Alternative Landscapes
An Exhibition on Chinese Contemporary Photography
N A R R O W S PA C E M U S E U M M a y 2 0 2 0
CONTENTS PREFACE Mapping Out the Alternative Landscapes in China
RIVERSIDE JOURNEYS Zhang Kechun / Zhang Xiao / Yan Wang Preston
THE POETICS OF HOMECOMINGS Su Jiehao / Zhu Lanqing
ATYPICAL TOPOGRAPHY Cheng Xinhao / Ren Zeyuan
P R E FAC E
“LANDSCAPE IS A NATURAL SCENE MEDIATED BY CULTURE. IT IS BOTH A PRESENTED AND PRESENTED SPACE, BOTH A FRAME AND WHAT A FRAME CONTAINS, BOTH A REAL PLACE AND SIMULACRUM, BOTH A PACKAGE AND A COMMODITY INSIDE THE PACKAGE.” M.J.T Mitchell
As a parallel to the photographic obsession with changing cityscapes in China, some photographers document the urbanization in areas outside the cities. They record the social landscapes along their treks to western China to unveil the under-documented bleakness of modernization engineering that undergirds the celebrated colorful cityscapes. Their journeys either inherit the tradition of New Topographics photography to document the human-nature interaction, targeting significant geographic regions in China, such as Yellow River and Yangtze River, or, following a homecoming aspiration, searching for selves in lyric renderings of homelands. The third type of photographers interweave their quasi-geological visual survey with fictional narratives, exploring the convergence of time-spatial specificities. Considering photography as a critical practice, these artists “remap” the landscapes of China following the thread of subjective reflection against the urbanization backdrop.
Buddha’s Head in a Mining Field, Ning Xia Zhang Kechun
RIVERSIDE JOURNEYS
The idea of the landscape was defined and expanded, not only by the people who live on the land but by the people who depict them. Soil, land, nature – these traditional pronouns for landscape fall short when describing the representations of landscape nowadays. A definitive breakaway from a pristine, untouched landscape happened in the 1970s when a group of new photographers went west, demystifying the post-war industrialization of America with their cameras. Their works, in aesthetic terms, are “marked by repetition and isolation,” departing from Ansel Adams stylistically, these images demonstrate a “celebration of directness, emotional remove, and attentiveness to humanity’s shaping of the land (Rohrbach xiv)”.
As a distant echo to the “New Topographics“, decades later, some Chinese photographers embarked on a journey to the developing west, photographing while traveling. Zhang Kechun’s series “the Yellow River” offers an illustrative example among them. Between 2010 and 2013, Zhang started and restarted his journey from river source to river mouth dozens of times. A Linhof view camera, sheets of color film and a folding bike formed a one-man shooting crew.
Deers on the field Zhang Kechun
People on Pavillion Zhang Kechun
Every river leads to the ocean. Zhang Xiao concerns about the coastline. Coastline area holds enduring significance to China considering the economic development districts and their colonial past. Previously working as a photojournalist, Zhang Xiao cultivates an eye for the ordinary and adopts the documentary photographic style. His journey covers 18000 km along the coastline of China, from the mouth of Yalu river in Liaoning province to the mouth of Beilun river in Guangxi province.
As the frontier of Opening and Reform, the coastal areas underwent huge transformations at a stunning speed. They are the leading figure in early Chinese urbanization. The prosperity of coastline has attracted an influx of migrants who seek employment opportunities. Construction sites and factories soon took up the cities. Coastal areas epitomize the blessings and curses of urbanization. Zhang Xiao’s photos capture the quotidian moments by the ocean, some of the people gather together for entertaiment, while some are alone, sitting or standing, facing the ocean. Compared to Zhang Kechun, Zhang Xiao stands closer to his subjects. The concrete condition of individuals was suddenly brought to the viewers. Zhang Xiao’s work enjoys high saturation, high contrast and vivid colors. Instead of dwelling on a fixed principle, his images vary in presentations of people and nature, a sense of humor and lightheartedness are ubiquitous in “Coastline” series.
COASTLINE ZHANG XIAO
COASTLINE ZHANG XIAO
Yan Wang Preston “Mother River“
“ TO LANDSCAPE IS TO IMPOSE CERTAIN ORDER. LANDSCAPING INVOLVES WORKING WITH NATURAL PHENOMENA.” Liz Wells
the poetics of homecoming
Your childhood is a village. You will never cross its boundaries no matter how far you go. His days are lakes, his memories floating bodies. Adonis “Childhood“, Lines 70-72
Golf course at dusk, Borderland Su Jiehao
Rockery, Borderland Su Jiehao
Among all the namings of space/place,
memory is the most intimate one. Whereas, the temporality of the image seems to hamper an in-depth reading of spatiality in the glimpses of viewers. The image itself lacks memory, but it can reproduce and reconfigure memory operating on an established visual framework. Viewers revise their spatial knowledge and reorganize their personal memory through visual readings of images. Roaming on their homelands, the photographers of this chapter concentrate on the shifting landscapes that bear the personal memories. They reacquaint the places with cameras after years of living afar, mapping out their affective territories along their homecoming journeys. Pigeons, Borderland Su Jiehao
“Borderland” includes portraits, rural and urban landscapes and stills. They dance between the imagination and concrete, the fiction and reality, belonging and isolation, jointly producing a private pilgrimage to the recollected living past. Years of drifting makes Su trapped in a “border” state: not belonging to any place but suspended in between. This might be the condition that many urban dwellers can resonate with, especially in the context of China where cultural advance lags far behind economic progress. The mental in-betweenness plagues people who lived through the transformations. The desire to reconnect to the past, coupled with insecurity to searching for the belonging, makes “Borderland” a self-comforting memoir written for the whole lost generation.
