Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China 1780235992, 9781780235998

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zooming in

zooming in histories of photography in china wu hung

reaktion books

For Lida, who knows this book so well

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2016 Copyright © Wu Hung 2016

The publishers gratefully acknowledge support for the publication of this book from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange 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 permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Hong Kong A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78023 599 8

CONTENTS

introduction 7

part one

representing china and the self 17 1

Inventing a ‘Chinese’ Portrait Style in Early Photography: The Case of Milton Miller 19

2

Photography’s Subjugation of China: A ‘Magnificent Collection’ of Second Opium War Images 47

part two

3

Birth of the Self and the Nation: Cutting the Queue 85

4

Self as Art: Jin Shisheng and His Interior Space 125

history revisited 159 5

Searching for Immortal Mountains: The Origins and Aesthetics of Chinese Landscape Photography 161

part three

6

A Second History: An Archive of Manipulated Photographs 189

7

The ‘Old Photo Craze’ and Contemporary Chinese Art 219

living in time 251 8

Mo Yi: The Story of an Urban Ethnographer 253

9

Liu Zheng: My Countrymen 277

10

Rong Rong: Ruins as Autobiography 301

11

Miao Xiaochun: Journeying through Space and Time 323

references 349 bibliography 377 acknowledgements 387 photo acknowledgements 389 index 391

INTRODUCTION

On 16 July 1842, a fourteen-year-old English boy named Harry Parkes (1828–1885), who was travelling in China, wrote in his diary: Major Malcolm and Dr Woosnam took a sketch of the place to-day on their daguerreotype. I cannot understand it at all: but on exposing a highly polished steel plate to the sun by the aid of some glass or other it takes the scene before you onto the plate and by some solution it will stay on the plate for years. It is no use me trying to describe it, it is quite a mystery.1

1 Milton Miller, A Chinese Family, 1860–63, albumen silver print, detail of illus. 12.

This boyish observation turns out to be the first record of photography in China. What is more significant about this record, however, is its timing and place: Parkes, who later became the British Minister to Japan and China, was then an apprentice Chinese interpreter on board the British warship hms Cornwallis.2 Leading a fleet of other warships and carrying Britain’s chief envoy Sir Henry Pottinger, hms Cornwallis was sailing along the Yangzi River en route to Nanjing at the close of the First Opium War. This war, the first major military confrontation between China and Western powers, had started in 1839, when the British government sent its navy to protect the lucrative opium trade and to pursue greater economic and political benefits in China. Equipped with superb weaponry, the invading army won a series of battles in Hong Kong, Guangzhou (Canton), Ningbo, Dinghai and Zhenjiang. The war ended in August 1842 with the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing – the first of the ‘unequal treaties’ between China and a colonial power, which ceded Hong Kong Island to Great Britain and granted the opening of five treaty ports, including Guangzhou and Shanghai. 7

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So photography, a visual technology invented merely a few years before in Europe, arrived in China together with colonial expansion. (In fact, the daguerreotype was invented in 1839, the same year the First Opium War started.) The implication of this seeming coincidence is profound and will be explored in the first two chapters of this volume. We don’t have the photograph that Malcolm and Woosnam took on the British warship. If their undertaking was successful, the result might have resembled a view of Macau taken by Julies Itier (1802–1877) in 1844, which is one of the earliest surviving photographs made in China.3 From then until 1860, a flurry of amateur and professional photographers went to China. Some of them set up temporary studios in the newly opened treaty ports, where the first generation of Chinese photographers also began to operate. In addition to photographs of landscapes and people, some ‘artier’ pictures were produced towards the late 1850s that reflected the European penchant for the picturesque. Among these are garden views made by the Frenchman Louis Legrand (b. c. 1820) and the Englishman Robert Sillar (1827–1902).4 Featuring clusters of ornamental rocks and a few bony trees over a bridge, they employed the language of chinoiserie and carried on a by-then jaded European tradition in representing the Orient.5 This situation changed significantly around 1860. If the First Opium War in the early 1840s brought photography to China and inspired a local industry, the Second Opium War from 1856 to 1860 occasioned systematic photographic documentations of China and Chinese people. Two photographers contributed most to this advancement: Milton Miller (1830–1899) from America and Felice Beato (1832–1909) from England. Consequently, this volume devotes the first two chapters to investigating their works. Starting their China career in Hong Kong around 1859 and 1860, the two men had very different professional backgrounds and artistic ambitions. Arriving from San Francisco, Miller specialized in portraiture and opened commercial studios in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. His ‘Chinese images’ have been considered among the most sophisticated portraits from 1859 to 1862, eagerly acquired by museums and collectors worldwide. Naturalized as British, Beato made many firstrate panoramas and architectural photos in China and followed the British army all the way to Beijing as one of the earliest international photojournalists. These basic facts are familiar and need no repetition. One goal of this book is to develop a deeper understanding of these 8

