The Three Gorges Dam Proj­ect in China, completed in 2012, is one of the most controversial proj­ects in modern Chinese history. To generate electricity and provide flood control, China erected a dam on the mythic Yangtze River, raising the water level nearly 600 feet and inundating almost 250 square miles of land, including some important archaeological and cultural sites. The move resulted in the relocation of an estimated 1.3 million people.

Multimedia artist Chen Qiulin, a member of China’s avant-garde, grew up in one of the cities that was later submerged by the rising water. She has rendered her reactions artistically in seven videos titled "The Empty City," now on view at the Hono­lulu Museum of Art until mid-June.

"Qiulin’s artwork is concerned with the tensions between a rapidly developing contemporary China and traditional social structures, in particular those relating to family and interpersonal relationships," said Shawn Eichmann, the museum’s curator of Asian art, in an email. "One of the tensions that is evident in her work is a concern over the losses of traditional Chinese society that result from modernization, and this includes a struggle to find ways in which traditional Chinese art and aesthetics are relevant in the face of immense social changes."

Chen’s videos, lasting 10 to 15 minutes each and shown side-by-side in one of the museum’s galleries, include scenes of her now partially submerged hometown, Wan­zhou, which was evacuated. She wanders through the city wearing a military overcoat and a white facial paste made of herbs as if to imply a ghostly presence; she also carries balloons, which she told the museum refer to the Danish tale "The Little Match Girl."

Some parts of her old hometown are still accessible, and she visits places such as its main park, which had a garden called the Lonely Garden.

"The mysterious memory of Lonely Garden has accompanied me throughout my growth, therefore I want to give it back something of my memory," she writes in the guide to the exhibit. "I had never taken a picture in the Lonely Garden, although the imagination had been floating in my head since I was a child."

The videos also show Chen in her new home city in Chongqing, a sprawling metropolitan region of 34 million people. Still wearing mask and military coat, she wanders through the city streets and stairwells — Chongqing is among the hilliest of the major cities in China — visiting dances at the night market, seemingly unnoticed, but apparently the appearances were disruptive enough to get the police after her. She told the museum she’d managed to send away the videotape before her arrest, a practice born of experience.

Chen has not always run afoul of authority. She succeeded in relocating and preserving a 16-ton traditional home from a village that was going to be inundated by giving beer to local government officials.

Chen has made a splash internationally, winning major international awards and producing more than 35 installations in the last 10 years. Eichmann said she is certain to produce more intriguing works.

"What particularly impressed me during her visit was her interest in seeing art from a wide variety of cultural contexts," he said. "She was aware of many of the most important traditional Chinese paintings in our collection, and spent a good deal of time studying them. However, having first trained as a printmaker, she also was interested in seeing works from our Japa­nese print collection.

"Artists working in China still have limited opportunities to be exposed to arts from the rest of the world, and she was also especially interested in studying our collection of contemporary art, which I think helped her to put her own work into a new, wider context."