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Patty Chang’s mirrored mountain accompanies her “Shangri-La” exhibition.

In 1997, a war broke in a rural Chinese province near the Tibetan border. But it wasn’t a war over politics or religion – it was a battle between towns over who had the right to declare itself Shangri-La, the place that inspired the fictional town in James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon,” in order to draw more tourists to the area. The battle became known as the Shangri-La War, and eventually became so heated that the Chinese government had to step in to declare one town the winner.

When artist Patty Chang came across this story while surfing the Internet during her residency in Paris, she was immediately fascinated by the absurdity of the marketing war and decided that she wanted to journey to the self-proclaimed magical heaven on earth herself in order to document the juxtaposition of reality and fiction that merges in the mountain city.

Chang’s 40-minute video installation titled “Shangri-La” and its accompanying mirrored mountain sculpture are on display until Oct. 16 at the UCLA Hammer Museum.

Chang’s work, along with Fiona Tan’s “Correction,” which is also on display at the Hammer Museum, marks the first Hammer presentation of the Three M Project – a collaboration between the Hammer Museum, New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

“The word ‘Shangri-La’ in our cultural vocabulary is something that a British writer in the ’30s made up based on a Tibetan word for ‘heaven on earth,’” Chang said. “But he altered it for his fictional means. It’s interesting that the Chinese are embracing it.”

While Shangri-La may suggest other-worldliness, Chang’s trip was rooted in reality from the start. Her initial plans to visit the city were canceled because of the SARS outbreak in China, forcing her to postpone the date.

When she actually did take flight to China, she was able to capture her initial impression of Shangri-La from an airplane that descends from above the clouds into the city.

At first, it appears to be a quiet city closely integrated with its mountainous natural environment. But people immediately enter the video, exposing the reality that the self-proclaimed earthly heaven may not be so ethereal as its name suggests, particularly when exhibition viewers realize that the mountain that monks are climbing is actually a replica of one inside a hotel.

“The most difficult part (of the project) was going there and trying not to have any expectations of what it may be but immediately feeling disappointed upon arrival,” Chang said. “I had expectations for a place that didn’t exist and had to deal with the idea that Shangri-La was a real place. It has citizens who live and work there. There are toilets. People kill and eat animals. There’s a marketplace, construction.”

Indeed, Chang’s video follows many examples of construction in Shangri-La, from the creation of a Tibetan chamber that is supposed to cure altitude sickness, to the decoration of a cake, to most importantly, the assemblage of the mirrored mountain.

The concept of the mirrored mountain evolved from Chang’s original plans to place mirrors on the ground in order to have them literally reflecting the heavens on earth, in the same way that Shangri-La embodies both a physical reality and has a mythical and fantasy aura around its name. And the fact that she chose a mountain is significant in itself.

“It’s a symbol in the book and in Tibetan Buddhism,” Chang said. “It’s something you don’t climb; you give reverence to it. In towns there were recreations of the mountain everywhere.”

But just as the Shangri-La wars were about marketing, Chang’s project ended up being about advertising in addition to art.

“The compound where the construction took place was actually at a karaoke bar run by monks. Once we started planning it, (the monks) got really interested in it and wanted to keep it as advertising for the bar. They started negotiating with the group building and it became a business negotiation,” Chang said.

Another realistic aspect of Chang’s project is the sheer duration of the video itself, which doesn’t lend itself easily to fast-paced gallery walkers.

“It’ll be interesting to see if people watch for more than five minutes,” Chang said. “People are much more used to walking through and glancing (at the art in museums), so if people can sit through it, I’m happy.”

Yet for those people that do sit down to watch her installation, she hopes that she was able to successfully bring to light the problems with constructing a place of perfection on earth.

“People have always had the idea of utopia. It’s part of human nature to want a better place up to the point of creating it,” Chang said.

“When we go on holidays there’s a structure and mechanism behind our pleasure that’s not just what we see in front of us. (I want to) let people question their notions of perfection and an ideal place or situation and understand what the realities and the non-realities of that are.”