Introduction

and other photographers through detailed formal and contextual examinations. In Miller’s case, a close reading of his Chinese portraits reveals that far from simply documenting the likenesses of Chinese officials and their families, a group of rigid, frontal images were the result of a carefully conceived project to forge an essential, timeless Chinese portrait style. Using indigenous ancestral portraits as the model for these photographs, he reinvented a local visual tradition for a global audience. This portrait style was then transformed into a stereotype in both visual representation and verbal discourse in the following decades and significantly influenced the perception and practice of Chinese portrait photography. For Beato, my study evolves around two interconnected issues. One issue concerns the relationship between his brutal war pictures and his seemingly tranquil representations of classical Chinese architecture. The other issue is about his effort to merge these and other images into a ‘magnificent collection’ for his British patrons and audience. Once again, a close reading of his works demonstrates previously unnoticed aspects of his practice, including the changing formats of his China photos, the various groupings of these photos in different albums and the construction of a coherent visual narrative of the colonial conquest through both journalistic and architectural photographs. This brief introduction to these two chapters illustrates the case study method employed in this book, which inspires the title Zooming In. Differing from a general survey, a case study typically focuses on a particular event or person and aims to develop an in-depth interpretation based on a set of carefully examined facts. This research strategy is especially needed at this moment in studying China-related photographs because the field of Chinese photography has grown rapidly and entered a new stage. During the past five years, several general introductions to Chinese photography have appeared, including Terry Bennett’s exhaustive History of Photography in China, 1842–1860, History of Photography in China: Western Photographers, 1861–1879 and History of Photography in China: Chinese Photographers, 1844–1879 (published in 2009, 2010 and 2013);6 Chen Shen and Xu Xijing’s revised A History of Chinese Photographic Art (Zhongguo sheying yishu shi, published in 2011);7 and Claire Roberts’s more succinct Photography and China (published in 2013).8 Together with other surveys of photographers and photographs of specific periods and locales,9 these books provide a new, much consolidated basis for studying photography 9

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in China, and have been further enriched by more focused and contextualized investigations of key issues, events and players. A clear sign of this new orientation was a large research and exhibition project organized by the Getty Research Institute from 2006 to 2011. Concentrating on photographs taken in China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the project was interdisciplinary in nature and stressed the relationship between photography and contemporaneous visual culture and social conditions. To launch the project, the Institute organized a two-day ‘laboratory’, inviting scholars of history, cultural studies, Sino-American relations, urban studies, literature, art history and the history of photography to study examples in its collection. The final products of the project include the exhibition Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China and a scholarly catalogue of the same title consisting of five essays that discuss different aspects of early China-related photography in considerable depth.10 Continuing in this direction, the present volume also consists of focused case studies and emphasizes close visual analysis and broad interdisciplinary interpretation. Unlike the essays in the Brush & Shutter catalogue, however, it has a general chronological framework, with its eleven chapters arranged in a temporal sequence from the 1860s to the present. While each chapter is an independent study on a photographer or a group of photographs, the eleven chapters comprise three ‘parts’ with shifting themes and focuses. Part One, ‘Representing China and the Self ’, starts with the two chapters on Milton Miller and Felice Beato summarized above, examining the colonial mentality and practice in early ‘China photos’. The following two chapters change direction to explore the role of photography in the construction of China’s modern identity as a nation state, as well as the emergence of individual subjectivity in photography. Of these two chapters, one studies different images related to ‘queue cutting’. Towards the late nineteenth century, antiQing revolutionaries and reformists had taken the queue worn by Chinese men as a shameful sign of China’s backwardness. Getting rid of the ‘pigtail’, then, symbolized a man’s determination to sever ties with the past. Portraits of queueless reformist leaders and political activists were circulated through public and private channels. As soon as the Republican government was founded in 1912, it decreed that ‘all our countrymen should shed this filthy custom from the old regime to become citizens of the new nation.’11 This official campaign was again assisted by photography: transmitted by mass media 10

Introduction

to the whole world, images of voluntary or forced queue cutting provided the most concrete evidence for China’s entrance into the modern era. Around the same time, some individual men had their portraits taken before cutting off their queues; the commemorative inscriptions which they wrote on the back of these portraits reveal their complex psychology at this historical moment. Showcasing divergent aspects of the queue-cutting movement, the meanings and functions of these photographic images were all bound up with the changing political process in China, and therefore signify the emergence of what can be called ‘Chinese photography’. If the two preceding chapters demonstrate colonialist practices of consuming China through photography, these ‘queue-cutting’ images demonstrate the integration of photography into China’s political culture and social life. None of these images were produced as works of art, however. It was not until the 1920s and ’30s that photography became associated with individual artistic expression in China, and ‘Chineseness’ in photography became related not only to political identity and social context but also to artistic creativity. During these two decades, many photographic societies emerged in urban centres such as Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou and Guangzhou. Their members experimented with different photographic styles, some fusing elements of traditional literati painting with this modern art form. In the present volume, this transformation from ‘Chinese photography’ to ‘Chinese art photography’ is exemplified by the Shanghai photographer Jin Shisheng (alias Jin Jingchang, 1910–2000), mainly because he simultaneously created two kinds of photographic images: ‘pictorial photographs’ (huayi sheying), which adhered to a dominant trend in ‘fine art photography’ (yishu sheying) at the time, and a unique body of photographs that consisted of a large number of self-portraits and representations of cameras, photo shops, photographic exhibitions and photography books and magazines. Reflecting on photography as a special visual technology, these images also show the artist’s exploration into his interior world as a pioneering artist-photographer. Chapters Five to Seven then constitute Part Two: History Revisited. As indicated by this subtitle, the central concept here is the relationship between the past and the present, but each chapter focuses on a particular group of images and asks a different set of questions. The first chapter, ‘Searching for Immortal Mountains: The Origins and Aesthetics of Chinese Landscape Photography’, connects a brand of Chinese landscape photography to the time-honoured 11

