My Thoughts and My Actions - Qing Wu

Liu Zheng – The Chinese

As a photo journalist for state-run Worker’s Daily, Liu Zheng set about working on a series about common people in 1994. It took him eight years to complete, and the series, under a very generic title called “The Chinese”, caught wide attention and has since been traveling around the world in various galleries. The publishing house under Worker’s Daily also published the forty-six black and white prints in a small photo book, which I found in a dingy bookstore at Beijing’s 798 art district this past Christmas. Liu wanted to catch a nation in change and tended to select small or quirky characters struggling at the margin of the society: convicts, monks, traveling opera singers, transvestites…sometimes he would push the comfort level of the viewers and show corpses and dying elderly straight at your face. At a very first look, these photos remind us of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. But at closer examination, they are not quite the same. Liu does not observe a changing China at such a comfortable distance as Robert Frank saw his adopted land, neither does he projects his own psyche into the characters as Mrs. Arbus did. Liu is very much a Chinese photographer who invested his enormous sympathy and love to his own people, no matter who they are and how ridiculous or tragic they may first appear. This is quite in sync with the culture tradition of Chinese intellectual, who sees as his own responsibility to love and save his own fellow countrymen. Liu made these images and seemed to tell us: Look, these are my people. They could be ugly, sad, miserable, used, harassed, impoverished, sick, opportunistic, uneducated, uncultivated, unfortunate…but they survive and they have their joy and hope and dignity. I simply love them unconditionally.

Non-Chinese critics are often fascinated with these photos and tend to interpret these series under more negative light, but clearly Liu was not interested in making any outward political statement. Chinese viewers, and especially oversea Chinese, may get offended or furious due to the overall negative and tragic tone of these images. They would probably consider Liu as a sellout who caters to the West’s stereotype on Chinese. As a Chinese myself I find the images very powerful to evoke this twisted love of my own. And if one truly loves his own country, he should be able to look at the darker side without shame.

Liu has done some other works in between and after this series, mostly deviating from photojournalism and working on staging and other conceptual gimmicks, but none of them could compare to this series. I hope Liu would continue down this path instead of getting sidetracked to other ideas.

Urban Illusionist: Yang Yong

Since YangYong burst into the scene in 1999, she has been hailed as one of the major symbol for the new art trend coming from the south. Still in her twenties, her works have already been well exhibited around the world, with solo shows in Asia, US, and Europe. The success of YangYong raised two critical questions: Judged from a more universal point of view, are her works real breakthroughs in the contemporary photography? How is she positioned in the current Chinese avant-garde movement?

More than one critic described her style as Nan Goldin’s, which I would dispute. Nan Goldin often uses snapshot method to catch people in the middle of the act, or barely out of the act for a brief pose. She would often use harsh flashlight to emphasize the raw emotional state of the wounded characters, and the effect is often intimate and disturbing. YangYong, on the other hand, is clearly in much more control. She used both her friends and the strangers to stage the scenes, asking them to act out either under her guidance or improvise. She often changes the camera angle and reconfigures her group of characters to convey a sense of change and mobility. Also, she is very meticulous about the background and the lighting, using mostly natural light to construct an alienated, intensely-color-saturated urban jungle where her characters seem random, lost, distant and melancholy. YangYong appears to be much more a film maker than photographer, which came as no surprise since she was first a video artist before focusing on photography. You can clearly see some of Wong KarWai in her. Her training in painting also influenced her significantly, giving these images superb color, lighting, and sculpture-like compositions.

Therefore there is really nothing technically innovative about YangYong, but her images are fresh and beautiful. The other methods, such as staging, performance and serialization, are also very popular among Chinese art photographers, but YangYong is among the few who are able to produce the most poetic and unforgettable works. She quickly caught the attention of the international art world partly due to her subject matters, which are often beautiful prostitutes in commercialized ever-changing Chinese cities. In her works foreigners see exactly what they want to see. Her success comes from a perfect fusion of a talent and the timely demand of the art market.

Time of Fantasies: Aniu

I have wanted to write something since I first saw Aniu’s works, but I feel words are not enough to describe them. Most of the art photographers these days tend to have a clear agenda in their mind before they shoot their works, and an expert critic can usually identify the photographer’s intent or influences. Aniu’s works are something else. They seemed to follow a unique visual instinct, editing and extracting the most ordinary scenes into something quite dark and mysterious. The mood is always melancholy, the dodging and burning are prevalent, the colors are often de-saturated, and the meaning seems unfathomable. But together these images speak loudly for themselves.

