Song Chao by Thircuir Ltd.

Song Chao : Miners

Essay by Enoia Ballade All images selected fromSong Chaoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s works

Crazy Clouds Enoia Ballade I am flying away this morning. I have slipped into my travelling clothes, transforming myself into an unexceptional anonymous individual, leaving the clothes of my own existence, the ones that make up the real me, aside for a time. I am leaving Beijing with its endless avenues, its infinite spaces and roaring energy. I am heading for Paris, that once-glossy nineteenth century industrial-romantic capital city. Entering the huge under-belly of Beijing Airport I am swallowed up into the gigantic machinery of air transport. I am stripped, searched, told what to do and where to go. My body no longer belongs to me. It is engulfed into the continuous flow, the entirely human stream of impersonal bodies, all separately shown where to go, directed and disciplined so that they walk submissively on. The awkward moment of self-effacement. This is what I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like about flying. Yet the experience also offers me intense solitude. Because I have become a commodity, I am invisible. Entirely engulfed in the flow of other people, my body finds a space of complete seclusion. After going through the formalities in a strange daze, I finally get to my seat. The plane takes off, slowly rising into the air in its long awaited ascent. For the first time today something has been accomplished. Cradling myself comfortably into my journey, I close my eyes. 5

My friend Song Chao drifts into my mind, emerging from the clouds of tiredness and the cold and clammy languor of the plane. A few days ago I found myself agreeing to write about him. Quite a lot has been written about him already. His work has been published in magazines and exhibited in museums. I have carefully read through all these reviews, as I always do before writing a text. In the mists of my airborne drowsiness I see the watching eyes of thousands of strangers around me and feel the strangeness of the incommunicability of things. These eyes honestly and warm-heartedly liked Song Chao’s work, they have made him famous, bringing him all such celebrity offers in today’s world – the media coverage, the prizes, the money… But for me these eyes are blind, they just see Song Chao “the miner”, “the man from China”, “the photographer”. So many misunderstandings, so many misconceptions! I am becoming a reluctant witness to a strange game of Chinese Whispers created by our information technology. In this system gradually things are repeated, emphasised, distorted and then vanish. Information, in this infinite universe of human communication, is often like the mirage the thirsty traveller sees as he crosses the desert - only the deceptive reflection of a distant truth. The first time I met Song Chao I was surprised. I had seen his work and had already been struck and moved by its power and humanity. We decided to have lunch at a restaurant where he had booked a small private room. After ordering a generous list of dishes, we started to talk. In this way I got to know a deeply humane person. Tender, curious and brave, with great strength and, at the same time, the fragility and even shyness of the artist who has not yet realized the work that lies within himself. 6

Song Chao’s story is simple but telling it one sees how easily it can be stolen from him, so close is it to the myths of our modern novels. I think this is the first reason his work is misunderstood: his life in itself is so picturesque that it hides the truth of his existence. Song Chao was born to peasant parents in a small village in Shandong Province in October 1979. That is such a recent date to our Western minds, yet it is distant if we see it in the accelerated time of Chinese history. He grew up peacefully in the Chinese countryside, far from the turmoil of China’s awakening. As a young adult he started looking for a job and joined his brother down at the state-run coal mine in his region. In their spare time the pitmen could develop their interest in culture and art. A place was found for him by an uncle, a generous, sensitive and educated art professor at the mine. A photographer himself, he introduced Song Chao to the instrument that has never since left his hands: the camera. Song Chao took a series of portraits which have led him to France and the United States, from the “Rencontres d’Arles” to Time Magazine. This was a magic encounter, the fate of a family bound up with social history, the fate of an individual bound up with that of his family. It was here that the “miner to photographer” myth began. The story of his life has been written and rewritten until it begins to sound like a cheap nineteenth-century French novel. Yet Song Chao, like so many others, is simply an actor-witness living at a joyful time, an era of optimism bordering on hysteria; modern Chinese society emerging from poverty to share the follies of the modern world. History drives us just as it is driven by us. But it tends to erase things, being a long process of simplification. If Song Chao is reduced to a simple interpreter of Chinese history, or to 7