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images of immortal mountains in classical Chinese art. Guided by the works of Lang Jingshan (1892–1995) and Wang Wusheng (b. 1945), two noted ‘photographers of the Yellow Mountains’ separated by half a century, the chapter takes readers on a journey to explore the pictorial language of immortal mountains in premodern China, starting from Han dynasty representations of Mount Kunlun and ending with depictions of the Yellow Mountains by Mei Qing (1623–1697) and Shitao (1642–1707). This artistic tradition continues to inspire contemporary photographers like Wang Wusheng, but his personal experiences during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) also imbue his landscape images with a different kind of spirituality. Wang Wusheng’s counterpart in the next chapter is Zhang Dali (b. 1963). Zhang has also responded to past visual tradition with his artworks, but to a more recent tradition of a very different nature. This is the so-called ‘revolutionary photography’ (geming sheying) of Mao’s China, a branch of official photography charged with the mission of narrating the history of the Chinese revolution, the founding of the People’s Republic and the lives of revolutionary leaders and state heroes. A well-known experimental artist, Zhang Dali developed an art project between 2003 and 2006 to trace doctored versions of famous historical photographs, eventually producing a massive work called A Second History, which displays these images on 130 panels. Taking its cue from Zhang’s project, this chapter looks into the practices of photographical manipulation. It shows that, rather than being isolated incidents, darkroom manipulation of both historical and journalistic photographs constituted an essential mechanism of official photographic production in China, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of recording what is real, doctored images help reconstruct history and idealize reality under the name of photo reportage. This extreme form of political and ideological control, however, was only part of the story of photography under Mao’s rule. Beyond official censorship, private photos transmitted personal and family memories from older to younger generations. Such private photos became the primary source for Old Photos (Lao zhaopian), a tiny magazine that became enormously popular in the late 1990s and triggered an ‘old photo craze’ (lao zhaopian re) throughout the country. Taking a close look at the intention and content of this magazine, the last chapter in this part explores the popular psychology behind the ‘old photo craze’ and relates this cultural 12

Introduction

phenomenon to ‘photo essays’ in popular publications and ‘memory paintings’ in avant-garde art. In this way, the three chapters in Part Two assume a double role: on the one hand, each of these chapters studies a particular visual tradition in Chinese art and visual culture, be it revolutionary photography, private ‘old photos’ or representations of immortal mountains; on the other hand, these chapters connect these traditions to projects in contemporary art, including Zhang Dali’s A Second History, multiple examples of ‘memory paintings’ and Wang Wusheng’s Yellow Mountain photographs. Structurally and historically, therefore, Part Two provides a transition from Part One to Part Three, which is devoted to the most recent chapter in the history of Chinese photography since the 1970s. Chinese photography was reinvented as an art form in the late 1970s and 1980s. During the previous period, from the 1950s to mid1970s, publications and exhibitions of photographs in China served strict propagandist purposes under government control; unofficial photography remained private. With Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the country entered a new era of economic and cultural development. In the field of art, information about modern Western art flooded into the country; a domestic avant-garde movement arose and then broke up in the 1980s, having introduced many artistic experiments.12 Closely related to this general development, three changes in photography ushered in a new generation of photographers from the 1980s to mid-1990s.13 The first change was a sweeping ‘documentary turn’ in the 1980s. Like those of the documentary movement in the 1930s in the United States, Chinese documentary works from this period were linked to China’s sociopolitical transformation; their content and form served the liberal agendas that the photographers aspired to undertake. The second change took place from the late 1980s to mid-1990s, when independent photographers (duli sheyingjia) grew into a formidable force. They severed ties with mainstream photography and constituted a subgroup within the camp of contemporary art. Unlike the amateur photographers of the early and mid-1980s, whose career paths often ended with appointments in professional institutions, these independent photographers insisted on their outsiders’ position even after they became well known. The third change was the introduction of conceptual photography in the 1990s.14 Many experimental photographers (shiyan sheying jia) participating in this ‘conceptual turn’ came from the tradition of 13

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documentary photography. The notion of a concept-driven art steered them to pursue meaning beyond concrete images. Mo Yi (b. 1958), Liu Zheng (b. 1969) and Rong Rong (b. 1968) – the subjects of the first three chapters in this part – are representative experimental photographers who embody these changes. Their works also most intensely interrogate three prevailing themes of experimental Chinese photography in the 1980s and ’90s, namely the urban environment, people and the self. Mo Yi explored his state of existence through photographing the people and things surrounding him. Several of his photographic series from 1988 to 1997, including Expression of the Street, A Swaying Bus, Landscape Outside a Public Bus, Photos Taken through a Dog’s Eyes, Red Lamp Posts and Urban Signs, stemmed from a twofold engagement with the city on the one hand and his own subjectivity on the other. While reflecting a perpetual attraction to alienation, these works are also the earliest Chinese examples that fused conceptualism with documentary photography. Liu Zheng is known as China’s Diane Arbus because his My Countrymen series includes many physically and mentally disabled subjects. Breaking away from Socialist Realist representations of ‘revolutionary masses’, his eyes seem to be fixed on men and women who are recipients of unwanted identities and have been made objects of prejudice. In addition to its sociological value, the two persistent focuses of the series – death and grotesque figural representations – testify to a new fascination in experimental Chinese photography with the body and human psychology. Rong Rong was a member of Beijing’s East Village, an avant-garde community formed by migrant artists from various provinces in the mid-1990s. Immortalizing some unforgettable performances conducted by fellow artists in this community, he played a key role in advancing a type of experimental photography that takes performativity as both subject and purpose. He was also the first Chinese photographer to cast his eyes on urban ruins: fascinated by the rapid transformation of the Chinese city, he photographed half-demolished residential houses that exhibited traces of now absent occupants. The concept of ruins recurred in his works from the late 1990s to early 2000s, which variously documented the death of buildings, human subjects and photographs themselves. The last chapter of this book focuses on Miao Xiaochun (b. 1964), who represents a new type of ‘global photographer’ based in China. Whereas Mo Yi, Liu Zheng and Rong Rong all developed their careers in China and affiliated themselves with a burgeoning 14

