Artist Statement – The Qixia Qu Suite
The series of photographic images titled ‘Under the Sky’ was shot in the Qixia district of Nanjing,
China, during the spring of 2012, 2013, and 2014 while I was in an extended artist residency at the Shangdong Contemporary Art Centre. My initial interest in pursuing this photographic project was in direct response to what I was experiencing as I witnessed the massive upheaval to the land that is taking place within this economic development zone. There is a lot more history to this context but I will leave it for the moment other than to say that never before in the history of human initiatives on earth has there been such a large-scale force of development. I am not interested in competing with the magnitude of this monumental change by trying to represent it but it is the background that has allowed a contrasting awareness to form of the minor presence of the human, the individual person and how their presence is felt in this reconfiguration of the land and an idea of the natural world.
I had many questions as I began to attend to and shoot in response to this transformation that was happening to the ground around me. Initially, was the fact that I didn’t experience myself as a distant observer in the manner of a documentary photographer. I also didn’t initially understand the cultural relevance of what I was seeing or what it was that was compelling me to make these pictures. It took a great deal of time for me to come to an awareness of what and how the object of my enquiry would be constituted. By the third year of shooting, I had a clearer sense of what was happening in my exchange with this appearance of the land and came to understand that there was something that went beyond a prescriptive way to acquire knowledge about a subject and I think this is apparent as a quality of presence and transcendence in some of the images.
One of the ways I understand and respect what constitutes photographic agency comes from a question of the existence of a real world referent that is seemingly captured by the photographic trace. I think that this visible appearance of the world calls upon oneself and in seeing, is a manifestation of that world. This force of nature is not me or mine – not my agency - but an external force that acts upon the need to look. This does not necessarily mean then that the photographic image is only of the external world. It means that it is registered in the relation between looking and seeing. I would agree with Kaja Silverman, that the resulting image is more of an analogy and forms a correspondence with the world. And in this, my agency is also present as an embodied form in spatializing the frame of the image through the camera viewfinder in direct relation to the ground upon which my body stands. I would like to think that there is a kind of non-dualistic unity being enacted here that doesn’t strictly maintain a traditional subject/object relationship.
The fact that I need to look and that the external, visible appearance calls upon me to see is a condition that goes beyond any one cultural understanding of what this force of “nature” is. The point though is in the context of being located somewhere, on the land, in a place that is not of my culture, and to acknowledge that the cultural specificity of the human presence I sensed was not actually available to me (or was it?). So, there is an interest in the anthropological and a kind of natural history but this also includes my agency, and that I act and participate but without a claim for some stable form of knowledge that could arrive. I am concerned that if I were to make a knowledge claim that this would simply be giving my agency over to a kind of naïve realism, more in line with a generalized humanist point of view.
This points to yet another concern about humanism and its relationship to universalism as it is generally assumed that photographic technology is universal in its uses and effects and possibly that its history is also (only) one of representing a humanist subject. I am sitting on the fence in relation to these considerations and this is an area of my own research that I will be exploring. My initial sense is that this implied universal is a much larger problematic than “we” are generally willing to acknowledge. I am simply not willing to use this universal as an excuse for my own inability to understand how there may be an intimate sense of an emergent cultural specificity that is operating in my images or to rethink what cultural specificity is as local embodied knowledge in relation to global forms of reception of the photographic image. This is like saying it is OK, because we are all just the same Western idea of being human. This is absolutely not OK with me.
Some of my images carry the trace of an absent body and I would ask: do “we” (in the self/other relation that would position us in different cultures) share an invisible imaginary body and in terms of local knowledge perceived by the body. Is cultural difference then also constituted through the sharing of an imaginary body as the body of an undifferentiated imaginary? I have to ask why I am able to perceive a sense of this presence in China, outside of my own cultural tradition? From a Western perspective, there is plenty here that points to remnants of Christian theology and psychoanalytic theory as they pertain to identity, the imagination and lived experience of body images and practices of figuration that organize pictorial space. Admittedly, I don’t know what or if there would be corollaries within Chinese cultural traditions of landscape, pictorial space and philosophical concepts of illumination including cosmologies that organize an understanding of the self and natural world.
As a photographer, I have to approach this question of an unknowable force of nature and the inability of understanding the cultural specificity of this location because the fact is that I am able to experience something of these as I have a direct awareness of their material presence through their visible appearance. It is this intimate sense, of the presence of the human (as well as its absent presence) and of a natural world that truly confounds me. This reflects directly on how I have been able to organize my practical relationship with photographic technology. So, the resulting body of work has not been made through one mode of photographic practice or one manner of paying attention. It is more a collection of poetic fragments and different moments where looking and seeing came together in unpredictable ways. There is also a sense of loss and of mourning as in an elegy of the passing of a world view and those that inhabited it.
This way of working doesn’t rely on the systemization of an approach that would assume one fixed point of view in the production of a stable form of knowledge.
Under the Sky is a document that can be experienced and understood chronologically in the way that it is a result of this shifting mode of practice and manner of being compelled to shoot. The body of work is more like a photographic essay that opens and explores and perhaps delimits, while not closing in to create a stable subject. From a philosophical point of view, this would be like an ongoing “becoming of existence” and not the being of a fixed knowable existence or subject. I would think then that this manner of photographic practice is performative, enacting its relationship directly with the world, where it finds itself. As I shot and edited and then returned each year to shoot again, I began to notice that the organization of pictorial space and the figure/ground relationship in my images was also shifting and changing. This was a welcome surprise as I was incorporating and enacting aspects of my own subjectivity but also aspects of experience and transcendent force. This force does not transport me elsewhere but opens me to the ground at my feet, under the sky, to be both myself and beyond the self. So, ultimately, I am left with asking: what is this illuminated presence that is the photographic image, what is human presence, what is nature, does the human share this?
In terms of presenting this work for exhibition there are certain images that do specific things. For example, there is a set that functions to establish the location with horizons that take the viewer back into distant space. Each editorial pass through the body of work has allowed me to find groupings and subsets that allows for comparisons and contrasts to be drawn between images. This lets me work with meaningful variations that can be played off each other in selecting from the entire body of work to organize any one specific selection for an exhibition. This would allow me to address different audiences in the process of re-contextualizing specific and potential meanings. While it makes sense to start with an introduction that establishes an overall relationship to the land I don’t think this necessarily would lead to a chronological layout of when the work was shot.
The video, Breathing Light, is still being edited so I will offer this description. It was shot in the evening at the edge of a new upscale shopping complex that sits in a developing urban area surrounded by agricultural fields. I was working with light being emitted from a large outdoor commercial display panel as it shone out through the dark to reveal the surrounding environment which includes the new urban forms, the fields and natural growth as well as the people (largely students living in this new university district) as they carry out their social lives immersed within this spectacular light. The multi colored light pulses out from the panel to traverse across the surface giving light to the land as a wave like breath – capitalism is at home here. I was interested in how far it would travel, the furthest point where it would reach and then retract itself back to the panel. It seems to me that this light displays the disquieting promise of the new China, the utopian space of the future city carried by a progressive ideology of new scientific and technological development.