The following is the small article he wrote to when he published a group of photos in a major Chinese photo magazine. Somehow the poetry of his writing gets lost in my attempt of translating this essay. I hope Aniu, if he ever read this, would forgive me.

I always know, behind the skyscrapers and all these colorful spectrum of people, there hide secrets that can’t be explained – These secrets exit in the alleyway, under a small tree, or behind the flicking expressions of people’s faces. They are also truths. For a long time I searched between the bustling city and the neglected corners, between two kinds of truths.

I slow down my pace, lower down my voices, trying to start a dialogue with them and listening to their sighs and smiles. Now I am standing on the side of the river and looking out. The river is wide with many crisscrossing tributaries. The real and the unreal can not be distinguished. I know that I cannot add anything to that, since “every river will eventually find its own direction”.

Photo SF, Chinese Artist Network, and Wang Ning De

Before I stopped by Photo San Francisco this Saturday I did not exactly know what I should expect. Hosted by Stephan Cohen gallery and sponsored by 60 galleries and dealers from US and Europe, it was one of the largest such exhibitions in the West Coast. Not to my surprise, I found most works familiar, beautifully framed, and rather boring. There were plenty of works signed with famous but dead names, and it was not unusual to find several different prints from the same negative. San Francisco celebrity artists, such as Michael Kenna, Todd Hiddo and Richard Misrach, dotted a number of the booths. After all, this was a trade show where only “safe”, established, and highly decorative works were appreciated or aimed to be put through transactions. No one takes risks, and most of the attendees probably do not have a taste for edgier and more experimental works. For myself, I hardly learned anything new and quickly forgot most of the images that flashed through my eyes.

However, I did have one good discovery. At one of the booths I found Chinese Artist Network, a newly-formed and loosely-connected Bay Area group which helps to promote photographers of Chinese origins. I have long wondered that such a group might exist, and finding them is almost like finding an adopted home.

They only hang a few works in the booth, but one definitely caught my eyes. It showed two Chinese men in Mao suits standing and dozing off in the backdrop of sky and clouds. The makeup they wore made them look like carders in revolutionary Peking operas. Abby Chen, a lady who sat in the booth, mentioned to me that the photographer, Wang Ning-De, was one of her favorites. I browsed through a zine-like brochure on the desk and got a quick glimpse of a whole body of works from Wang. Somehow these images stuck to my mind.

The internet did not give me more information about Wang other than the short bio listed in the CAN’s website. The same website also showed ten photos of his, which more or less came from the same series. They showed various characters, solo or in group, dozing off against various backgrounds. The moods they created vary too: Some are disturbing, some are cute and humorous. But they invariably give very ambiguous meanings and metaphors. Why are they sleeping in these unlikely situations? What are they dreaming? Or, in one image, you would wonder whether the kid lying on the ground is sleeping or actually dead. Whoever sees these pictures will inevitably face the questions of interpretations. The pictures are obviously staged with great efforts, but the intention is never clear.

Sleepy human figures are not new in Chinese modern art. Fang Lijun, a major player from early nineties, painted a huge yawning face in the heyday of Cynical Realism movement. Several other painters also took the same approach, rendering typicalized Chinese faces with or without expressions, as a way of self-mockery or defiance of the fast-changing realities. Wang’s sleeping figures seem to have taken a cue from that period, but they evolved and expanded the limit of the cynicism. He introduced child nudity, art history reference (the dancing children greatly resembles Matisse’s famous work) and more narrative structures into these images, while all of them form a complete self-referential visual system where time seems to be frozen, sleeping is the norm of existence, and humankind are ever more isolated even if they are in groups. These images somehow depict a space between reality and dreams, and audience can further decipher and decide for themselves what stories they tell and what mood they can convey. The mystery is beyond the words.

Black-White Song Village (Hei Bai Song Zhuang) - Zhao Tie Lin

The Chinese avant-garde art movement in the last two decades is probably one of the most unique events in the art history that deserves some attention of the future historians. It is still unclear whether this movement would leave behind any significant works that would be long remembered, but study of this unusual phenomenon would shed some light on some very basic questions about art: Why do people make art, sometimes against all odds and out of all kinds of madness? What is the function or role of art in a society that is rapidly transforming itself? How does art survive and move from fringe to the center?