Introduction

experimental art movement, Miao Xiaochun took a different path from the onset. Amid a ‘craze for going abroad’ (chuguo re) in the 1990s, he went to study at Kunsthochschule Kassel from 1995 to 1999, producing a graduation work which represents him as a mysterious traveller to the West from an unidentified time and place in China’s past. When he accepted an invitation to teach at one of China’s top art schools, this image – a life-size mannequin fashioned in his own likeness – accompanied him on this return journey to witness the enormous changes that had taken place in his native country during his absence. In addition to such autobiographical representations, Miao has articulated his identity as a global artist in two other ways: his later works purposefully blur the boundary between photography and new media art and ‘translate’ famous Western classical paintings into photographic and digital images with all their figures replaced by an essentialized portrait of himself. Traversing geographical and artistic boundaries, his story echoes those of Miller and Beato, who came from America and England to photograph China 150 years ago.

15

PART ONE REPRESENTING CHINA AND THE SELF

1. INVENTING A ‘CHINESE’ PORTRAIT STYLE IN EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY: THE CASE OF MILTON MILLER

2 Milton Miller, The First Wife of the Tartar General, Canton, 1860–63, albumen silver print.

Not much can be said about Milton M. Miller’s (1830–1899) professional life.1 Piecing together scattered records, we know that before starting his brief but productive career in China, he worked from 1856 to 1860 as a cameraman in Robert H. Vance’s San Francisco gallery.2 In 1859, Vance (1825–1876) formed a partnership with Charles Leander Weed (1824–1903), an adventurous photographer and entrepreneur who later opened galleries from Nevada and California to the Far East.3 When Weed moved to Hong Kong in 1859, Miller followed, serving as the ‘operating artist’ in the newly established Weed and Howard Photographic Gallery in both Hong Kong and Guangzhou.4 According to an advertisement from 1860, the gallery was equipped with ‘a large Solar Camera by which Photographic Portraits can be taken Life Size; this is a new invention to which the Advertisers would call especial attention’.5 In 1861, Weed left for Shanghai to look for new venues; Miller took over the gallery’s ownership and established the firm of Miller & Co., Photographers.6 It is unclear how long he maintained the Guangzhou operation: in August 1861, Miller announced that the branch would be open for business for only a month. During this period, he also suffered a burglary; the missing properties included ‘the whole of the articles’ in the gallery and a box of negatives.7 It is likely that Miller operated mainly in Hong Kong, from where he travelled to Macao, Guangdong and other locations on commission. For example, in May 1861 he sailed to Nagasaki, Japan, where he made a series of stereoviews for the American publishers E. & H. T. Anthony.8 Another commission came from Dr John Kerr at the Canton (that is, Guangzhou) Hospital; he invited Miller to photograph a Chinese patient whose body and arms were ‘covered with hundreds of tumors’.9 This was the first documented use of photography in China for medical research in 19

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an institutional context. Miller terminated his Chinese venture in 1863 and returned to his hometown in Vermont, selling his business and negatives in Hong Kong to his former operator S. W. Halsey.10 It seems that, once resettled in America, he reinvented himself as a real-estate investor and largely abandoned the career of a photographer; the 1870 u.s. census identifies him as a ‘retired photographer’.11 Among the Western photographers working in China from the mid- to late nineteenth century, Miller is best known for his portraits of Chinese officials, businessmen and women. To many collectors and researchers, these are prized artistic images that not only demonstrate the photographer’s technical sophistication but also reveal the sitter’s inner character – a combination rarely seen in the early photography of China.12 Take his portrait of an old woman, for example (illus. 2); she wears an elaborately embroidered robe with matching vest and skirt – the ceremonial garb of a Qing official’s wife. Though expressionless, her wrinkled face shows signs of a long, unhappy life, delicately contrasting with her ornate crown of jewels and flowers. The image is subtle yet direct. Light, which comes from above and focuses on the woman’s body and face, foregrounds her from the shadowed surroundings. The sense of visual immediacy and the woman’s individualized appearance reconfirm the picture’s identity as a portrait13 and explain why this and similar images by Miller have been praised as ‘the most significant body of nineteenthcentury Chinese official portraits’.14 But who is this woman? Is she really the wife of a Tartar General, as a version of the picture’s English caption says? Who is this Tartar General? Why did the woman come to Miller’s studio to have a formal visage taken? These questions have never been asked because people have willingly trusted the image to be a genuine portrait, mainly based on its heightened naturalistic effect. But during a workshop on photographs of China in 2006, this image was scrutinized along with some other Miller pictures.15 Certain peculiar features of these photographs were recognized. One problem concerns the old lady’s clothes, which are worn by different women in other Miller pictures, including a young lady whom the caption identifies as the wife of a Cantonese mandarin. who is the sitter?

