Additional Photography

"the step toward a more cultured society"

http://798district.com/798/en/home/

http://www.ucca.org.cn/

"the step toward a more cultured society"

This little quote opens Beijing's Summer art calendar, where I was surprised to discover a concentration of great exhibitions, collections and projects.

Communist china, with its liberal economy, is definitely changing quickly since its entry on the global market, and rapid modernisation. Walls are falling down and are opening one after another. 

The arts, a great and old aspect of China's historical/cultural heritage are slowly becoming a social tool for young social activists. 

China is everywhere, even on the art markets where not only contemporary Chinese artists are gaining acknowledgement, but Chinese art buyers are having an extremely strong influence on the rise of art market's prices. 

After the cultural revolution's destruction of a huge quantity of art works, or simply the loss over the last century of Chinese artifacts to occidental collections, it seems the Chinese are back in search of their past and ready to spend quite a lot, without forgetting the benefit of economic interests, on art. 

Here are a few links to some interesting articles, I have stressed what I considered some relevant points,  I would suggest you check them out: 

http://798district.com/798/en/blog/2012/08/christies-presents-fine-chinese-ceramics-and-works-of-art-in-september/

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/38578/5-reasons-the-chinese-art-boom-may-not-buoy-the-global-art-market-after-all/
--> " those familiar with the Chinese art market stress that Poly and Guardian are not looking for space to hold auctions, and they aren't even throwing a sideways glance at Western art. They are setting up shop to more easily seek out the many Chinese treasures that sit in the parlors of American and European collectors, in order to take them back to China and sell them there. Consequently, while their global reach may expand, their sights aren't really on the international art market, but bringing Chinese treasures back home. "It is no secret that the PCR [Chinese government] wants to achieve dominance in the international market for Chinese art, and the rapid rise of Poly International demonstrates that they are well on their way to achieving that goal," James Lally, a New York-based Chinese art dealer, remarked to ARTINFO. "

http://www.chineseartappraisal.com/chineseartmarket.html

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Here yet again the social division appears through the different perceptions of the art world. A majority of the Chinese population is quite removed from any particular artistic awareness. As I discussed with a Chinese graduate friend, pursuing a degree in International relations, she was very surprised to hear me speak of artists as spokesmen of change since she principally saw art as pure leisure, a hobby. 

I strongly this article, link to BBC website 

"The search for photos of China's past"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18784990

Touches a great number of topics discussed in the blog, quest for lost identity, use of photography as a voice for the lost, damages of the cultural revolution, reconstruction, art as a social tool... 

Very interesting would love to share it with you. 

"Old photograph fever is currently sweeping China. A new and intense appetite for images of the country's past has resulted in a publishing phenomenon - sales of books of historical photographs have rocketed."

"But now China is opening its horizons, looking to the West and to the past, to reclaim its cosmopolitan history."

"After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Chinese leaders concluded that young people did not fully appreciate what the Communist Party had done for China, so they began an ambitious new policy of historical education, the Patriotic Education Movement. The craze for old photographs is partly a by-product of this movement."

"Rapid urban development in China has meant that historic buildings and neighbourhoods have been swept away and replaced with skyscrapers. They exist now only in people's memories or in these photographs."

(about this quotation please read my previous article on photography, you might know why I was so keen that surfing the internet brought me to this article, with which I immediately connected.)

"Photography is as the eye on the Buddha's palm" Wang Lin

  A silver-surfaced copper sheet prior to exposure in Photograph results in the formation of a layer of photo-sensitive silver halide, and exposure to a scene or image through a lens formed a latent image. The latent image was made visible, or "developed", by subjecting the exposed plate to the fumes rising from a quantity of heated mercury.

The South Korean photographer Atta Kim compared this process to Heidegger's Geworfenheit, Throwness.  

The metaphor between Geworfenheit and Photography introduces the latter as a fifth sense, the conscious eye. 

The term plays with the concepts of Being and Time and works around the interactions of the subject with its surroundings (instinctual reactions and interpretations). Heidegger's monistic view of the world introduces everything as in existence, only unnoticed.This touches photography in its power to reveal the unremarked. 

                               

Standing still in the middle of Tiananmen Square with her frozen expression, light blue umbrella and gaze lost in the distance this woman had a romantic longing to her that contrasted sharply with the severity of her surroundings. 

I chose photography to embrace my project because I profoundly see in it a gateway to Existential realisation.  

I spent my last weekend pouring over the photographic archives of Beijing's 798 Art District and was inspired by the words of many artists whose process resonated with that of which I am in search.

Side street food stalls

Beijing Street Vendor

Photography became for me a straightforward path to social awareness.

