Still Life

China’s Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydroelectric megadam in world history and the subject of Jia Zhangke’s digital film Still Life (2006), Liu Xiaodong’s oil paintings, and Yang Yi’s digital photographs. Built in part to address the problems of global warming, the dam has had a number of surprising effects on the environment and has led to massive displacement of people to make way for the water. Jia populates his film with migrant workers, refugees, tourists, visitors, and even aliens from outer space, none of whom are at home in this world. Jia captures the city at the moment of its undoing, a place that is changing, he remarks, too fast for film. Reading Jia’s film together with Liu and Yang’s artwork and through the genre of still life painting, the chapter argues that Jia’s film envisions a kind of minimal hospitality that emerges when the world is past.