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Zheng Yaohua
Introduction Artist Statement and Notes On Their Sites Thumbnails Reviews
Introduction
Artist statement
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artist notes
believe that some seemingly inconsequential personal memories stir people more frequently than significant historical events do. I also believe that most people’s lives appear completely uneventful to others. At the end of 2006, after reading for the second time Joel Sternfeld’s On This Site, a book juxtaposing landscape photographs with texts about a series of tragic events in American collective memory, I decided to make a book for another type of memories. I started photographing the sites where people’s private memories were attached, recording memories that might be meaningful only to their owners.
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his brochure is about Zheng Yaohua’s photography project, a photobook, On Their Sites: Landscapes with Private Monuments, in which landscapes and still lifes are juxtaposed with texts. These texts record average people’s bagatelles and memories that are attached to the photographed places or objects located in and around New York City. As Zheng has stated, this work was inspired by the book On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam by Joel Sternfeld, and imitates its form (even its title). Unlike the ones Sternfeld dealt with, Zheng’s “stories” have no chance of becoming a part of history. However, this fact also serves as one of the motivations for this project. Zheng admits that although he has not been making an album about immigrants, his immigration background has had an effect on his subject building and the clues he chose to focus on.
Although “image-text” has not been a fantastic new idea, it naturally becomes a tool for a project that borrows a form of communication from tourism, — on the Lion’s Mound, looking down at the lush plain, the battlefield Waterloo, where the topography has changed long ago, the guide counts the 47,000 dead or wounded and then the tourists sigh. The form helps to construct the project and to query the difference of reliability and significance to treat depictions of collective/ public memory and individual/private memory as both of them are recorded in detail.
Most photographs in this project were taken on 4” x 5” negative films. The project began in 2007 and is now approaching its goal of 25 sets (a set consists of a piece of memoir and a photograph of the related site). Some sets have been selected for photography exhibitions, including Intimate Distance (Qart Gallery, New York, 2007) and 4 Photo Show (456 Gallery, New York, 2008).
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heng Yaohua was born in Shanghai, China in 1962. He studied Chinese language and literature at Shanghai Normal University where he received his Bachelor’s degree in 1985. He has been a video editor, motion graphic designer and a writer for more than a decade before starting to treat photography as a serious tool for his art creation. Zheng currently lives and works in New York City, U.S., where he has to be merely an on-my-way-to/from-office photographer, but as serious as he has been.
Contact: zheng.yaohua.zeyez@gmail.com More works: zeyez.net Bio/CV: zeyez.net/bio.html
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The ongoing project has also given me a chance to revisit this experience. One unconsciously seeks an awareness of being anchored. By attaching memories to places or objects where he/she settles or tarries, one builds the relationship of mutual recogni-
tion and confirmation with the world. An intersection, a mailbox or a tiny thorn therefore becomes his/her vessel of private memory or monument of personal history. I was amazed by some details while recording for this growing collection and was finally convinced that they had been or would be the irrefutable evidence of one’s life in his/her memory. To simulate the look of uneventful lives, I waited for sunny days to photograph on the sites where various intimate memories were interspersed, hoping to avoid painting the images with the likely mawkish photographic expressions of a know-it-all. 4”x5” film, as deep depth of field as possible, wide framing, nonhierarchical composition, by which I offered audience a chance to retrace the artist’s searching and, thereby, his imagination. When brightening the upper midtones, lowering its contrast, the highly detailed realistic sun drenched images were washed down, which offered me a world of memory, of lucid dreams. However, I cannot tell to whom the dreams belong. September 12, 2010
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re those real stories or fictions?”
I’d like to ask back instead of answering, “Would you ask Sternfeld the same question about his On This Site?”
This reciprocal questioning has been a component of this project.
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ternfeld’s book revealed a certain way of reading photos. Viewers not only project emotions onto a photo that they’re viewing, they also project specific objects onto it when they believe or guess that a missing element may have visually existed in the scene. This is one of the ways that humans view the world and some photographs have worked this way. Photograph what is seen while focus on what has visually disappeared.
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don’t think the strategy of entrusting viewers with the task of drawing a final image only applies to literature exclusively. Photography shares this strategy. Sternfeld’s works did, and I’m following his footsteps in this project.
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ates! It seems like a sin in Western Culture if you forget certain dates, birthdays, first dates, or wedding anniversaries. People fully dress events up with historic attire to make them important. The time stamps are the bow ties. I’d like to clarify that in this project, most of the dates came from my research on the internet, not from exact memories of the protagonists. However, I have always had doubts about the necessity of my perfectionism.