Zhao TieLing’s new book, Black-White Song Village, is not an ambitious project to set about to answer these big questions. Instead it focused on daily life of a dozen free-lance artists who live and work in a rural village on the outskirt of Beijing, which has also been compared to early SoHo in New York or Montmartre in Paris. The village is not the first congregated living environment for Chinese artists. As early as 1990, YuanMingYuan Painter’s village was once made quite famous due to over-exposure to media. The artists in that village were eventually dispersed when the district government decided to clean up the neighborhood. Quite a number of them moved further away from Beijing and settled in Song Village. Over the time the village grew in reputation and became a magnate for artists of all kinds, some of whom have already been well established internationally, while most of others are struggling and little known.

Zhao selected a range of characters and devoted one chapter to each of them. Mixing dialogues with black-white snapshots, he used the usual photojournalistic format. The style of the dialogues runs from casual chitchatting to serious conversation on art. The photo shots are usually candid and intimate. The featured artists, often seen from the back and at a low angle with light lit behind, rarely stared straight into camera and did not seem to even notice the camera’s presence. If they did happen to look at the camera, they appeared slightly coy. Zhao must have got to know them fairly well in order to shoot at such a close distance. The artists were chosen not by their success but by how well they represent certain group or certain hierarchy in the village. They often had more interesting stories to tell, although some of them seemed to waster their time away in the village because it offered an isolated utopia where irresponsibility and craziness could be tolerated. Zhao’s intention is quite clear: He wants to give a more comprehensive view with their most private moments. Observant but not intrusive, these pictures give no embellishment of such kind of bohemian life but shows the unpretentious and the unforgiving sides.

Zhao was trained as a computer scientist but had a true passion for photo-journalism. After a few years in Computer Science Institute in Beijing, he gave up on science and devoted himself full-time to photography when he was well into his 40s. In the early 90s this could be seen as unusually rebellious and might have raised many eyebrows. From mid 90s, he published a series of books on marginal characters of the society: prostitutes, migrant workers, artists, people who exist outside the official system. It is a very rich and provocative vintage point: As China reformed itself from state-controlled socialism into a market driven free economy, more and more people left the land and old work units and ventured into migration without the official system to fall back on. Zhao wanted to document these changes and capture all the human dramas, both tragic and comical, with his lenses. By exposing the life of the poorest and most marginal characters, he also aimed to educate the prejudiced mainstream readers and hopefully bring changes to the system.

But with Black-White Song Village, Zhao hit a homerun since the material itself was highly relevant for his own artistic endeavors. His specialties, or his signature themes, are still there: The liveliest parts of the book are the anecdotes and life stories, narrated by the artists themselves. Their personalities and the hardships they encountered came well through the interviews. While letting the artists talked about their own ideas and strategies, Zhao also peppered his questions with his own thoughts on art and practice of art. He knew well that both the artists and himself faced the same questions : How can one maintain his atristic integrity while surviving in this market-oriented society? How does one pursue his/her individual freedom and financial success while remaining socially responsible? How far can one go in terms of self-promotion and making his/her works known? The answers are not so simple, and there may never be good answers.

As China continues to change and move forward, its internal art market is also slowly developing itself and the government also started to organize exhibitions and reform the art schools. Gone are the days when avant-garde artists had no other means to survive other than selling works outside China. Zhao’s first-hand sketches froze a particular time moment at a particular location, and his efforts would prove invaluable in the near future when the art scene could be entirely different from what is now. After all, the initial growth is often painful and slow and the pioneers often have a lot to pay.

Staging is Fun - Wang QingSong

Staged photography is all the rage now, and it is getting bigger and more expensive. Gregory Grewdson is probably one of the most prominent photographers specialized in this genre, using expensive equipments, a large crew and even Hollywood celebrities to create dark, surrealistic and suburbia epics. Jeff Wall, the Canadian who started this whole thing 20 years ago, stick to his more political themes, subtle but no less poignant. The Chinese artists apparently do not want to be left behind either: Wang QingSong, a photographer from Beijing and the brightest rising star, is taking New York art scene by a storm. Not only did New York Times use one of his images on last week’s magazine, it also dedicated an article about him on this Sunday’s art session, presenting it as a hard proof that Chinese modern art is catching up. Currently his works can be seen at his first New York solo show (Salon 94) and at the upcoming exhibition at ICP and Asia Society.

So what are all these buzzes about and why are the foreign curators so enthusiastic about him? I clicked through his website with these questions in my mind. I am usually a bit suspicious on Chinese artists who earned their fames in the West. Due to lack of official support in China and driven by greed, Chinese artists have a weakness to take shortcuts and cater to whatever the foreign art market wants. Some of them cashed out, while majority of them produced mediocre art and lost their true sense of creativity.