his own autobiography, he is robbed of his own exceptional quality. Is my birthplace, is the path I follow in life, sufficient to describe the essence of my being or what defines me as truly alive? To tell our own story is already to lie, to rub out certain truths as I edit my own story using fake landmarks and logics. Our existence, surely, is made up of ruptures, of fragmented and contradictory moments, of fleeting thoughts, of emotions and experience that appear and disappear. To tell my story I will have to ignore them but I know for certain that it is here in these tiny spaces that I become an infinite being. No doubt these forgotten moments contain what spurred Song Chao into action. The countryside, the mine and the city are insignificant compared to his relation with his uncle, the master who showed him the hard road to his own creations, and with the men he photographed. Song Chaoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main motivation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; his love, his tenderness, his eye â&#x20AC;&#x201C; is to be found in infinite moments of everyday life. Though they seem to disappear without trace they leave clues for the careful investigator, fingerprints slowly revealing the grey shapeless outline of another human being. It is here that you will find the photographer, the artist struggling with his camera to hand back to humanity its stolen dignity.

It is cold. I am trying to find a comfortable position. The man next to me needs to get something out of his suitcase, disturbing for a moment the apparent calm. Hard plastic doors click, interrupting my thoughts. For an instant I am conscious of where I am, until music sends me back to my drifting thoughts. Once again I abandon the weight of the lifeless manageable article that is my human body.

Ideas slide by, images by Song Chao like passing clouds in the sky. Men are standing staring at me. This one looks amused, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s laughing, that one is weary and willing to share all his secrets. Here they are free, no longer tied to their destinies, no longer pitworkers, but human figures borne along on the tide of their fate. They shine like mirrors reflecting you and me, they seem to be talking to us. I think again wearily of all the misunderstandings surrounding these photographsâ&#x20AC;Ś. How blind we are. In the many articles I have read about Song Chao he is seen only as a miner photographer documenting life down in the pit, a messenger bringing our civilised and secure world images of another era, an age of sacrificed and suffering flesh. The human eye is sometimes capable of such vile complacency, revelling in displays of poverty. Where does our fascination with miners come from? They are a living demonstration of how society can deny its own humanity. The pit-worker is one of the most eloquent symbols of modernity in that he reflects the world as we have seen it evolve in our time, humanity becoming relegated to the notion of a human machine. We have changed the social status of man, arranged body and soul in a different pattern and, gradually, we have invented a society in which the economic rationale has pushed out the natural man. Our utopias claim, so we accept our condition more easily, that this is a miracle, that our freedom is greater and that our standards of living are steadily improving. There are very few spaces left where the truth gets through to us, making us uncomfortable. The miner, the industrial worker, the victim, are all the visible flip side of our social machinery. They remind us of what we would gladly forget. The pitworker is us, is me.

Since the beginning of the day my body has been used. All along I have felt like a serial number, an object, a commodity. My body is no longer mine. This trip has turned me into the archetype of modern man as defined by our society. How can I so easily give up on myself and on what makes me human? I lose my face, I lose my possibility of otherness. A voluntary deportee, I temporarily give up my free will and the ownership of my body. Confronted with the violence of anonymity, of this body erased and made impersonal, this body which is nothing more than “the holder of a right to exist, among other rights”, as Michel Foucault writes so aptly, what can be more human than to give each person a body and a face? With his series of portraits Song Chao frees the exploited subject, the non-human human regains his fundamental freedom. His serialised, rationalised and disembodied body, the productive machine enslaved to its faith and culture, falls away revealing his true face: that of someone who loves, suffers, breathes, sweats, smells and grunts. The body appears first, represented in the wide range of its sensations: dirty, clean, hidden, exposed, powerful; tired and worn; hopeful or ready to surrender; then in each picture the faces burst out, the eyes are focused, the necks are knotted, the mouths expressive, each one revealed in the total fragility of its uniqueness. “I am alive!” each portrait claims, and though I work, though I suffer in this world, I am still free. A disenchanted freedom, an original freedom, that makes me equal to all things. I am tree, I am stone, I am earth, I am sky, and even the sky is sky, cloud is cloud, as I am a man. His eye is not critical: he is freeing, not judging. When does he raise the question of the mine? Never. Who does he take pictures of? His 10