Taking this initial discovery as a clue, I have tried to trace the links between Miller’s Chinese portraits by comparing their subjects, 20

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costumes, settings and props. Many more connections can be established: the young woman is shown both individually and with her husband; the husband is also photographed with his mother and younger brother; the mother, who turns out to be none other than the ‘wife of the Tartar general’, appears with other women in yet another picture. This detective work has finally singled out eleven photographs as belonging to a tight, ‘feature-sharing’ cluster: the same people appear and reappear in these pictures in different costumes and changing groups, and the portraits were all shot in the same place and with an identical photographic style.16 Their iconographical consistency and stylistic coherence suggests a loosely defined ‘project’: it is possible that Miller created these images during his short stay in Guangzhou in 1861. Before contemplating the implications of these findings, however, we need to look more closely at the images. The most frequently photographed and most photogenic sitter among Miller’s subjects is the young man in four images reproduced here. In A Young Chinese Man, he wears a winter-style official surcoat (bufu); the bird insignia in the square badge on his chest identifies him as a civil official (illus. 3). During the Qing dynasty there were nine degrees of civil officials, whose different ranks were indicated by various bird motifs on their badges. In the present case, the bird is probably the silver pheasant (baixian), the symbol of the fifthdegree civil official. The same man appears with his wife, in full court dress; here he has changed into a summer-style surcoat made of semi-translucent gauze (illus. 4). The bird insignia on the surcoat differs from the first one and indicates a different official rank.17 The same man also appears in two other pictures in casual, domestic clothes. In one, he sits with his wife and their four children (illus. 5); in the other, he is with his aged mother, his younger brother and three children (illus. 6). But it seems that only two children are his: according to traditional customs, the boy sitting next to the younger brother should be the latter’s son. The young wife portrayed in the second image also reappears in multiple pictures (illus. 7, 8 and possibly 11). Both in the portrait with her husband (illus. 4) and in Mandarin Lady (illus. 7), she wears a full set of the ceremonial attire of an official’s principal wife, including an embroidered robe with official insignia and a matching skirt, a jewelled crown and a long necklace. During the Qing dynasty, a lady put on such a formal costume only on ceremonial occasions. But the woman in Mandarin Lady sits in 21

zo om i n g i n 3 Milton Miller, A Young Chinese Man, 1860–63, albumen silver print.

4 Milton Miller, A Mandarin and His Wife in Full Court Dress, 1860–63, albumen silver print. 5 Milton Miller, Chinese Family, 1860–63, albumen silver print.

a languid pose, which seems at odds with her supposed social status and the implied formal occasion. Leaning to one side, she puts an arm on a traditional-style tea table (chaji) while exposing her tiny bound feet.18 A Chinese Woman presents an even bigger problem: here she is dressed in a Han-style unofficial jacket and skirt, but with a rank badge on the chest (illus. 8). Not only is it highly unusual to combine a rank badge with an informal jacket, but the badge also differs from the one in the previous picture. According to Yuhang Li, who has extensively researched traditional Chinese costumes, the badge seems to have been added arbitrarily onto the jacket, because 22

zo om i n g i n 6 Milton Miller, The Same Mandarin in Civilian Dress, with His Aged Mother Sitting in the Middle, His Brother on the Right Hand, and Three Children, 1860–63, albumen silver print.

it covers the embroidered borders running from the neckline to the lower hem.19 The young man’s clothes – his winter-style surcoat, fur hat and collar (illus. 3) as well as his summer-style surcoat with a different rank badge (illus. 4) – are shared by a middle-aged man in two further images (illus. 9, 10). In one, this older man is accompanied by his wife (illus. 10). Her clothes are completely identical to those in the two images of the young woman (illus. 4, 7). Like the younger couple, the middle-aged couple is portrayed again with other family members in plain clothes (illus. 12). Similarly, the young man’s aged mother in the image above reappears in the picture discussed at the beginning of this chapter, in which she has changed her plain robe to ceremonial garb (illus. 2). Upon close comparison, we find that she, the young woman (illus 4, 7) and the middle-aged woman (illus. 10) all wear the same set of clothes and ornaments, including the robe, skirt, vest, crown and necklace. Moreover, her identity as the ‘Wife of the Tartar General, Canton’ cannot be true because in other pictures she and her children all wear typically Chinese clothes. One of these ‘Chinese’ images is shown above. The other photograph is Chinese Ladies of Rank, in which she appears with other female figures to represent three generations of women in a family (illus. 11). These eleven pictures were all shot in the same space, as indicated by the identical diamond patterns on the carpet and the 24

7 Milton Miller, Mandarin Lady, 1860–63, albumen silver print.

8 Milton Miller, A Chinese Woman, 1860–63, albumen silver print.

9 Milton Miller, A Chinese Man, 1860–63, albumen silver print.

i n v e n t i n g a ‘ c h i n e s e ’ p o r t r a i t s t y l e i n e a r ly p h o t o g r a p h y 12 Milton Miller, A Chinese Family, 1860–63, albumen silver print.

same plain backdrop. They also employ identical props, including two side tables (one Chinese style and the other Western style), a set of covered teacups and two sets of chairs. In two cases, additional props such as potted flowers, calligraphy scrolls and a table screen are employed to generate a stronger domestic atmosphere (illus. 4, 5). This space is clearly Miller’s studio in Guangzhou.20

§

10 Milton Miller, A Mandarin and His Wife in Full Court Dress, 1860–63, albumen silver print. 11 Milton Miller, Chinese Ladies of Rank, 1860–63, albumen silver print.

