This post is part of a series about the “Mutual Interests: Collaboration Across the Arts and Humanities” exhibition developed by faculty in the Society, Technology, and Environment Cluster at Grand Valley State University.
The 1954 Yangtze River flood was the first major natural disaster that occurred in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after its establishment in 1949. Lasting from May through September, the flood inundated approximately 41,665 square miles of land, including more than 20,000 square miles of farmland, and affected over 30 million people. In Hubei Province, the epicenter of the disaster, approximately 10 million people were affected and more than 30,000 died. Yet the disaster’s history cannot be told through statistics alone. For many survivors, the flood did not end when the waters receded. Its consequences persisted in their bodies, their memories, and their everyday struggles to live with pain and illness, complicating the narrative of collective triumph that has shaped the disaster’s public commemoration.
A Monument to Triumph
Constructed in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution, the 1954 Flood Fighting Monument in Wuhan commemorates the collective effort to defend the city against the floodwaters. Located in front of the Wuhan municipal government building, the monument transforms a devastating natural disaster into a story of socialist achievement, political solidarity, and collective strength. Two large relief sculptures at its base depict soldiers, workers, and peasants working together to reinforce embankments and protect the city. In Seizing Every Second, figures carry stones, push carts, and rush toward the flood-defense frontlines. In Unity Is Strength, soldiers link arms to form a human wall against the surging water, while others stack sandbags and drive stakes into the ground. Muscular bodies, clenched fists, and resolute expressions convey courage and determination. Influenced by socialist realism, the reliefs portray the people as disciplined, unified agents capable of overcoming the forces of nature.
Yet the vulnerable bodies of those who drowned, starved, or fell ill remain largely invisible in the monument’s powerful visual narrative. Its heroic bodies embody collective victory, leaving little room for fear, disease, prolonged suffering, or death. The monument preserves an important memory of collective action, but it also reveals how public commemoration can select which experiences deserve to be remembered. What happens when we look beyond these idealized bodies and listen to those who survived?
Photograph by Yue Liang.
The Voices of Survivors: A Disaster That Never Fully Ended
Between 2018 and 2026, Yue Liang conducted interviews with flood survivors and their family members to recover experiences that official representations often leave out. Her research began with her grandparents and their siblings, who lived in a nursing home in Caidian District, Wuhan. Through them, Liang met their neighbors, friends, and former colleagues. The interviewees, then in their eighties and nineties, came from varied backgrounds, including farming, teaching, cotton-mill work, office employment, medicine, and small shopkeeping. They had experienced the flood in different places and under different circumstances.
The conversations often unfolded in relaxed settings more resembling afternoon tea rather than formal interviews. This allowed survivors to recall the past in their own words, moving between specific events, bodily sensations, and reflections on how their lives had changed. As many of the original interviewees had passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic, Liang also spoke with their family members. These conversations were not simply attempts to reconstruct what happened in 1954. They also explored how the disaster was remembered, how its consequences endured, and how people made sense of suffering long after the emergency had passed.
For survivors, disease was an intimate and often painful bodily experience. Accounts of scratching their bellies with scissors evoke desperate attempts to relieve the intense itching associated with schistosomiasis and memories of applying warm compresses to swollen joints to relieve the cold convey the discomfort of rheumatism and persistent joint pain. Survivors and their families described the severity of spinal disorders and lower back pain, as well as the effort required simply to keep the body functioning. Certain phrases recur in survivors’ accounts: hardship, how to live, there was nothing we could do about it, and just go if you can. Their simplicity is striking, conveying not only material deprivation but also the limited choices available to people whose lives were constrained by disease, poverty, and inadequate medical care. Behind these vivid expressions lies a world in which medical knowledge and effective treatment were often limited, leaving sufferers and local healers struggling to manage conditions they could not readily cure.1
Such memories shift our attention from the dramatic moment of disaster to its slower, less visible aftermath. A flood can be dated by the arrival and retreat of water, but illness does not necessarily follow that timetable. Pain may persist, physical impairments may reshape daily routines, and memories of helplessness may remain long after damaged homes and embankments have been repaired. The 1954 flood can therefore be understood as a form of slow violence, as Rob Nixon discusses in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, whose effects continued to unfold through people’s bodies and lives long after 1954.2
Seeing Beneath the Monument
These oral histories inform artistic exhibition, which brings survivor memories into conversation with the monument’s idealized bodies. We use 1950s X-ray technology as both a visual medium and a conceptual framework for looking beneath the surface of official commemoration. If the reliefs present strong, unified bodies as symbols of political achievement, the X-ray imagery within our alternative monument invites us to consider what such representations conceal: vulnerability, bodily damage, disease, and the traces of lived experience.
To create the X-ray imagery within our exhibition collaboration Bodies that Remain, Bodies that Dissolve: Revisiting the 1954 Yangtze River Flood, Kristin Reeves drew on the Shanghai Animation Film Studio’s style, established in 1957 under the PRC’s Ministry of Culture, to translate historical evidence into sensory and narrative forms through animations created with sumi ink on traditional rice paper. Reeves directly references the mark-making techniques that represent Chinese landscapes, water, and human forms described in The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (Chieh Tzǔ Yüan Hua Chuan) published between 1679 and 1701, which influenced mid-20th-century Chinese painters, including renowned artist Qi Baishi, and the ink-wash animation style used in the Shanghai Animation Film Studio.3
above: Bodies That Remain, Bodies That Dissolve, (X-ray View #3 -4, 5-6, and 9-10 of 18), artwork by Kristin Reeves (2026): continuous video loop, found x-ray viewer, custom digital display configuration and coding. Installation detail, Stuart B. and Barbara H. Padnos Student Gallery, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI (2026), photo credit Kristin Reeves.
Through artistic interpretations, bodily imitation, and re-enactment, we seek not only to represent historical experiences but also to establish an embodied dialogue with the people who lived through the disaster. As recorders and creators, we engage with survivors’ testimonies while recognizing that memory is neither a transparent record of the past nor a fixed account of experience. It is continually reconstructed through acts of recollection, interpretation, and representation. These artistic practices also challenge the distance between historical subjects and contemporary observers, reminding us that we are not neutral witnesses to the past but active participants in shaping how it is remembered and understood.
Ultimately, the voices of survivors remind us that the history of the 1954 Yangtze River flood did not end when the waters receded. The monument preserves the memory of collective action and political triumph, but the survivors reveal another history—one carried in pain, illness, endurance, and memory. To listen to them is to recognize that the human costs of disaster cannot be fully captured by statistics or heroic images. Beneath the monument’s triumphant bodies are the lives of people whose suffering and resilience deserve to be remembered, too.
- Li Xiuzhen, The Writings of Li Xiuzhen (Li Xiuzhen wenji) (Beijing: Zhongguo renkou chubanshe, 1995), 47-48, 79-80; Shu Zhongmin, ed., The Chronicles of Chinese Traditional Medicine in E’zhou (E’zhou Zhongyi Zhi) (Wuhan: Hubei kexue jishu chubanshe, 2006), 45-58. ↩︎
- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). ↩︎
- Mai-mai Sze, ed., The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (Chieh Tzǔ Yüan Hua Chuan) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). ↩︎
Feature Image: Unity Is Strength, a relief sculpture on Wuhan’s 1954 Flood Fighting Monument, portraying collective flood-defense efforts through figures linking arms, stacking sandbags, and reinforcing embankments. Photograph by Yue Liang.
Kristin Reeves and Yue Liang