*In the spring and summer of 2021, the “One University One Village” team brought earth building technology to the 13th Shanghai Biennale, colliding — in the best way — with artists researching water systems. Who says earth buildings have to look crude and backward? We disagree.*
The Women’s Construction Team
Over years of rural building practice, we noticed that among the villagers attending our artisan training sessions, there were always a few women. During busy farming seasons they worked the fields and looked after the young and elderly at home; in the off-season they came out to work on construction sites and supplement the household income. They worked quietly and steadily on site. While some of the male artisans smoked, drank tea, or checked their phones, the women kept unhurriedly at the task in front of them. They might have had less physical strength than the men, and perhaps a little less confidence, but they consistently showed better control of the moisture content and mix ratios when preparing the earth — keeping the ramming work on track.
Regrettably, following the customary practice of rural migrant labor, women artisans were always paid less than their male counterparts.
In 2017, we got to know master builder Lin Yougang from Huili County, Sichuan, and his wife Dong Yixiang. Lin was a man of few words — reliable, hardworking, technically solid. Dong Yixiang was conscientious and responsible, with strong communication and comprehension skills.
On the Hetaoping Village project in Miyi, Dong Yixiang guided other women artisans in mixing earth on site, reviewed drawings with Lin, discussed project details with the on-site architect and villagers, and still managed the cooking and laundry. She was capable, kind-hearted, and upright. The construction team led by Lin and Dong Yixiang — whether mixing earth or ramming walls — always inspired confidence.
Dong Yixiang
Gradually, the idea of forming a women’s construction team took shape. More than that — we wanted women artisans who did the same work as men to receive the same pay.
Testing the waters, we talked to Dong Yixiang about the idea and invited her to lead the team. Trusting her own ability and approaching the responsibility with care, she accepted. And so the “One University One Village” first women’s construction team — led by women, with over half its artisans women — came together naturally.
Women artisans of the team receiving training (Photograph: Liu Xiaoxue)
In May 2019, the newly formed women’s construction team took on its first independent project — the reconstruction of the Su Gan Rila family home in Lufa Village, Binggu Town, Miyi County, Sichuan. Unexpectedly, and yet somehow unsurprisingly, the team completed the build to full quality standards in just over a month. Even our on-site architect had to scramble to keep the drawings ahead of the construction pace.
After this project, all of us — the team, Lin, and Dong Yixiang — had full confidence in the women’s construction team. The artisans' income rose considerably, and they were full of motivation for the work ahead. Most importantly, here, equal work meant equal pay. We valued not only physical labor but also patience, responsibility, and attention to detail — qualities essential to quality that are too often overlooked.
Su Gan Rila family home reconstruction (Photograph: Zeng Guchang)
“Water Refuge”
In 2019, our artist friends Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun received an invitation from the Shanghai Biennale.
Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun
From 10 November 2020 to 25 July 2021, the 13th Shanghai Biennale, titled “Bodies of Water,” unfolded across eight months, telling the story of water as the source of life — how it transcends territories and connects individuals, how different communities take shape through convergence. It called on artists to think beyond the individual, beyond national borders, toward new forms of interconnected collaboration.
The exhibition featured 64 artists and collectives from 18 countries across six continents, presenting 76 works — 33 of them new commissions, the largest number in the Biennale’s history.
“A Watery Vessel” poster (Image courtesy of the Power Station of Art)
Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun’s work draws largely on fieldwork — geography, topography, landscape change, habitats, urban-rural transformation, ecological issues. Their practice is research-based, process-oriented, and collaborative. In recent years they have focused sustained attention on water systems: tracing water across geographic intervals and temporal flux, exploring the dialectical relationship between human dwelling wisdom and modern science within nature. Their “Water System Project” comprises multiple works that gather reflections on the upper and lower reaches of the Dujiangyan irrigation system.
In China, “water and earth” (shuitu) have been inseparably linked since ancient times. The Qiang people, who have lived for generations along the Min River basin, have built their dwellings with earth, timber, and stone — local materials, local techniques, local wisdom — while confronting the challenges of climate change, earthquakes, and other disasters. Their ways of building and living are deeply intertwined with the local habitat and water systems, each shaping the other profoundly. Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun therefore decided to incorporate the “One University One Village” team’s decade-plus of research into post-disaster reconstruction and earth building innovation into their own work.
After many rounds of discussion and exchange, the concept for “Water Refuge” gradually took shape. Working with earth, “Water Refuge” attends to the impacts of policy and post-disaster reconstruction following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Using old tents, the building material of the Qiang — earth — and a post-earthquake museum as its objects of study, the work probes a geologically complex region in the upper Min River where anthropocentrism has no place. It explores how recurring disaster is tied to the urgent need for collective experimentation that transcends territory and geopolitics; for diverse thinking drawing on local traditions, vegetation, and ancient wisdom; and for a critique of the reductive, compressed logic by which past dwelling knowledge has been distributed. It was one of the Biennale’s commissioned works.
