“My Bethlehem on Fire” brings together a collection of visual works by the artist You Liang over the past five years. This series of creations was not initially conceived as a perfectly planned and structured long-term project. Instead, it emerged as a collection of images captured instinctively by the artist, driven by long-standing questions and confusions within her own mind.
"My Bethlehem on Fire" has nothing to do with Christianity and the city of Bethlehem, it is just Bó Lì Héng (Chinese translation of Bethlehem) in Han characters. Out of ignorance, or perhaps out of blind pursuit of the concept of the holy city, many people come to Shangri-La for pilgrimage. This city was originally named Zhongdian, in order to promote the tourism economy, the Yunnan government changed its name to Shangri-La in 2001. It comes from the novel "Lost Horizon" by British writer James Hilton. Whether Zhongdian is the prototype of this novel remains to be verified. However, over the past ten years, after the collective memory of Zhongdian has been successfully tampered with, pilgrims and hippies have come to this pilgrimage one after another.
In 2014, the 1,300-year-old city of Dokezong in Shangri-La was hit by a fire. Two-thirds of the ancient city was burned down. The tourism economy suffered a setback, and the reconstruction process was long. The pilgrims who once regarded this place as their destination packed their bags and started looking for the next holy city.
There is a souvenir shop next to the store where Youliang worked, and its title is written in the language of the colonists (Mandarin). It is called "Bó Lì Héng (Bethlehem) Boutique". Youliang didn't know whether this Boutique was a survivor of the fire or a newcomer after reconstruction. Confused about this kind of inappropriateness that can be seen at many places in Shangri-La, Youliang began to use her camera to examine the reconstructed collective memory. Having her own imaginations and expectations, she digested in contradictions, and imitated these journalistic images that can only be testified in a fictional cultural field.
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