Why should we conduct a close reading that primarily focuses on the sitters’ clothes, ornaments and rank badges? This is because a careful examination of these details – indicators of the sitters’ (supposed) identities – marks the beginning of a serious inquiry into the nature of these historical photographs. Any historical inquiry requires an evidential basis. Due to the paucity of archival evidence in studying early photographic portraits in China,21 this basis can be established only through a systematic inventory and analysis of the intrinsic properties of actual photographs. Such a preliminary examination is both deconstructive and constructive because it simultaneously frees a photograph from unsubstantiated assumptions and re-establishes its status as a historical image and artefact. In the present case of the eleven Miller portraits, it has become obvious that we can no longer trust the conventional identifications of the sitters. Miller may have provided some of these identifications, 29

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such as labels and captions; others were likely added during the course of the images’ circulation and reproduction. These labels, for example, identify the young man in the illustrations variously as ‘a Cantonese mandarin’, ‘a minor official’ or ‘a Chinese merchant’ (illus. 3, 4, 5, 6). The young woman is said to be the wife of a mandarin or a merchant when she is dressed in domestic clothes (illus. 5, 8) and is labelled as ‘the number 1 wife of the Canton governor’ or the wife of a lower official when she wears the ceremonial costume (illus. 4, 7). As for the old woman (illus. 2), we already know that some books introduce her as the wife of the Tartar General in Guangzhou; but she is also identified as ‘probably the wife of Kwang Tsan-t’ang, governor of Kwang-tung (Guangdong)’ in The Face of China; as ‘the wife of a Cantonese Mandarin’ on the cover of Imperial China; and as ‘Mandarin’s Wife’ in Terry Bennett’s newly published History of Photography in China, 1842–1860.22 None of these claims can be substantiated by textual evidence, but the pictures themselves can easily refute all of them. As mentioned above, no official could have different rank badges on winter and summer surcoats at a given moment; and it is unthinkable that ranking officials and their wives would exchange clothes when they had formal portraits taken in a Westerner’s studio. It is clear that these are all staged ‘costume portraits’ with dubious historical credibility. But the labels and captions provide them with a fictional documentary quality. whose individuality?

This renewed understanding challenges the photographs’ status as ‘the most significant body of nineteenth-century Chinese official portraits’.23 We should also question a previous conclusion, based mainly on this group of images: that as early as 1860 and 1861, many affluent Chinese, including Qing officials and their families, had embraced photography and frequented Western studios to have their pictures taken.24 One version of this theory appears in Mary Warner Marien’s Photography: A Cultural History: The standards for middle-class portraiture, developed in the West, were adapted to the tastes of a new, well-to-do Chinese clientele. Lavish furnishing, placed in an enclosure marked off by a cloth backdrop, formed the setting for people who dressed in fine clothing and displayed artistic treasures. Miller’s portraits, mostly of the Chinese upper and middle classes, and 30

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persons working for foreign trades, usually show the sitters directly facing the camera. A hint of expression is occasionally evidenced on a sitter’s face, but as a rule the camera kept its distance from the sitter.25 The portrait of the young couple in court dress is the example used to illustrate this statement (illus. 4). Marien mentions several visual features of Miller’s Chinese portraits, including lavish furnishing, fine clothing, artistic treasures and the expressions on the faces. Because the sitters’ names are never given, even in the make-believe captions, I suspect that the perception of these images as genuine visages of middle- and upper-class individuals is largely based on these features and the photographs’ realistic style, which places a heavy emphasis on the sitter’s physiognomy and character. Indeed, portraits by Miller, whether real or fictional, convey a strong sense of naturalism rarely seen at the time in China, and for this reason he has been compared to Mathew Brady (c. 1823–1896) and Marcus Aurelius Root (1808–1888). Like these two representative nineteenth-century portrait photographers, Miller consistently created images that were at once precise and dramatic. He used carefully controlled lighting to delineate figures’ facial features and to mould their clothed bodies. He also took pains to capture hints of facial expression, as we find in several male portraits in this group (see illus. 3, 4, 5, 9). Situated in a relatively empty environment, these figures surface from the plain, slightly blurry background, initiating a visual dialogue with the spectator. This naturalistic style places Miller among mainstream American portrait photographers of the 1850s and 1860s. As historians of photography have shown, during this period, an ideal photographic portrait was conceptualized in America as a lifelike image emanating from the sitter’s inner character; a representation of this kind must, therefore, treat ‘the exterior surface of persons as signs or expressions of inner truths, of interior reality’.26 Serving a well-to-do clientele obsessed with ‘character’, the task of a portraitist became predominantly ‘how to achieve it, how to show it and preserve it, and most of all how to recognize it in others’.27 Furthermore, according to this view, to recognize and represent the sitter’s character not only fulfils the mimetic function of photography, but more importantly demonstrates the photographer’s artistic aspiration and talent. In revealing the interiority of the subject, the photographer elevates him or herself from performing a mechanical act to reflecting the 31