The “Water Refuge” installation consists of a rammed-earth wall 4 metres wide, 5 metres high (including base), and 0.5 metres thick, flanked by timber frames, tent cloth, and display cases. The rammed-earth wall was built using the new rammed-earth construction technology provided by the “One University One Village” team: pure raw earth mixed with gravel, sand, and other natural materials. Solely by adjusting the proportion of different particle sizes in the earth mix, the wall achieves the strength and crack resistance to meet safety standards — no chemical stabilisers were added. The wall is 100% recyclable, biodegradable, and pollution-free.
In the adjacent display case, two soil samples — one raw, one scientifically proportioned — were presented with all nine particle sizes, from coarse to fine, sieved out and laid bare, revealing the scientific principles embedded in rammed-earth technology. Meanwhile, the team had lightened the formwork and tools. The pneumatic rammers and aluminium-alloy formwork, re-engineered by the team, ensured wall density and a smooth, clean surface. And the team responsible for building this pivotal wall was none other than the “One University One Village” women’s construction team, led by Dong Yixiang.
From the West to the East
In the late stages of exhibition preparation, when the floor plan was finalised, we learned that the installation our team had contributed to would occupy the most central position in the ground-floor hall of the Power Station of Art. Dong Yixiang and Lin Yougang prepared meticulously with us — we wanted to present the highest standard of the “One University One Village” pure earth building technology to visitors from China and around the world.
The exhibition used 18 tonnes of earth. This earth was not specially quarried; it came from the Earth Building Workshop (Yunnan Rural Revitalization Research and Development Center) built by “One University One Village” and Kunming University of Science and Technology on the Chenggong campus.
Completed in 2019, the Earth Building Workshop is itself a pure earth building. The earth used then was surplus spoil from the foundation excavation of an urban construction site roughly 6 kilometres away. After the Workshop was built, the remaining earth was collected and stored for future research, experiments, and artisan training. No one imagined that this earth would now travel a thousand kilometres to meet the people of Shanghai.
Earth Building Workshop (Yunnan Rural Revitalization Research and Development Center) (Photograph: Wang Ce)
Transporting Kunming’s earth to Shanghai, bringing a women’s construction team from Sichuan to Shanghai, carrying southwestern China’s building technology to Shanghai — the whole process created a connection between the landscapes, materials, and people of the west and the developed metropolis of the east. It allowed village artisans to step out of the mountains and present a craft they take pride in on a larger stage. It also invited urban dwellers in their concrete-and-steel forest to turn their gaze toward a more distant, expansive, and authentic world.
Though the project carried special meaning, for the women’s construction team a single rammed-earth wall was, compared to building a house, a very small job. They sent just four artisans, who completed the wall in five days.
Dong Yixiang leading artisans in rammed-earth wall construction at the Power Station of Art (Image courtesy of the Power Station of Art)
Exchange between the artists, “One University One Village” architects, and artisans during construction (Left to right: Chen Jianjun, Wan Li, Dong Yixiang, Lin Yougang, Chi Xinan)
Dong Yixiang and Lin Yougang moved through the Shanghai work methodically. At the same time, they were already calculating how to wrap up quickly so they could return to the Dahei New Village project site in Jinning District, Kunming, and get the next rural construction project underway.
After the work was done, we set aside a free day for the artisans. It may have been the first time they travelled to a distant city as members of an invited professional technical team.
Recently, we talked with Dong Yixiang again about the Shanghai trip. Here are her thoughts on this cross-disciplinary collaboration:
From Earth, Back to Earth
The Shanghai Biennale’s “A Watery Vessel” opened on 16 April 2021. Visitors have been coming in a steady stream every day since. The exhibition runs until 25 July, but our work is far from finished.
We brought so much earth from Kunming to Shanghai. After the exhibition, where will it go? This was a question we had to answer. We did not want the earth to become waste, adding to Shanghai’s environmental burden. We wanted it — from earth, back to earth — to return to the ground in an environmentally responsible way.
After discussions with many parties, it was decided that the pollution-free earth would be dismantled and crushed after the exhibition, then used as backfill for a garden to be built next to the Power Station of Art. There, it will become the foundation for plant life, staying with the people of Shanghai for years to come.
In this way, we completed a ritual that traversed east and west, connecting one place to another. Raw earth, together with gravel, sand, and other local natural materials, was drawn from the land, infused with human intelligence, mixed and rammed through purely physical processes, and transformed into an art installation. After it had transmitted all the codes it carried — natural, technical, cultural — it “crumbled,” returning by purely physical means to its original state, back to the earth.
The Shanghai Biennale’s “A Watery Vessel” is still on display. If you have the chance to visit, as you take in the work, reach out your hand and touch this raw earth from the land of colorful clouds — Yunnan. It is a work jointly presented by hundreds of millions of years of geological movement, thousands of years of human civilisation, hundreds of years of craft transmission, and decades of technical innovation. No decoration has been added. What you see is the thing itself: the condensation of human intelligence and labor, and the traces left by time.
Photograph: Wan Li
Image courtesy of the Power Station of Art
Photograph: Wan Li
Image courtesy of the Power Station of Art
Photograph: Wan Li
Image courtesy of the Power Station of Art
We hope you enjoy it.