Old is New; Empty is Full

LEE YUK HUNG FRPS

I live in one of the densest cities in the world, at a time when cities the world over are growing faster than ever. While that change is making our world feel more and more crowded it is leaving some places emptier than before - urbanization has left many rural and suburban villages that had been inhabited for generations almost vacant and abandoned. Paradoxically, it is in these wastelands that I find life forces at work - a rare bit of space to breathe, to be inspired and to create. It is to these places that I brought my camera for this photo project.

The photos show the walls of deserted buildings and waning villages in southern China which sit on the edge of burgeoning urban encroachment and at the crossroads of transition, guarding the last vestiges of a centuries-old civilization under flux. These little back yards steeped in history and nostalgic memories stand vulnerable to decay under humid sub-tropical climates. Decay through growth; moss, lichen, and the mould that every inhabitant must battle, crawl without impediment over the surface of these walls. To some, they are beautiful, to many they are not, and I found myself repeatedly explaining to the few unimpressed who gathered around me what exactly I saw worth documenting in these corrupted surfaces.

I saw quite a lot, in fact - not just abstract beauty, but a resemblance to classical Chinese ink wash paintings, the traditional subject matter of which is nature. Human touches - a house nestled among the trees, a solitary figure under a cliff - are deliberately marginal or absent. The water, trees and mountains in these paintings are more impressionistic than strictly realistic, and are not unlike the fluid forms that I saw on those walls; their ancient creators reproduced the spirit or essence of an object, its qi, but not the object itself. If ink wash painting could turn landscapes into semi-abstract shapes, why couldn’t I use my lens to coax nature’s footprints on these walls into tangible landscape paintings? The ridges, spines, and bristles stained on the wall looked, from a certain angle, like mountains and trees. More vaguely textured marks might be water, clouds, or falling rain. In a sense, everything in the photos is vague, everything is ambiguous. That looks like a mountain, we can maybe agree - but are those streams running down, or fissures? Is that a cloud rolling over a ridge, or the mist of a waterfall? There is no limit to the wonderful fabric of natural elements that you can see; I have my ideas, but you may have your own, and my challenge as a photographer is to convey a sense of the landscape that I saw on the wall - to encourage the audience to see trees and lakes and to sense the hydrous nature of it all as I did, and not just a dirty wall. But at the same time, I like that the specifics of the image are left to interpretation.

You see, I was painting without a brush. I could not create the strokes of my images, only frame them. Taking the photos meant carefully interpreting the wall, drawing from my visual memory of the genre. To the degree that my intention is clear, the audience can share my interpretation - ‘of course, that’s a snowcap, and that’s the moon.’ On the other hand, the ambiguity that remains‘are those clouds?’ - allows the audience to join with me in the act of interpreting. The photos should not spell everything out for you, but they should not leave you lost either. They should nudge you in the right direction, and let you take part in the creative act.

Framing the photos was largely a question of composition, and the composition in ink wash painting, the sense of balance, is very particular. The paintings are not realistic, but they are often quite detailed and have astonishingly fine brushwork. Yet they are never claustrophobic; there is no horror vacui. There is always space to allow the viewer to breathe and to allow air, or qi, to flow through the painting. Absence complements presence. The combination of detail and space produces the incredible sense of scale that certain ink wash painters achieve when trying to show the greatness of nature and the smallness of humanity. Certainly these photos have a degree of detail that one can lose oneself in, but I have tried to balance that detail with a certain amount of space, and to draw out an epic vastness on these little village walls.

I also tried to draw from the palette of ink wash painting. The colours of these paintings are so muted that one could be forgiven for thinking that they were all monochrome, as many of them are. Yet many do use subtle colouring, and I attempted to do the same in some of my photos. This was faithful to my source of inspiration, and a hint of blue or green here or there provides another interpretive nudge to the viewer, again not to show you the trees or the lake, but to help you find them.

I did not explain all this in such depth to the people I met in those villages, only in passing. I think it was eye-opening, or maybe just amusing for them to see these ordinary walls, perhaps ones very familiar to them, in such a different light. To have shared moments like this with strangers was a wonderful thing. It was an intimate moment rare in our big, modern city, a moment of pausing to look into our past as it exists in the old walls and in the landscapes of China.