styles and interpret Mao’s poem with feedback from high officials.

And Thus Is This Land extends this collaborative process into the present. It asks participants to engage with each other, the artist, the original painters, and the poem that sparked this chain of creative work. They will navigate the tension between copying and adaptation, arriving at a work that both resembles the original yet is also wholly new.

Dai Guangyu (born 1955, Chengdu) has worked in community-based performance art for over three decades. His projects gained widespread attention in his native Chengdu in the 1990s, inviting participation by local artists and even members of the public with no previous exposure to contemporary art. Trained from a young age in Chinese painting and calligraphy, Dai has also realised many public performances using ink, both in China and internationally.