Yunnan V · Land of Wilderness

This is the final post in a series of posts about our family trip to Yunnan.

When my wife was planning our trip to Yunnan, of all the cities we could have visited, Lijiang came up primarily because of this one place that caught her eye — Land of Wilderness — a massive, formerly derelict plot of land at the foot of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

Leica CL · 56mm · f/1.4 · 1/12000 · ISO 100

In it lives a never-ending world of structures and vehicles adjacent to the handmade, eclectic style that I’m used to seeing in Burning Man. It’s all the work of Qiao Xiaodao.

He grew up poor, seeing his father collect scrap materials to fix things around the house, build furniture, and even machines. In the process, Xiaodao absorbed how his father could fix nearly anything and create new objects from the simplest of materials.

He later moved to Beijing and held an odd selection of jobs, working as an electric welder, as a mason, later as a graphic designer, even running a silkscreen business that eventually went bankrupt.

Then in the mid-2000s, he taught himself the guitar and formed a duo (大乔小乔) with his eight-year-old niece, slowly working his way up the music ladder. But fifteen years after he moved to Beijing, he burnt out and moved to Lijiang, his wife’s hometown. He first tried farming, but didn’t find success in the grueling activity.

Then, he picked up a hammer, applying the ethos his father had shown him, but bringing in the creative vision he’d built in Beijing. He crafted furniture and small houses, the first of these was a tiny little cafe he built for his wife.

His work soon started to be noticed, and clients started to commission work. He would collect the fees up front, provide no sketches or prototypes, and then finally deliver the work that he promised. He’s built over 100 houses all over China with the help of other artists and builders.

They’ve been used for everything from cafes and little stores to the sets for TV and film productions. Then during the pandemic in October 2020, he took over this abandoned commercial plot outside of Lijiang City and named it The Wilderness because it was so overgrown with grasses and plants and had no infrastructure at all.

He saw it as a playground that he could gift to his newborn daughter.

Leica CL · 18mm · f/2.8 · 1/4000 · ISO 100

Leica CL · 18mm · f/2.8 · 1/2000 · ISO 100

Design principles

In my eyes, Land of Wilderness has a lot in common with a place like Disneyland. It is a singular vision of a creative person, with the final results delivered by extremely skilled craftspeople. But it diverges in the way it has come to be.

Leica CL · 56mm · f/5.6 · 1/500 · ISO 100

Disneyland was meticulously planned up front. It has a top-down imposed structure, whereas Land of Wilderness has organically formed over the years, project by project, built from materials reclaimed from junkyards.

So instead of trying to see it as a whole, it’s best to explore it through the design principles that Qiao Xiaodao put forward in his interviews.

Leica CL · 18mm · f/2.8 · 1/2500 · ISO 100

Leica CL · 56mm · f/1.4 · 1/5000 · ISO 100

Nothing should be dead

The first of these principles is the idea that nothing should feel static. All his buildings get moving parts, including a signature motif — rotating hats on rooftops. He says he partly put them there because his buildings are ugly, and the hats hide that ugliness, but also because the hats spinning in the wind make the structures feel alive and healing. That area is known for its plentiful wind.

The same impulse to make moving structures move resulted in houses on wheels and battery-powered monster cars, a lot like the mutant vehicles in Burning Man, though at a much smaller scale. This, of all the principles, was the first that I could see my children latch onto. They were wide-eyed when they saw this place with all of these moving pieces, each emitting their own sounds.

And I distinctly remember my five-year-old being awestruck again when I told him that all of this was built by regular people using ordinary materials. It reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote:

“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”

To me, the idea that nothing should be dead made it feel a lot like Burning Man, where everything was there for a reason and was meant to be moved and interacted with.

Narrative

Everything in Land of Wilderness comes with a name and a story. This part I didn’t completely get since my grasp of the written Chinese language is still limited, but the buildings were all emblazoned with their own signs. They had wayfinding, pointing us to where to go.

Leica CL · 18mm · f/5.6 · 1/320 · ISO 100

In busier months, many of these buildings actually function as cafes and stores in addition to being works of art, and you could see that in the way they were crafted. So though the whole place felt like part of a singular world, each place had its own sense of self, and I could see each of us — whether my mother-in-law or my youngest, three-year-old — gravitating to different parts of the park because of the unique stories they suggested to us.

Leica CL · 56mm · f/1.4 · 1/2500 · ISO 100

Leica CL · 18mm · f/2.8 · 1/2500 · ISO 100

Smallness

One of his theories about happiness is that children go and hide in a corner or other small place when they’re scared. So, he made all of the houses deliberately small and tucked into the wild grass. Some of these places are actually designed for only one person at a time.

This is only possible because of the complete freedom given to visitors. There are no guards and instructions are mostly about safety.

Leica CL · 56mm · f/1.6 · 1/16000 · ISO 100

They sit very lightly on earth, without a foundation or anything tying them to their location, feeling almost like Lego that was placed there by a child. I could see this principle also resonating with the children. They kept exploring — finding smaller and smaller places to crawl into and hide, windows to peer out of, little tree houses to climb up into.

Leica CL · 18mm · f/2.8 · 1/800 · ISO 100

Though this place was completely new to them, they felt at home because of the sense of scale. In many ways, it was the opposite of a modern art museum, where there are so many strict rules about what to touch and what not to touch, how quiet you must be, how you must travel through the space.

Leica CL · 56mm · f/1.4 · 1/6400 · ISO 100

Sky as material

One of the main reasons Xiaodao chose Lijiang versus a big city like Beijing, where he has connections, were the clouds and the sky. As much as he can manufacture the structures on the ground, he can’t make up the backdrop behind him.

Leica CL · 56mm · f/1.6 · 1/10000 · ISO 100

And those big cities, especially Beijing at the time when he was there, were gray and hazy. Rarely was there a day where you could see clouds floating across a blue sky.

Lijiang’s sky is worlds apart. The clear sky and fluffy clouds felt almost like a blanket keeping us warm. They also provided ideal lighting for my photographs.

Leica CL · 18mm · f/2.8 · 1/2500 · ISO 100

All the strucures are built with the night in mind, though we didn’t experience that aspect as we were only there during the day. They’re all uniquely lit — which the hidden light fixtures and generous use of transluscent materials suggested to us.

The smartphone test

Qiao Xiaodao has been very upfront about one of the ultimate tests for whether one of the works has reached his quality threshold or not. And that is, if someone were to pass this spot, would they pull out their phone and take a photo? If not, they are owed a refund.

Leica CL · 56mm · f/1.6 · 1/4000 · ISO 100

We saw that manifested plainly in front of us. There were other families like us, of course, pulling out their phones to take fun little photos, but there were also plenty of influencer types lugging camera gear and wearing elaborate clothing to do photo shoots.

Leica CL · 56mm · f/1.4 · 1/6400 · ISO 100

I personally used to be judgmental of people that seem to go to places purely to take photos of themselves. But now I see that if you don’t take it purely as performance, being there and being in the photograph is actually a way to participate in art.

And in a place like this where you could actually touch the art and enter it, sit in it, and crawl through it, these photographs are ever more meaningful. They’re nothing like a trite photograph taken in front of a world-famous artwork.

Leica CL · 56mm · f/2.5 · 1/5000 · ISO 100

And this last principle is what keeps me thinking about this place — the way I felt going through and taking photographs, and then today, looking through them, still feeling nothing but whimsy and lightness, childlike curiosity. I didn’t know it at the time that the intention behind the place was to provide a healing energy, but I certainly came away feeling that way.

Thanks to Q for reading drafts of this.