Chen Jiagang : Utopia
Essay by Jeremie Thircuir All images selected from Chen Jiagang’s works
The Age of Utopias Jeremie Thircuir
“Water can carry a ship, but it can also sink it”. By quoting this piece of traditional Chinese wisdom, Chen Jiagang hands us the key that is needed to understand his work. At first glance, Chen Jiagang’s photographs may seem distant, cold, purely aesthetic; on hearing this proverb however, a door is opened and meaning gradually appears inside this complex and delicate work — a work that is eminently contemporary and profoundly human. To understand one of Chen Jiagang’s photographs is to enter the heart of a vast universe, to slowly unravel the thread of an internal investigation, to leave the apparent beauty of the images in order to reconstruct the secret path of the mind that leads to another kind of beauty, the deeper beauty of meaning. “Water can carry a ship, but it can also sink it”. The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi’s first book of writings is entitled you (游). In Chinese, this word has several meanings. It is generally translated as “walking”, “strolling”, “moving freely”, but it can also mean “to swim”. For Zhuangzi, swimming has a highly symbolic meaning in that
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it teaches one to let oneself be carried by the currents and eddies, and to remain in an open balance amid the tumult of water flowing around one. Water becomes a symbol of life’s movements, of our environment and of how we interact with it. It is the physical mirror that reflects the struggle of man caught in the flow of his own existence. Much of Chen Jiagang’s work consists in exploring this movement of History over the body of the individual. All his photographs are made of wide shots, representing monumental spaces inside which the individual seems lost, a witness to the issues immortalized by the artist. Thus begins the exploration of an imaginary space where opposites meet, creating between them a permanent balance between power and decay, success and failure, life and death. This is the first recurrent obsession of the work of Chen Jiagang, observer of the movement of human utopias, which he watches come and go with the changing tide of events. “Water can carry a ship, but it can also sink it”. In traditional Chinese thought, man is associated with fire, whereas water is the feminine element — symbol of fertility, of force and of gentleness. Thus by choosing this sentence, Chen Jiagang also gives us the second key to his work in which woman plays a fundamental role. It is she who embodies humanity, faced with its destiny. In this she assumes several aspects: fertile
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woman, beloved woman, idealized woman, the embodiment of beauty, of love, but also that of the wildest passions and desires. Chen Jiagang reflects on the Chinese iconography of her from the twentieth century, on her symbolic meaning. He sees her as deeply ambivalent, an incarnation of creation, of the future, of childbearing, but also as femme fatale, dressed in her traditional Qipao, the caricature of a character from a Shanghainese film noir of the 1930’s, she becomes the embodiment of the desires that lead man to his fall. Thus woman, taken in her iconographic meaning as a social image, becomes a symbol of the world’s complexity. This great movement of life, leading us from birth unto death, in which every thing contains its opposite, is one of the fundamental themes of the artist’s work. A former architect and property developer, Chen Jiagang found fame and fortune before losing everything. Both due to his personal life, as well as to the evolution of his country and that of the world he lives in, he has lived through many entropic cycles. Photography gave him a new beginning but also the distance required to understand himself. In Chen Jiagang’s photography one finds much in common with the films of Zhang Yimou. Spectacular and often exaggerated, their works use a pre-existing imagery and a known historical framework as the basis for developing their own language. This language goes beyond contradictions and is organized around the point where individual destiny
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and the outside world meet and find equilibrium, where the cultural and the natural confront each other. Both the artist and filmmaker’s creations, although rooted in traditional Chinese thought, are deeply relevant. They provide us with a new reading of our modernity, with a redefinition of how we see the challenges of the contemporary world. They show a relationship between Man and Nature, which fits in contradiction to the western humanistic conception. The image of all-powerful Man, standing at the centre of all action, is opposed by that of Man evolving within the limits of his environment. His powers are restricted. As soon as he forgets this, he is hopelessly reminded of his own limits. Any thing, however enormous, can fall and disappear. It is this invisible thread, this intangible wall that human desires tirelessly come up against. For Chen Jiagang, man always exists in correlation with his environment, be it natural or social, he cannot remove human destiny from its external reality. He makes us witness this meeting point between the individual and the world around him, reminding us that it is on this natural borderline that the greatest moments of human life are played out. In his capacity to overthrow the world or succumb to it, Man exists in this permanent interaction between an inner and outer universe. “Water can carry a ship, but it can also sink it�.
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Chen Jiagang is a photographer of Time. His work is built on games of anachronisms that confuse us. Taken in the present, his photographs show us a past coming back towards us. From past power to the abandonment of once grand factories, from purity to the alteration of the landscape, the movement of time is evident in each of Chen Jiagang’s photographs. The historical basis of his labour is thus broken, creating the timelessness of his works. His subject is not limited to Chinese history, but extends well beyond it, seeking to define human nature in the motions of its desires and ambitions. Chen Jiagang inserts the finitude of human time into the time of transcendence, the time of what is happening when nothing is happening. The work confronts a being who is lost against the elements, alone against human history, against the obsolescence of his desires, against the irreversible and immutable time of nature that flows unrelentingly. She is an anachronistic being, this woman, dressed as if she could be in the time when these factories were great. Once again she blurs time and the image. In their motionless long shots, Chen Jiagang’s photos reintroduce the time of the gaze into the contemplation of the work. Contemplation here takes on its original sense: the gaze of the Roman augur on the Templum, a rectangular frame drawn in the sky in anticipation of divine manifestation. The artist draws, with his frame, this contemplative space, and in so confronting us with the growing artificiality of the
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world, he invites us to see another hidden truth emerging beyond the apparent simplicity of the first image. Seduced at the first sight of the work, this first instance of our gaze sends us back to the awakening ambitions of an emerging utopia. It sails between the landscape and the female figures wandering among the steel, the concrete, and the rubble. In the course of this contemplation, the dream goes out and dims, the plasticity of the image gradually disappears allowing meaning to emerge. To enhance this effect, Chen Jiagang aims to expand the frame, enlarging the field of vision and perspective. The result of wanting to immerse the public reinforces the emptiness of the scenes he immortalises. The image is staged, down to the smallest detail, it is drawn before being engraved on film. His photographs, resulting from a montage of several shots, make the viewer enter the image. In order to obtain the largest and most accurate prints, he uses a camera that he has specially designed and had manufactured for this purpose, and which, is at present, the largest view camera in the world. The Third Front is the starting point of his photographic work. This strategic policy in modern Chinese history dates back to the early 1960’s. China had just broken off its ties with Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. To its south, the Americans were increasing their presence in Vietnam. For Mao Zedong, the economy of the Middle Kingdom, whose activity was concentrated at its borders, was under threat.