friends and their families, people he knows and loves. Song Chao works on the essential living matter, the shapeless dough, that binds all things together. He is not trying to produce objective thought about society, he does not simply observe, he is himself an actor in the process of interacting with his models. He expresses a link, the truth of these men who come alive, emerging out of the paper they look us straight in the eye, seeing deep into us. Song Chao adjusts his lens on this fragile balance between nature and culture, opening a space for understanding between East and West. Two schools of thought meet, greet, and shed light on each other. The Bible links original sin to the flesh, giving rise to over three thousand five hundred years of Manichean thinking, founding Western tradition in a binary struggle between good and evil, body and spirit, beauty and ugliness; whereas Chinese philosophy, from the same period under the Chou dynasty, bases its understanding of the world on a totally different model. It assumes that man has two souls: po, the animal soul, and hun the spiritual soul. The first appears at conception and stays with the body after death. The second is born when the child is weaned and goes to heaven after death to become the ancestral spirit honoured by his descendants. The theology of the early Chinese dynasties sees Man as dual: a product of nature, of the force of nature, but also a cultural being with his own identity and action, whose shadow after death is ritually honoured as the trace of his earthly existence. If our fundamental humanist conception is the superiority of mind over body, and thus of Man over nature, ancient Chinese philosophy postulates the fundamental ubiquity of the human being. From 11

this point of view the work of Song Chao is typically Chinese. With his portraits he unravels contradictions and exposes bodies which from the depths of their social identity – here that of the miner – come back as free men to tell us their truth. With their bodies, their flesh, they also reveal how they are feeling. As my mind runs on, an unexpected memory disturbs the thread of my thoughts. It is a quote from Yohji Yamamoto that I wrote down in a notebook long ago. “Hatred and love are the foundations of life. What is both the theme of life and its biggest problem in life is knowing if man is able to recognize and accept all aspects of being human, such as beauty and ugliness, sadness and anger, and having felt them, still be able to love”. I smile, I understand. I can hear the firm warm voice of Song Chao answering: “Yes, I can.”

Interrupting my meditation, the meal – or what has been designated as such – is served. Again everything is standardised, weighed and quantified, everything reduced to its cash value, a necessary abstraction to punctuate my trip, to feed the body, that in order to be soothed in this confined space must be maintained both morally and physically. Rather than food, what we are served is quantified need with the idea of flavour added rather than real flavour. My freedom is reduced to a binary choice: chicken or beef? I tear open the hot metal container and the cold plastic one. My body receives the satiating dose of salt and sweet as decided by the rational engineers of economic travel. Finally I am allowed a coffee, 12

the only product, strangely enough, that slightly reminds me of my former life, the one I led before this trip, before the airport, at a time when my body still legitimately belonged to me, or at least when what I sensed of my body owed more to freedom than to the weight of culture. After this small mealtime theatre a period of time that I cannot quantify ends. The lights go out and my body can at last stop this strange mechanical ballet where I feel like a robot, acting against my will, undistinguishable from the dozens of passengers around me. The strange and bewildering mist of travel engulfs me again. All I can feel in my mouth, in my body, is the cloying taste left by the coffee. Here I am alone again. My eyes close and I return to my strange reverie of words and images. Art and thought seem to me to exist on two levels, like my coffee. What my body senses first is its colour, its warmth, its taste as it goes down my throat, and the cup in which it is served. Then there is the stage when the coffee is no longer in front of me but inside me. It loses its natural otherness and penetrates my cells, the caffeine seeping into my blood, the fragrance percolating into me. In the same way, after reading a book or seeing a work of art there is that moment of magic when it becomes part of me, of my organs, of my blood. The images and words pass through my skin, slowly moving from body to mind, filling the space between myself as body and my life as an intelligent sensitive being. Matter seems to disappear and I am connected to an invisible universe. The ghostly shadows of Song Chaoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s portraits come toward me. Now I no longer see them as miners. That is forgotten, swallowed up, and 13