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love Ci, Sanqu, haiku and narrative songs accompanied on a guitar. I like Ernest Hemingway, but not because of his taciturn heroes; I also like Heinrich Böll and his nagging group portraits. I like William Eggleston and Jeff Wall not because of the color of the former and the flying papers or talking dead soldiers of the latter.
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am fascinated by those simple, clear and direct ways of expression as well as their results. I love to see that things keep their basic appearances. Nothing is protruded and nothing is carelessly blurred as background. Yes, something like scenes and lives in the early afternoon sun.
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large format camera helps to make simple and clear images. That is why I shifted to a wooden 4” x 5”. On a well tilted ground glass I see mysteries and undercurrents.
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hotograph corresponding figures? Every now and then, I think it is the trend. But I have been worrying about ringers for ones that photography has already created.
However, the corresponding figures might have been there and nourished by viewers with their imagination. October, 4-25, 2009
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Norah Jones Dario Nardella Grammys Alley Pond Park Long couch Black ducks Lat. 40°45’12.55”N, Long. 73°4 4’32.28”W
#3
Alley Pond Park, Douglaston, Queens, New York, 2008 Dario Nardella, a 46-year-old sanitation worker, insists that Norah Jones sat on the long couch on February 20, 2003, just a few days before she received eight Grammy Awards. Nardella has his reasons when arguing with his coworkers: 1, he can recall what he ate for his brunch and whom he chatted with afterwards on that day; 2, he even talked with Miss Jones when she previously walked by down to the lawn, telling her no black ducks yet in the mere; 3, three days later, he watched the Grammys for the first time and learned the girl’s name. Surely he wouldn’t forget a face in just three days.
Dario Nardella has been watching the Grammy’s every year since 2003.
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Ring Dexter Evanson Keene H.L. Return package Lat. 40°42’55.68”N, Long. 73°37’56.29”W
73 Sealey Avenue, Hempstead, Nassau, New York, 2008 Dexter Evanson reshipped a tennis cap in the right color with a ring included on October 18, 2007, and emailed a notice to a Keene, one of his eBay customers, with the note that he found the ring in Keene’s return package when he opened it. Keene responded four days later to say thanks and that the ring could belong to anyone but him/ her. Mr. Evanson soon replied that neither did he think the ring belonged to anybody he knew since he had never had a helper and he opened and sealed every package with his own hands; “thank you, though truly no need to send it back”. Keene asked in the next mail that whether Mr. Evanson knew of an H.L. as the letters engraved on the ring were possibly initials for a name. Evanson didn’t.
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Climber Warren Dream Time of college Lat. 40°45’0.72”N, Long. 73°56’23.32”W
Queens Plaza, Long Island City, Queens, New York, 2008 “I run among the steel frames on the roofs sometimes, without missing steps or stumbling. I dreamed the dream... frequently. I got used to it. It always woke me up in the morning, except once when I dreamed that I was dreaming the dream, getting up, taking a shower... I wasn’t! It doesn’t sound that crazy if you dreamed you’re dreaming, does it? ... I dreamed it again once or twice this year, and that’s kind of weird.”
#23
A man who introduced himself as Warren talked in a New Jersey pub in the spring of 2008 about his time of college in the late 90’s. He used to take the subway to school via the elevated Queens Plaza station every day.
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Burn Ellison’s Laundry sorter Metro Lat. 40°35’1*.**N, Long. 74°08’5*.**W
Beard Street, Staten Island, New York, 2008 On the evening of September 26, 2004, Gladys Ellison, a 43-year-old nurse, found a Metro, dated the 26th of the previous month, in the gap between the washing machine and the laundry sorter in the Ellisons’ basement. Around the same time the paper was published, five months after their son, Sgt. Eric Ellison, 21, died in Gartan, Baghdad, her husband, Mart Ellison, a 49-year-old veteran, got a burn on his right shin by accident in their garage. A week after finding the newspaper, Gladys Ellison moved in with her mother in Vermont where she stayed for 14 months.
