The Senses and Society | 2019
Landscaping
Abstract
For a mainstream Chinese audience, photography is more properly perceived as a documentation of realistic worldly appearance than as a form of art. In fact, most photographic exhibitions in China are curated to cater to, and reinforce, such a mainstream conception. Landscaping is an exception. The debut exhibition of the Photography Center, Guangzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, it consisted of some 40 works by 13 contemporary photographers. The participating artists, based in different parts of China, are of many ages and career stages: some are well-established, such as Lu Yao; some recent graduates in their 20s, such as Chunping Hou. All, however, seems concerned with the concept of shanshui (mountains and rivers) – the Chinese counterpart for “landscape.” According to the wall text by curator Qingsong Wang, a much-acclaimed contemporary artist, “all the thirteen artists have more or less adopted the style of expression” that underlies the great Chinese tradition of landscape painting. In the eyes of several participating artists, the unremarkable things of everyday life can be revealing and thought-provoking. Yongjun Fu’s A Peach Tree by the West Lake (2004–2013) (Figure 1a-b) greets visitors as they enter the first exhibition hall. It is comprised of two juxtaposed pieces. On the left are nine separate works, in a grid pattern, recording the same tree in different seasons; it is a location where sightseers or nearby residents flock together and take a rest. On the right, the tree disappears. A dramatic effect is succinctly presented; a readily observable continuity, as a public event, is broken. What makes it more admirable is that the photographer had not preconceived such a dramatic effect. Its constituent single photos, according to Fu, are nothing but an objective record of a most common tree over a decade (2004–2013). The same attitude toward the landscape is adopted in Ying Qin’s graduation project Forty Cities (2006–2015), wherein forty sketch-like spots captured from forty small cities – electric wires across the sky, Mao’s statue in the rain, street market and postal shop, for instance – are integrated into an ordinary Chinese city. As in Fu’s work, the constituent elements of Qin’s Forty Cities, if being singled out and viewed independently, would be just an instant of the past, capable of providing esthetic pleasure to its viewers. As a whole, however, each of the two works becomes an event, which, in the sense of John Berger, is both a cultural construction and a record of a series of traces naturally left in time (2011, 92). Behind the works are two artists who seem remote in manner but look on the social changes with a warm, critical eye. The situation of shanshui has changed. In one sense, the contemporary artists’ attitude toward the landscape has become different from that of premodern Chinese painters. For traditional literati painters, who are often scholar-officials, mountains and rivers being depicted form an ideal space, a space they can retreat to. This idea is hinted at in the following famous passage from Linqun gaozhi (Lofty Message of Forests and Streams), written by the Song painter and theorist Guo Xi (ca. 1020–1090):