behind the apparent obviousness of the pictures the moving savour of my friendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gaze gradually emerges. These men who get up every morning and look at their lives are me, are us, simply a soul, a life, a body beyond the social illusion, beyond culture, each just another living being who is born and dies and who between these two events is filled only with a natural obstinacy to remain in the world. The skin of the images splits, the sharp silhouettes that appeared so clearly the materials that seemed so rough, disappear. All I see now is those powerful eyes watching me, the weariness of the burden of living, the weight of the body, the power of the knotted muscles and the strength of mind, struggling together, or in opposition, to make a man of me. I am facing the stage of the theatre of human feelings. The cries, the joys, the fears and groans of the brave echo in my mind. These men live and suffer with all their humanity. They suffer from living, their suffering is mine. Everything makes sense, the separate elements come together and a truth appears. Here at the fragile point where flesh and spirit meet, man appears at last in his own nakedness. Far from the illusions of the social world, away from the hidden violence of modern society, from the depths of these photographs manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s original suffering explodes in our faces. We, who for the past few centuries have fled suffering, have created societies evolving into utopias from which suffering is absent. A fragile human being, wanting to convince himself he is immortal, protects himself, wards off suffering and lives sated in security. Man here is like a spoiled child crying in the night. History is revealed as a long mad dash to escape the inevitable. We are human, we suffer 14

from having to live, from wanting to achieve our heartsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; desires, from love, from abandon, from losing those we love, from death. Song Chaoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photographs take us back to this basic truth. This is his strength and his impertinence, because in doing so he is breaking a taboo. He displays this consubstantial suffering boldly before us, and each man who stands before me in his portraits is beautiful. This is humanity in the vastness of its similarities and differences. To accept suffering as part of living is also to accept living in a world of otherness. It is to give someone else his proper place, to restore his dignity, and this is what Song Chaoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is doing.

My legs hurt and my body is tired. Where am I? However beautiful my thoughts are when they carry me away, they cut me off from the present. The noise of engines buzzes in my head. A metallic voice announces our imminent arrival. I am no longer tired, the promise that release is near refreshes me like a sweet, cool breeze. Thus I finish my reveries and the plane lands, my body is released and my mind too, in a way. I run out, finally having reached the goal of my journey: to meet the woman I love.

Cao Genjun

Li Zhongyin

Yang Guanlan

Hu Wei

Feng Lin

Zhang Qingdai

Zhang Wenbao

Song Binjun

Zhou Chuanyun

Liu Lingchuan

Yao Yonglun

Yi Huailu

Yang Shaomin

Luo Guanglei

Hu Xinglun

Yan Changuang

Yan Dezheng

Li Dazheng

Li Jiming

Liu Benmiao

Zhang Hongling

Li Jiguo

Wang Huaifang

Ren Futan

Wang Jinfa

Zhang Mingxing

Liu Defeng

Hu Weibin

Chen Jinping

Li Guoyin

Li Chankun

Wu Shijun

Xu Chenye

Ding Shengli

Shi Qinian

Liu Chongliang

Guo Xintian

Wei Taixian

Zhang Xueying

Diao Guangfu

Zhang Detuan

Yu Zhenyuan

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Enoia Ballade Essay Texte

Enoia Ballade Translation Traduction

Celia Izoard