#1
Man Burns Self after Son’s Death in Iraq
FLORIDA A father who had just been told his Marine son was killed in combat in Iraq set himself on fire in a Marine Corps van and suffered severe burns yesterday, police said. Three U.S. Marines went to a house in Hollywood and told the parents of a 20-year-old Marine that their son died Tuesday in Najaf. The father, Carlos Arredondo, 44, then walked into the open garage, picked up a can of gasoline, a propane tank and a lighting device and set the van on fire. (AP) Rachel Ellison, 16, the - Metro, New York Edition August 26, 2004
daughter of the Ellison’s, mentioned the above circumstances in her schoolwork, by her parents’ okay.
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Butt Juan Vargas Garbage can Saddam Hussein Execution Lat. 40°43’4.21”N, Long. 73°57’27.79”W
Bedford Avenue and N 7th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, 2009 At around 10 p.m., December 29, 2006, Juan Vargas, 19, was talking on his cell phone with his mother in the Dominican Republic when the smoke began to reek from the garbage can where his cigarette stub smoldered. A police officer got out of the patrol car that was pulled over across the street, approached with a bottle of water in his hand and poured the water over the red ash. Vargas was about to worry about his immigration status as the officer was called back by his partner who stayed in the cruiser. “Saddam…” said the partner. They must have been listening to the radio or something. Vargas figured later, it was Saddam’s hanging that saved him.
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Saddam Hussein was executed on December 29, 2006, 10:05 p.m. ET (December 20, 2006, 6:05 a.m. Baghdad Time). However, there was a one or two hour delay before the news was broadcast all over the world. Juan Vargas seemed to have been mistaken.
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Bag Anya Hindmarch Not sleeping Hard rain Explosion Lat. 40°46’2.99”N, Long. 73°58’54.95”W
Whole Food, Columbus Circle, Midtown Manhattan, New York, 2009 We howled with laughter while we waited, the big rain causing flooding. Three of us got nine Anya’s bags, our payoff for not sleeping. A block away from my office there was something exploding. So I got off early, with my Anya’s bags, payoff for not sleeping. I remembered the howling, but, why were we laughing? Anyway, each of us got three Anya’s bags, payoff for our not sleeping. This anonymous verse must be
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talking about the launch of Anya Hindmarch’s I’m Not a Plastic Bag bags in the Whole Food stores on July 18, 2007, the same day torrential rain hit the city in the morning, and the steam pipe in Midtown Manhattan ruptured in a thunderous explosion at the evening rush of that day.
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Beads Emily Kwong Bridge opening Lat. 40°4 4’30.14”N, Long. 73°52’40.28”W
The Overpass of Long Island Railroad, 88th Street near 43rd Avenue, Elmhurst, Queens, New York, 2008 After school on June 26, 2006, Emily Kwong, a fifth-grader of PS89 Elmhurst, went through the bridge opening and lost three plastic beads from her wrist band. During dinnertime, Emily found out the family would be moving to the West Coast in a month. The next day, when immersing herself in bidding farewell to her friends, Emily forgot to search for her beads even though she passed through the opening twice. The summer vacation started on June 28.
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On the first day of the next academic year, my daughter, one of Emily Kwong’s friends, mentioned the lost beads when I walked her to school. We paused at the opening for a while.
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THUMBNAILS Mailbox Fuying Lin Shanghai North Dakota Lat. 40°46’0.30”N, Long. 73°4 4’21.11”W
248th St, Qns, NY, 2008 10 years ago Ms. Lin Dropped a letter with a decision into this mailbox. She wanted to stay in the USA...
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Lie Playground Lat. 40°45’55.71”N, Long. 73°4 4’25.73”W
School playground, Qns, NY, 2007 A teen girl helped her friend to make a little lie...
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9/11 Stuart Fergus Sony Phillips Samsung Lat. 40°38’27.45”N, Long. 73°5 4’23.73”W
88th St, Qns, 2008 Mr. Fergus didn’t know about the attack until 4:15 p.m. that day. He bought a new TV afterwards...
#9
Whimper Whisper Lat. 40°45’40.07”N, Long. 73°4 8’33.17”W
Sanford Ave, Qns, NY 2007 On the bus a whisper turned into a whimper...
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Thorn Yvonne Rawson Suture Fliers Lat. 40°46’14.90”N, Long. 73°4 4’2.47”W
Pembroke Ave, Qns, 2008 Mrs. Rawson missed the last meeting of historic image lovers in the community...
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Chin ZenaShhh Inviting Beardlessness Lat. 40°45’12.95”N, Long. 73°58’54.05”W
Subway station, Mhtn, NY, 2008 ZenaShhh kept a photo missent to his/her Bluetooth phone...