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sensibility of an artist. Henry James thus stated in 1855 that an artistic photographer must infuse his personality to elevate the gift he possesses high above that of a mere mechanical power . . . elevating the cause of genuine art above that mere daguerreotype faculty of ever presenting one exact copy of nature.28 The earliest record of Miller’s professional career shows that in 1856 he was working in Robert H. Vance’s gallery at the corner of Montgomery and Sacramento Streets in San Francisco.29 It is perhaps no coincidence that Vance, ‘the Pacific coast’s premier photographic trendsetter and practitioner in the 1850s’,30 opened this gallery the same year with an aggressive advertising campaign. Here is one of his advertisements in the San Francisco Commercial Advertiser, which trumpets the gallery’s unmatched technology, artistic taste and up-to-date style: Every plate is carefully prepared with a coating of pure silver, which produces that clear, bold and lasting picture that is so much admired, and which can’t be produced on the common plates, as they are now used by other artists . . . He [Vance] has of late, after much experimenting, brought his chemical preparations to perfection, using compounds entirely different from anything ever before used in the art, which enables him to produce perfect likenesses, at every sitting, with that clear, soft and beautiful tone, so much admired in all his pictures.31 Another advertisement in 1857 emphasized that with the assistance of ‘another of the best Artists in the state’, ‘our goal is to perfect ourselves in any new branch of our Art that may be invented, previous to introducing it in our establishment.’32 Whether or not Vance was referring to Miller here, this and other advertisements reflect Miller’s working environment before he went to the Far East. To rise to his employer’s demand in order to survive in the fiercely competitive business of commercial photography, he had to perfect his techniques and skills, embracing while helping to define the prevailing ideal of portrait photography and proving himself to be a true artist.33 Understood in this context, the heightened ‘individuality’ in Miller’s Chinese portraits demonstrated the photographer’s 32

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qualification as a creative artist, not necessarily the subjectivity of the sitter, especially when the sitter was a hired model. It is also important to recognize that although he was now working in a British colony away from home, his clients remained Westerners, not the local people. Indeed, even though the figures in his pictures appear to be men and women of distinct physical features and personalities, Miller never noted down their names and merely assigned them some generic identities in English. His shocking insensitivity towards local Chinese labourers during a recorded incident also makes one wonder if he cared at all about his employees’ feelings or thoughts.34 Projecting an individualistic air but remaining anonymous, these images represent a curious fusion of the newly emerging artistic genre of portrait photography and the age-old European tradition of depicting ‘Chinese types and professions’. We can trace this tradition to a set of illustrations that Johannes Nieuhof (1618–1672) made after travelling to Beijing in the years 1655 to 1657.35 But the direct predecessor of nineteenth-century photographic representations of China were William Alexander’s (1767–1816) watercolour pictures and engravings, which he created after journeying with the Macartney Embassy to China in 1792.36 Depicting distant Chinese cities and landscapes, exotic buildings and figures dressed in special costumes and engaged in different activities, Alexander’s pictures became enormously popular in the early nineteenth century and were reproduced in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States. When European and American photographers arrived in China from the 1840s onwards to produce their own images of China, they followed the well-travelled routes of Nieuhof and Alexander but updated the depictions of Chinese people and costumes with contemporary visual technology and artistic taste. The puppetlike figures in Alexander’s Costume of China were turned into real, albeit still nameless, ‘portraits’. As I will explain in the following section, what this transformation signified, however, was not the self-discovery of an indigenous people but the global reach of Western science and art, which allowed a Western observer to not only record local costumes and customs but also to transform the locals into ‘individuals’ in order to demonstrate his own modernity.

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reinventing a chinese portrait style

When Miller arrived in Hong Kong in 1860, the place was already populated by photo studios operated by Westerners and Chinese alike; the latter’s establishments included the Yicheng studio founded during the Xianfeng era (1851–61) and the Sheyingshe (photography society) started by Lai Afong (1840–1900) in 1859.37 John Thomson (1837–1921), a famous British photographer who travelled to China in the late 1860s and early 1870s, noted ‘a score of Chinese photographers’ who had their businesses along the city’s Victoria Road.38 The emergence and proliferation of commercial studios is a crucial issue in the history of Chinese photography and has been discussed by various scholars.39 Their discussions show the coexistence of Western and Chinese studios in the major treaty ports and growing competition between them. Jeffrey Cody and Frances Terpak, for example, cite the reformer Wang Tao, who felt that the Chinese studios in Shanghai made better prints than their foreign counterparts.40 Significantly, around this time, the Chinese ‘peculiarities’ in portrait-taking also became a recurrent topic of ridicule in Western accounts: a local sitter always demands a full frontal view with both ears showing, always looks straight into the camera lens in a confrontational manner, always sits squarely next to a side table with artificial flowers on it, always hates shadows on his face, always wears his best clothes and holds a favourite object such as a fan or a snuff bottle, and always displays his long-nailed fingers distinctly.41 Thomson reconfirmed most of these oddities in a report titled ‘Hongkong Photographers’.42 Published in the prestigious British Journal of Photography, this report differs from other accounts in its inclusion of an interview with a fictive native practitioner named A-hung, thus equating a Chinese photographer’s professional standards with a Chinese sitter’s uneducated preferences. To drive his point home further, Thomson also illustrated the report with a caricature (illus. 13). In describing this illustration, Roberta Wue writes: The dead, full-front orientation of the sitter, the painfully unnatural symmetry of his frog-like pose, and the tediously precise positioning of the furniture and props all illustrate and parody the artificial regularity and lack of depth condemned in Thomson’s account.43 Written in tones ranging from condescending to patronizing, accounts of this kind were nevertheless taken as reality. What makes 34

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these reports especially persuasive is a ‘discursive symmetry’: the picture they paint neatly contradicts Western conventions in portraittaking, hence confirming some deeply held notions about essential cultural differences between East and West. Developed around the mid-nineteenth century and applied to both operators and sitters, these Western conventions are also concerned with how to arrange the body, where to allow the light to fall, what background and furniture to provide and what to do with sitters’ hands, legs and eyes.44 One such instruction dictates: The posture of the person sitting for the portrait should be easy and unconstrained; the feet and hands neither projecting too much, nor drawn too far back; the eyes should be directed a little sideways above the camera, and fixed upon some object there, but never upon the apparatus, since this would tend to impart to the face a dolorous, dissatisfied look.45