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Consequently the industrial forces were moved towards the centre of the country, to the provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan. Modern factories, power stations and new mines were developed, cities were built, and millions of workers flocked to them in order to preserve the power of Chinese productivity from a hypothetical invasion. Nearly twenty years later, China opened up and the Third Front was abandoned. Most of the factories have since been deserted and left in that state. Exploring the ghosts of a past utopia where all that remains are traces of a faded era, Chen Jiagang tries to recover the atmosphere and memory of these places. Vast steel and concrete factories in full decay, empty warehouses, railway stations from another time, murky ponds, tangles of rusted metal structures, piles of coal, piles of pipes and sacks of raw materials‌ The gigantism of the past is as though it were fossilized, and all that remains is the graveyard of human ambition facing its dreams of grandeur, its desire to produce for a better society. Colour seems to have vanished over the years. All that remains is a dull grey world, barely illuminated by the heat of molten metal. From one image to another, the viewer tries to break through the fog of steam and pollution that blurs the landscape and carries him through time. The presence of women is the only thing that breaks the geometric arrangement of this mineral dÊcor. They give
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a scale to our eyes, the vast landscapes become immense, the factories even colder. It is through them that we project ourselves inside the photograph. Ghostly and unreal women, they seem absent, their interaction with the environment is minimal. Always outside of the action, their absence justifies their presence. Semantic tools, their role is functional, they are more signifying than signified. They stand out from the photographed place through their colour scheme, and stand half way between the image and its viewer. Their faces, which are turned towards the viewer, cause him to question the meaning of the scene he is observing. Iconic women, they wear the Qipao, the traditional dress of the 1930’s, or are dressed in dungarees and fleece jackets, the clothing that the working masses were forced to wear during the Cultural Revolution. They remind us of the women on 1930’s advertising posters, and of those on communist propaganda placards. They anchor the image in our society of desire: desire for greatness, desire for perfection and consumption. Objectified women, their bodies disappear to become the unconscious embodiment of the desire for social success. Anachronistic and dramatic, these figures remove the work’s documentary appearance, drawing it into the realm of fiction. Woman is the ultimate utopia. In his more recent photographic series, Chen Jiagang has moved away from cities and factories to be closer to nature.
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He has left industrial confusion for the simplicity of Chinese landscapes. As always, Chen Jiagang contradicts the first feeling the image gives us by his rendering of it. Under the guise of a perfect and idyllic picture-postcard Nature, one finds once again the obsessions of the photographer of the Third Front. It is a decrepit representation of a Nature from another time. It is aged. The images’ colours are dull. One can hardly distinguish the passing of the seasons. Weather has filtered out the colours. It is the memory of an idealized nature that is dying. The forests are immersed in bodies of water, trees are broken and twisted. In line with his work, he shows us the limits of our society of production. We have never produced so much, we have never destroyed so much. Never have so many nascent acts produced so many acts of death. Chen Jiagang observes the wild dreams of humanity, researches them, seeks to understand them. More interested in the time of action than by its outcome, his reaction to the world is devoid of any violence. He humbly puts humanity back in its place, faced with the desires for modernity that oppose the cultural to the natural order of things. He gives true scale back to these phenomena in their relation to time, integrating humanity into the flow of things that transcend it. “Water can carry a ship, but it can also sink it�.
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The Great Third Front
Cooling Water Gap, detail
Outdoor Steel Plant
Suspension
Depths of a Factory
Smelting Furnace
Pipelines
Bridge
Fairyland
Conveyor
The Third Front
Cable Bridge, detail
Washing
Cold
Corn field
Strom
6000 Volt Rail
Conveyor Belt
Silk Road
Castle, detail
Village
Moon
Moving
Sunrise
Fog City
Bridge in the Water, detail
Temptation
Resurrection, detail
Pond
Strangers
River Bank
Memories
Rainbow
Sunset
Ashore
Abandoned Boat
(Index) Mine Pool
Frosted Dormitory
Intruder
Wedding on the Street
Flag
Who are the Miners
Thorn
Rotating Mine Pool
Afterwards
Wind
Changshou
Nitrogen plant
Mirage
Fountain
Autumn Leaves
Beauty
Fishing Boats
Sunset
Observatory
The Cold Forest
Jinghai
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Thircuir Limited. Editor Editeur
Enoia Ballade Essay Texte
Jeremie Thircuir Translation Traduction
Thomas Bartz
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