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Smoking window Smoke-Free Air Act Lat. 40°45’7.94”N, Long. 73°58’50.19”W
East 41st St, Mhtn, NY, 2008 There was a smoker behind one of the windows...
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Cough Sachiko Fujimoto Wet glasses The Prometheus Lat. 40°45’31.29”N, Long. 73°58’42.34”W
Rockefeller Center, Mhtn, 2007 Miss Fujimoto failed to stop a bad cough...
#13
Pervert Sonja1986 ROKR E1 Lat. 40°4 4’33.37”N, Long. 73°57’13.87”W
Subway, Qns, NY 2007 Sonja1986 bought a Sony camera phone for exposing subway perverts...
#15
Wrong body Kyros Kendall Diver Collapsed bridge Lat. 40°42’15.14”N, Long. 73°59’19.12”W
East River, Bklyn, NY, 2008 New diver Kendall was told a story during his Asia trip, which was about retrieval of corpses in that country...
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Bus delay Alcindor Gaubert Bus M15 Familiar faces Lat. 40°43’31.37”N, Long. 73°59’24.65”W
Second Ave, Mhtn, NY, 2008 Nobody, but Mr. Gaubert, noticed the bus delay...
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Store Closing Minh Trung Nguyen A $100 note Labels Lat. 40°45’5.72”N, Long. 73°58’49.26”W
Airline Stationery, Mhtn, NY, 2008 It was a closing store, where Mr. Nguyen had made his first purchase in the United States...
#22
Fine Yaohua Zheng Police
Subway station, Qns, NY 2007 Mr. Zheng talked with a police officer for the first time...
#8
Overlook Dedrick Williams Magic Lipstick
Mhtn, 2010 Mr. Williams learned from a magic performance when he was a kid that the world was simple...
#14
Pink Agnes L. Bonheur Pink scrub Colored children’s cough syrup Lat. 40°42’46.35”N, Long. 73°50’15.10”W
Qns, NY, 2008 Miss Agnes L. Bonheur dismissed the family nurse who wore a pink scrub again...
#19
Womb Erin Endicott Diaper New Year Ball
Times Square, Mhtn, NY, 2010 Ms. Endicott passed out in the crowd waiting for the ball to drop on New Year’s Eve...
#24
REVIEWS
Young Tenet by Tim Connor
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have been following the work of Zheng Yaohua - known as zeyez on Flickr - for a while. He makes deadpan, deceptively bland snapshots of streets & intersections, buildings, restaurants, houses, small parks - all the ordinary places - in areas like Queens. At first glance these pictures seem so undramatic as to be almost random. But, if you continue looking, you see they are subtly composed, carefully patterned. Although the pictures claim only to represent themselves, their wan light & exaggerated lack of incident seem to brim with not-quite-decipherable meaning. What are they trying to say?
CIA boss Tony Brandon George Tenet Fight Scobee 777 Lat. 40°46’13.90”N, Long. 73°4 4’9.04”W
Little Neck Parkway at Northern Boulevard, New York, 2008 Tony Brandon scraped his left knee on July 7, 1967, in a semi-serious fight with his classmate George Tenet, later a CIA director, on the side-walk near the eatery that the Tenet’s used to own (“Scobee”, or the former “20th Century”). He remembers how badly it hurt and how George worried about his new shorts being torn, which were a gift for his birthday that day. George J. Tenet served
#7
Zheng’s project On Their Sites, give us a hint. He writes that the series is inspired by Joel Sternfeld’s similarlynamed On This Site, a photo book questions the problematic nature of photographic representation & the slippery meaning of collective memory. But Zheng’s homage goes beyond that. Listen to what he writes to accompany the picture #7 [thumbnailed in this page]. This is a strange, obscure, oddly fascinating story. Unlike Sternfeld, Zheng is initially concerned with private, not public memory. Who is Tony Brandon? How did he & his story come to Zheng’s attention? Is the story, despite its meticulous fact-checking addendum, after all, real? The details feel too weird to be invented. The inclusion of young Tenet, the pugnacious lickspittle who as a grown man would in 2003 reassure George Bush that the Iraq War was “a slam dunk,” pushes the story into the public realm. It also knocks the general interest level up a notch. We watch Tenet scuffle, hear him whine about his mussed-up
as the Deputy Director and the Director of the CIA from June 1995 to July 2004. He was born on January 5, 1953. It is likely that Tony Brandon’s memory of the date that had three 7’s is related to another event.