Departing from a social documentary, Zhu Lanqing’s photos give a lyric-poetry-like rendering of this small island. The first photo of this series is a weathered self-portrait of she wearing her grandma’s traditional-style costume, pronouncing a solemn preamble. Dining table, abandoned lawn, grandma’s hairpin, the damp kitchen, old people enjoying the sunlight at the front yard… in a slow pace, Zhu shifts between the memory space and island imagery, composing a subjective history of the village, which is an affective territory interspersed with her personal landmarks.
DIRECTION REVERSE IN JOURNEY ZHU LANQING
“I was consciously avoiding the overflowing of personal sentiment and dissolving her nostalgia into the objects.� Zhu Lanqing
ATYPICAL TOPOGRAPHY
Time from Different Souces Cheng Xinhao
Cheng Xinhao’s “Time from Different Sources� documents a small ethnic minority village under the Jade Dragon mountain called Ciman village. Adopting an ethnographic approach, Cheng shot about the quotidian life in the village, illustrating how villagers live in this place and how they deal with their changing living environments. Sample collection of stones indicates how the landform has transformed geologically; topological juxtapositions of bridges, gates, fruits and traditional instruments, as a whole, make a rich visual archive for local cultures.
Time from Different Souces Cheng Xinhao
Time from Different Souces Cheng Xinhao
Time from Different Souces Cheng Xinhao
“Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.” —— John Berger A second look into Cheng’s photo would surprise us: a fictional narrative arises from Cheng’s seemingly mundane quotations. Employing what he called “polyphonic narrative”, Cheng divided it into 4 chapters, in which four “times from different sources unfold in parallel in everyday life, struggle against each other, and finally homogenized, or find their ways to live together. ”
Have You Been There? Ren Zeyuan, 2019 Click to view
For artist Ren Zeyuan, an untraceable story from the travel tale Peregrinação has initiated his project “Have You Been Here?”. Portuguese explorer/writer Fernão Mendes Pinto mentioned a number of times “Portas de Liampoo (a harbor belongs to the Ningbo City)” in his book Peregrinação. This unofficial East Asian trade center used to thrive in the 16th century, whose exact location remains a long-standing debate among historians. In the hope of tracing the 16-century Portuguese visitors, Ren came to two islands that are considered to be the real “Portas de Liampoo”. Two elder islanders narrated the legends of Portuguese widely circulated in the islands. Ren soon senses the possible fictional components of travel tale and folklore texts -while both of them can be regarded as the “archive”, the history itself is constructed through archives, a changing text constantly undergoing manipulations and modifications. Holding a skepticism towards the historiography, Ren photographed his trips to these two islands; he pairs the documentary photos with a modernized fictional lab, where a researcher is anatomizing the ancient skulls. By visually examining and imagining the traces based on the interviews and folklore texts, he posits a question to the Portuguese: “Have You Been There?”
Have You Been There? Ren Zeyuan
Have You Been There? Ren Zeyuan
Landscape For thousands of years, human beings live on and with landscapes. The long-held mutual gazes define and shape the interactions between the two, through which landscape mirrors the human’s desire and concern, while human adopts an order endowed by landscape. Humanlandscape relation, in a broad sense, is ultimately a metonymical epitome of self-other relation. That’s why we need to constantly draw on it and come back to it via every possible means, be it seeing, shooting or imagining. Experimenting with storytelling and conceptual frameworks, the photographers customize their own “landscapes”. Most works in this exhibition investigate the photographic representations of landscapes against the backdrop of urbanization in China, which is built on the destructive construction of landscapes. Without delivering a uniform depiction of nature, these artists reframe the landscapes of that period via inspirational stylistic treatments. The landscapes, in plural form, become a suggestive scale by which observers, activists and the most ordinary catch a glimpse into the larger picture. In modulating the sensitivities to subjects, the selected photographers negotiate the selves and crystallize their inner landscapes sometimes within, sometimes beyond the frames. Their works proceed the past phases that elaborate on direct social criticisms or radical formal revolution, opening a new ground that features pictorial rhetoric and visual indexes of times for future generations.