Regardless of any type of criticism, Wang’s images are definitely very impressive. They are very large prints (the longest is 31feet), eye-popping, colorful and story-telling. Any museum goer would be immediately drawn in by their sheer sizes, and he or she would not move away quickly because there are a lot to see and a lot to decipher. For western eyes, they can be both familiar and strange to look at. You may recognize Manet and Botticelli, you may know some Chinese famous paintings being referred but you won’t know which. The themes are inevitably both exotic and universal. To some degree this is the kind of modern Chinese art you expect to see (postmodernism practised using Chinese art tradition), but on the other hand, there are enough surprises to keep you engaged. The line between Western art and Chinese art is deliberately blurred here, and the visual and intellectual pleasures are abounded.

But Wang is not entirely original in his approaches. The lavish setting, the theatric posing and vibrant colors can be found in David La Chapella and Pierra et Gilles. The political pop and irony on commercialism have been overdone in the early to mid 90s by Wang Guanyi and a few others. The famila battle scenes were once staged by Paul Smith and Jeff Wall. The stitching of the scenes with help of photoshop to create long scrolls was probably first tried by Sam Taylor-Wood in her Five Revolutionary Seconds, and referring art history and famous paintings in staged photography is once specialty of Jeff Wall. But Wang is still the first one who combined all of above in his images, who borrowed Chinese art (both classic and revolutionary) so freely and in the end he formed his own particular vernacular to create visual wonders as well as a very dry but witty sense of humor to critique the absurdity of modern life (and the art world). Wang is very self-conscious. He can mock exactly what he intends to be.

Lukas Felzmann & John Priola

Photo Alliance in San Francisco is a wonderful organization for photographers or collectors to communicate and study from each other. Their lectures typically feature one or two established local photographers whom would show their works and talk about why and how they made them. The audiences usually have the chance to get a very comprehensive view of a whole body of works within 90 minutes. Last night’s lecture by Bay Area photographers John Priola and Lukas Felzmann, which kicked off a three-day workshop on book-publishing, was especially good. It brought together two very different artists in the same classroom who are also excellent presenters.

Born in a Swiss intellectual family, Felzmann graduated from SF Art Institute and spent most of his adult life in Northern California. His works thus embodied the dual influences of West Coast landscape and German philosophical traditions. They fall naturally into the “New Topographics” movement, whose main players include Robert Adams, Stephen Shore and the Bechers. The photos from the new book LandFall were mostly shot in Sacramento Valley, where human activities and natural force are in a perpetual tug-of-war. While the landscape continues to change due to manmade underpasses, highways, aqueducts and nonnative trees, the nature also gives back flood, landfall, and rural decays. Not only is Felzmann interested in documenting these changes, he is also captivated by their poetic potentials and philosophic meanings. His series on migration birds are some of the most unforgettable images. Using the formation of the flocks, he shows to us that nature is full of wonders, and it is often more than what we can grasp. As an avid reader, Felzmann seems to be obsessed with knowledge and learning. His many shots of books and classrooms seem to be an unusual lifelong hobby of his.

Priola, on the other hand, made most of his photos in his studio, often with very controlled lightings and meticulous settings. While Felzmannm focuses on the nature and its relationship with humankind, Priola is more obsessed with the sentimental values of objects and memories. If Felzmann observes the world with a detached and analytic eye, for whom God renders itself as a rational, scientific but formidable force, Priola, thanks to his catholic upbringing, gets more fascinated by its mystics and melancholy power. Priola came out of age in late 80s and 90s, when AIDS took away many of his friends. This intense emotional experience affected him significantly, and they showed up under various disguises in many of his works: objects from diseased ancestors, dead butterflies, a fallen flowerpot, an apartment number lit in night. They speak silently and powerfully on time and on the ghosts we can’t see.

Though both artists started with very different aesthetic visions and photographic practices, they have a lot more in common. Both have done installation works, both ponder on traces of time, and both shoot mostly black-and-white photos and rarely do portraits. They look at the world and at the most ordinary with shock and awe, and their works express this feeling of being overwhelmed. Inevitably, they would cross each other’s path: In Priola’s latest works, he shot the same set of trees as Felzmann did. But they don’t necessarily see the same thing.