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new clothes. It feels like a unique insight. It sounds like a real memory. But what if it’s fiction? Personally, I don’t care if it is or isn’t. Is the past real or fiction? Is there somewhere it can be accessed with any kind of accuracy? “Little Neck Parkway at Northern Boulevard” is here in the photograph & there in the past. Real or not, Tony Brandon & George Tenet are grown up in a new story. Everything is changing every second. It really is that complicated. Maybe — with his “ordinary” photographs — that’s what Zheng means to say. Tim Connor is a photographer and critic. His photographic works can be found on www.blurb.com/books/1144336, and the art critiques he wrote can be found on timconnor.blogspot.com.
Fragility by Shi Hantao Translated from Chinese by Shi Yaohua
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n this series, Zheng Yaohua endeavors to use narrative strategies which we customarily associate with collective history in order to preserve or elevate personal memory. The result is naturally to reveal its unreliability and ineffectiveness. We find that in Joel Sternfeld’s On This Site meaning is a priori. That is to say, the viewer knows that there existed in the world a series of significant events, which we call history, before
even seeing his images. The artist merely serves as a tour guide. When we arrive at these “historic sites”, everything seems bland and unremarkable. History does not reside in the landscape. It can exist independent of reality. In Zheng’s project, however, personal memory is dependent on reality, as the photographer puts it, “like pollen stuck to objects.” What is paradoxical is that while memory represents people’s ultimate ideal of eternity, physical objects are perishable and transient. How could we expect the former to depend on the latter? Perhaps that is the fundamental reason why personal memory as history cannot exist? In the story of Emily Kwong [#2, page 18], the photographer even tells a paradoxical story of “lost beads”. If the beads are found, it might seem that one has found the evidence for the validity of one’s memory and carrier of the significance of the event, but by the same token, the beads would no longer be lost. If one fails to find the beads, even though this might confirm one’s memory of loss, without the beads how could one prove one has lost the beads? Which goes to show the unreliability of individual memory? To push the argument even further, one might say that even if the photographer points insistently to some of the core objects in his personal life in order to assure us of the truthfulness of the events or memories and the clarity of their meaning, these core objects - a mailbox, a street front, a bench, etc - appear insignificant in the images. In fact, they are almost squeezed out of the frames. This is like the stubborn but futile argument of a child, who points out some details that have been ignored
by adults as proof for his case. For adults, however, this kind of proof is meaningless and invalid. In the end we realize that the problem does not lie with the evidence. Adults’ discursive hegemony determines that the argument is over before it begins. Perhaps that is why the personal experiences in Zheng’s narratives can never have the historical significance of Sternfeld’s. It all boils down to two competing discursive systems. From the above we have to admit the fragility of personal meaning, which can be submerged at any moment in collective discourses. People are somehow accustomed to this relationship between the individual and the collective. Many viewers may wonder why the photographer so meticulously documents “trivial” scenes that are without any “esthetic appeal”, which of course reminds us of the given of photography’s role in constructing meaning. Extracted from Discomforting Anxieties by Shi Hantao, the director of the Marketing and Development Division of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. He was recognized as the Best Photo Curator of the Year in the 1st Lianzhou International Photo Festival in 2005 when he was the director of EPSON Image Gallery Shanghai. Shi Yaohua teaches Chinese language and culture at Wake Forest University.
Cover Nothing Lat. 40°46’12.94”N, Long. 73°4 4’8.20”W
Northern Boulevard, Queens, NY, 2006 I heard of nothing here.
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Acknowledgements for the project: Thanks to Chen Dai, Michael C. Mineiro and Zhang Xiaomin, whose early translation and editing readied the first pieces for gallery exhibition. To Zheng Xinnan, who helped me finalize the text in #23. To Tim Connor for writing the first critique of the project, which was an honor to receive and a great source of encouragement to me. To Sun Yunfan and Shi Hantao who shared their perceptive insight with me, and especially to Sun for her translation of the statement into English. Special thanks to Hannah Thompson without whose word-by-word discussion and amendment of all the texts I could not imagine this project making it to public eyes. Acknowledgements for this brochure: Thanks to Li Shuang, Jin Hua and Gu Gongkun for their great help with the English text.
© 2010 by Zheng Yaohua All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, Zheng Yaohua www.zeyez.net zheng.yaohua.zeyez@gmail.com
Design by Zheng Yaohua
First edition, March 2010 Second editon, the introduction and artist statement updating, September 2010