Meili Snow Mountain in view from the village
In May 2020, while things were slowly recovering in China from the pandemic, we traveled to Wunongding Village in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, about 70km from Tibet and 3600m above sea level.
We were there, invited by the design hotel Sunyata Meili, to continue our work with AnyOne (artist duo of Yumo Wu & Yannis Zhang from Beijing) and to create new music written for an instrument we built called the Fuzzy Synth, inspired by the surrounding nature.
Kunming was our first stop, just meant for acclimatizing to the altitude for one day. Our entire time there was actually spent: downloading app after app to obtain green QR codes proving our health and ability to cross from one region to the next, going for the first time to a Chinese hospital to be tested for coronavirus, and awaiting the results while eating some very nice hot pot.
Our next stop from Kunming was to Shangri-La, the closest airport to Wunongding Village where we were headed. Shangri-La is a completely fictional place from James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. In 2001, Zhongdian county renamed itself Shangri-La with the hopes of attracting more tourists (although they claim that they were the historical inspiration for the book!). Sadly, the ancient town itself also burned down in a fire in 2014. All that said, it’s a spectacularly beautiful part of the world!
From there, we continued driving about 150 km to the small village we’d call home for a week. Truly, we felt as if we’d arrived on another planet. With all the checks on our coronavirus-travel checklist marked, we’d found ourselves visitors in this place that seemed completely untouched. It was like traveling back in time half a year, and it felt strange to be suddenly exempt from this crisis that was defining our lives since December. Additionally, we’d suddenly found ourselves needing winter coats, and everyday was a completely different (and quite extreme) kind of weather. Working from overcast, to rain, to snow, fog, to sun the village transformed everyday.
Our first overcast days were spent discovering the design-hotel and town for the first time. We were also eager to drive to the mountains before the weather changed.
On the next snowy and rainy days, we spent most of our time inside, recording and filming new music we had been writing. We also had the chance to include some local materials: two yak bells made appearances as percussion instruments, normally only played by the herds of yaks that graze through the mountains here.
The day after it snowed, a deep fog covered the entire village (that’s where the village gets its name), and we spent time meeting some of the local residents. We sat for tea with one, met with the locals who pray at the temple everyday, and as part of another upcoming project we played some music for one farmer’s sheep. Everyone here was lovely! For work, most of them go to the mountains to harvest the mushrooms for which Yunnan is famous, and a medicinal caterpillar-fungus that costs thousands of dollars per kilo. We found the architecture of the village to be beautiful too, with each wooden house decorated with colorful patterns. Many of the houses feature greenhouse enclosures that cover half the structure to provide heat from the sun at these high altitudes.
By now, our musical work was almost finished too. We had created two music videos using our handmade instruments alongside some found objects as percussion, and our partners instead created cyanotype prints that documented the weather and took photos with their 35mm film cameras. Just as our artworks were complete the sun also emerged, and we saw the Meili Snow Mountians for the first time since our arrival, rising nearly 7000 meters up. The mountains are also a sacred place for the Tibetan buddhists, and none of the main peaks have been summited. With the perishing of multiple groups attempting to climb, it has now been banned. With the sun finally out at 3600 meters, it’s worth stating: you haven’t experienced a sunburn until you’ve experienced a high-altitude sunburn…
After our week locked away in the mountains, making art and meeting people, we set off by car to Lijiang, a city about 300 km away. The drive was studded with mountains the entire way, passing through different towns, often interrupted by yaks crossing the road.
The wetlands just outside Lijiang Studios
After arriving in Lijiang we had a wonderful opportunity to stop by a local artist residency called Lijiang Studio that has remarkably operated over a decade in China at various locations. For the past years, they’ve been in a small Naxi village outside Lijiang; it’s remarkably beautiful and the people there are wonderful!
Our trip wrapped up much the way it started, finding ourselves back in the changed world of masks, temperature checks, and QR codes.