My Visual Diary - Wang Xiao Hui

Chinese female artists, whom once went aboard and established themselves, would always rush back home and publish autobiographies, which typically feature success stories of conquering the West and tons of photographs of themselves schmoozing with foreign dignitaries. The Chinese saying, “returning home with all the glories”, applies perfectly well here: They have a lot to tell to their own people after all the loneliness, struggling and humiliations. After all, they succeeded in the West, and for Chinese people whose inferior complex still lingers after a colonial past, that means a bigger success than what can be achieved home.

Wang Xiao Hui’s “My Visual Diary” was first published in 2001 but has been printed more than ten times since then. I got a copy in Changsha this February, a month after I came cross her photobook “Close to Eyes” back in San Francisco. In the international art circuit, Chinese photographers are still rare species, and it is more unusual to have a published collection from prestigious art publishing house. My interest in her was thus elevated to the degree that I not only finished her book in a few days but also googled her and checked out most of her latest works. Wang is not a household name in the photography world, but her status is on the rise. Even if she may be still the second-tier artist in the scene, her success is an interesting phenomenon that deserves some analysis.

Unfortunately the book’s boastfulness almost distracts a reader from understanding her art. It babbles on like a psychiatrist’s patient who suffers self-esteem problems and relies on other people’s complements to feel good about herself. But the book serves its purpose for teenage girls who are not so exposed to photography but want so desperately to become an artist. It opens eyes for the more provincial and the less traveled. But for serious artists in-the-knows, even though the book helps give a roadmap on how Wang arrives at where she is now, it is not so artistically inspiring.

Wang came out of age in eighties and was one of very first batch of architecture college students after Cultural Revolution. She continued her graduate study in Germany under an official scholarship but her interest in photography and a few unexpected incidents pushed her to a completely different career path. From her own account, Wang showed artistic gift from an early age but it did not blossom until she got to Germany. The extensive traveling, the very nurturing environment supported by her husband and her friends, the unique position as the first few Chinese female artists in post-Cold-War Germany, and two rather tragic events that took place when she just started out as an artist (which includes a suicide and a fatal car accident of her husband), all contributed to her maturing into a true artist. Wang, like other prominent Chinese artists who gained their international fames in the nineties (such as Xu Bing, Cai GuoQiang, etc), belong to the same generation who went through much of their childhood and teenage years in Cultural Revolution and in a rather isolated society. All the new art movements developed in the West since the end of the World War II dazzled and stimulated them during their first few years of self-exiles. Driven by a sense of mission, they experimented and tried to adopt the new aesthetic strategies and combine them with various Chinese elements and traditions. Wang is not particularly so keen on making modern Chinese art. The Chinese influence in her photography is rather subtle and minor. But she does know how to ride on the curiosity of the West and take full advantage of their interest in her and her works. She takes it as her mission to represent well-educated, elegant and talented Chinese females. But in the meantime she still holds much of the traditional values from the past and feels awkward to cross any gender, political or sexuality boundaries. A few of her figurative works and her film “Shattered Moon” all expressed her own frustrations in her pseudo-feminist quandaries.

Wang’s photography can be roughly separated into three phases. In her early days, from late 80s to early 90s, she was basically a good photographer. Self-taught and with a natural eye for composition and visual metaphors, she did mostly commercial photo projects. For much of the 90s she traveled more, shot films and her best works were portraits and human figures, in which she often used tricky lighting and long exposures, with focuses on eyes and human forms. From late 90s on, she discovered large color prints (which indisputably had put German photography in the center of attention) and started to make huge prints with abstract patterns. Abstraction is far from being new in photography. Generations of photographers have been using macro lenses to shoot floral or surface close-ups and render them into abstract expressionism. But the sheer sizes of the new abstract photography have made them much more impressive to look at. Wang was clearly inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe and Wolfgang Tillman and made her floral shots very sensual and decorative. There is something very consistent in all the stuff Wang did. They are always very beautiful and flawlessly composed, but for the price of good looks they lack spontaneity and wit, and sometimes even degenerate into clichés. Compared to other German photographers such as Thomas Struth and Andrew Gursky, Wang’s photography is short of intellectual substances.

The most exciting contemporary Chinese photography still comes from China itself. The latest exhibitions on YangYong, Shao YiYong and Mu Chen at Goedhuis gallery, have shown very diverse set of visual language and potent political urgency. After all the postmodernism experiments and imitation in the late nineties, Chinese photographers have collectively made a quantum leap into the new century and pushed their individual styles much further than where they started. The art curators have taken the note and just started to organize shows and exhibitions to promote and showcase their works. The upcoming exhibition on Chinese photography and Video works at Asia Society and ICP New York would be an exciting and ground-breaking event to see true modern Chinese photography.