Trains in Dianshizhai
As products of colonial modernity, these images offered a window on world events, both real and imagined. Unsurprisingly, images of trains appearing in the pictorial depicted this new marvel of transportation as a new way of moving, a problematic symbol of the dangers of western science, and a potential danger to local ways of life. Depictions of trains in the pictorial also situate them within the knowledge industry: a new mode of seeing and understanding the world, as well as being a new medium through which the world was put on display and rendered understandable.
This examination of trains is part of a broader project that situates them in the context of what Amitav Ghosh and others have labeled “petro-fiction” – conscious and unconscious manifestations of petroleum-fueled culture in art. As Graeme MacDonald, Nicholas Mizroef and Stephanie LeManager have noted, oil and coal are all around us; petroleum and the networks of the extractive industry are infused in almost every aspect of modern life, in every corner of this room. Through the figure of train, I would like to show how petroleum and the Anthropocene become their own aesthetic.