In our modernised, urbanised, globalised and always moving never stopping world, human relationships can be pushed to an insignificant portion of our lives, leading us to an individualistic understanding of existence. 

I believe the issue at stake resides in this "always moving never stopping" that defines contemporary societies. Taking a walk around Singapore's National History Museum, there it has quite a relevant Movie introducing the capital as a 24/7 human industry.  

In such circumstances it is hard to take a step back, it is hard to detach ourselves from our actions and take a moment to understand the stands we unconsciously take. 

Perspective is what we often miss, and in every sense of the term, perspective is what I found through my camera. 

Detail of the Forbidden City

 Beijing Hutongs reveal the other face of China, this Hutong's mouth is at the Forbidden City's mouth, from the Chinese Elite to the backstage, to the heart. 

Mother and daughter rest in the Forbidden City's gardens. 

Hutong's buzz with life, particularly when the clocks strike 5pm.

Unfortunately these veins of Beijing are being demolished and thus disappearing ever so fast.  

Photography, existential questioning, social awareness, and perspective... a base ground study for anthropology.

Many if the photographers I discovered in Beijing’s Art District compared their camera to a supplementary sense.

Art is this field of uncertainty and subjectivity.  I believe every Art has a purpose, underlying or straight in your face.  Rimbaud’s Letter to Paul Demeny, know as “The Visionary,” and very inspiring in this way since he talks of art as an eye-opening guide:

“We owe a duty to Society, you belong to the teaching profession. I say that one must be a seer.

So the poet is truly the thief of fire.”

Side street food stalls

Photography, when life such as a treadmill flies beneath you, or over you, is that stop in time like a deep in-breath. Photography is Pascal's eternal present, where the past and future resound in an immortalised present. I wondered, on a racing passenger bike as Ping Yao, Da Tong's street scenes blew past me what photography exactly meant to me, as a traveller. And it all came down to remembering time and capturing, grasping the power of a second. You travel and discover every second something completely new, unforseen. Travelling is the constand reminder that we are only travellling through. It is intruding another's life for some time and understanding with in the back of your mind the reality of the ticket that sooner or later will bring you back "home."
That day as I thought we passed a small winding street lined with grey bricks with a child kneeled at its center playing with the earth. The moment was gone before I knew it but somehow I had had the time to take a snapshot. To live eternally in every second of your life, to live in every street you pass. It could just well be. For what if I stopped here and rested a while? But we are always running. Somehow through every snapshot that milisecond is turned to gold, not frozen in time but endless in time, enabling you to persist in that memory, without living in the past but rather in an unlimited present, and to explore in depth every fold of it. 

Raw meat preserved under plastic in Beijing's summer heat.

Hutongs and chic cafés

The Sun sets in Beihai Park by the Houhai Lake. Beijing's parc life is particularly rejuvenating, early morning, late afternoon and weekends the population spends some time with the rustle of leaves in the soft breeeze and setting sun. A sweet philosophy of enjoying the beauty of life an hour or two in the day.  

In the last paragraphs I speak of memory and our predilection to forgetfulness. The reason why photography has become so important in my personal process and in my interaction with the world would because of how unbearable this truth seems to me. When evey moment every instance of your spinning life is full of meaning and weight, as it creates the thread of your history and thus as your experiences create you, it seems unbearable to forget what makes you who you are. Very edgy and wordy explanantion, but we'll pass my poor writing. 

Two, very, young guards at the entrance of the Forbidden City.

Workers' blouses in the old alleys of the Forbidden City.

Leaves rustle in the wind at Beihai Park, in the last sunrays.

Beijing streets and their colors.

I was walking in some Hutongs and conversing with one of the inhabitatns when he asked me to take a photograph of his street. My camera is digital, very useful to connect with people, so I showed him the snapshot of his home. It was very moving to see the happiness looking at that picture gave him and to see the true gratefulness in his eyes as he thanked me. He even went into his room to take out a pet turtle and asked me to go on taking pictures of the two of them. This man never asked me to send him the photos, it was never his intention to ask for them, even after proposing. But I think I understood that little mattered apart the happy reminder that somewhere in the world there was that memory, his reality immortalized. With Hutongs being destroyed by the day in Beijing, people's homes for generations being pulled apart there was that hope that the little Hutong south west of the Imperial City, where he lived with his turtle would remain in some memory, in some other dimension. Maybe it is just me, but anyways that's the interpretation I chose and its precious signification has stuck with me. 

I would strongly encourage you to check out Feng Jian Guo's work, concentrated on the destruction of Hutongs, giving a voice to what is disappearing.