13 John Thomson, Parody of Chinese Photographic Portrait, from British Journal of Photography, xix/658 (1872).

It is interesting that while providing a basic perceptual structure for articulating Chinese conventions, these instructions also steadfastly oppose the Chinese way of portraiture. In other words, the Western observers willingly have themselves contradicted on every account by the Chinese conventions, thereby defining the latter as some strange behaviour of the other. As rare textual references to early Chinese photography, Thomson’s report and similar ‘eyewitness’ accounts by Western informants have stimulated a scholarly interest in defining a distinct Chinese portrait style.46 But as Régine Thiriez summarizes, after having scrutinized hundreds of old portraits from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, generally speaking, there are no radical differences between products of Chinese and Western studios.47 Chinese studios adopted various Western formulas in setting up the backdrop and arranging sitters’ poses, whereas many works by Western studios nicely fit the aforementioned Chinese conventions. Her conclusion is supported by Cody, Terpak and Sarah Fraser and by my own study of photo archives in China 35

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14 Anonymous, A Standard Ancestor Portrait, second half of the 1800s, ink and colour on silk.

and abroad.48 Rather than conforming to the sharp cultural divide repeated in the Western accounts, an empirical study of primary data reveals instead an abrupt split between practice and discourse. This split leads us to think about the nature of Western accounts of Chinese portrait photography and the complexity of studio practices. In other words, we no longer frame our inquiry around what separated Chinese and Western studios or whether Chinese sitters and photographers developed distinct standards in taking portraits. Of course indigenous traditions of portraiture existed in premodern China and would influence people’s attitudes towards the camera. Instead, our questions are refocused on a self-conscious construction of an ‘authentic’ Chinese portrait style in photography, a construction that took place from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. To my knowledge, during this period no Chinese writer or photographer wrote about this style or related practices; the so-called Chinese conventions of portrait photography were exclusively reported by Western observers (although sometimes citing local informants), in contrast to the contemporary EuroAmerican ideal of portrait photography. Nor did Chinese writers and photographers comment on heterogeneous practices of Western portrait photography – an absence of interest that signifies the lack of a comparative approach. In contrast, the Western discourse on the Chinese portrait style was entirely based on a comparative approach, which was internalized by Miller in his studio practice. While following the Western canon to make images for foreign and some Chinese subjects, he also made the earliest set of portraits that began to define a distinct Chinese portrait style. Here we return to the group of eleven photographs with a renewed interest. The subject of our examination shifts from the sitters’ clothes, ornaments and insignia to their poses, gestures, props and grouping. Underlying this shift is a changing focus from the sitters’ identity to the modes of representation. Among the eleven images, five portray individual sitters and six are group portraits. My discussion here focuses on the single-sitter pictures. Four of these five images conform to a standardized composition, with a man or woman placed in the exact centre, sitting in a perfect frontal pose and looking straight into the camera (illus. 2, 3, 8, 9). Seemingly frozen in silent stillness, these static images betray no bodily movement or any sign of animation, and their rigidity is reinforced by the frontal arrangement of the chair and side table. The notion of space is reduced to a minimum. The picture appears flat, 36

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15 Milton Miller, J. H. Chevechon, Hong Kong, c. 1860, albumen silver print. 16 Lai Chong, Senggelinqin, 1853, hand-painted daguerreotype.

even if the sitter’s face and robe are given a sculptural quality. We have no difficulty identifying the origin of this compositional style: if Miller’s treatment of the face and body followed a popular Western style, he designed the composition to echo a traditional Chinese ancestor portrait. If we put a contemporary ancestor portrait (illus. 14) next to the four images, we see the same frontal posture, same direct look, same empty background, same spatial reduction and enhanced two-dimensionality and same feeling of stillness and lack of animation.49 At least six factors further suggest that in making these images, Miller may have intentionally imitated ancestor portraits, a contemporary visual tradition in nineteenth-century China. First, like ancestor portraits, these images show full-bodied figures dressed in official garb. Second, several details of these portraits, such as a hand lightly holding a long necklace, the symmetrical placement of the two feet and the use of a broad footstool, are found in ancestor portraits. Third, in their portraits the two male figures fill almost the entire picture frame (illus 3, 9). This composition is rarely seen in portrait photographs but is a distinct feature of many ancestor portraits. Fourth, around the same time or slightly later, fake ancestor portraits were made for commercial 38

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purposes and exported to foreign countries.50 Fifth, surviving works by earlier Chinese photographers such as Lai Chong (fl. 1853) closely follow prevailing Western styles and betray no influence of Chinese ancestor portraits (illus. 16).51 Finally, a comparison between these four images with other portraits by Miller reveals a deliberate effort to create a typical Chinese portrait style. The sitters in these other portraits include both foreigners and Chinese, whose identity is often more definitely recorded. A certain J. H. Chevechon sits in a relaxed posture with hat in hand (illus. 15). The diagonal balustrade and vertical column define an architectural space for him. In Sir John Michel, the general stretches his booted foot in an outlandish manner almost beyond the picture frame; his nearly perfect profile image forms an exaggerated contrast to a frontal Chinese ancestor portrait (illus. 17). In a group photograph, the real Tartar General of Guangzhou appears in casual clothes amid sons and subordinates in his private garden (illus. 20). These examples make it

17 Milton Miller, Sir John Michel, KCB, 1860–63, albumen silver print.

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18 Milton Miller, Mandarin Lady, 1860–63, albumen silver print. 19 Milton Miller, Mandarin Lady, 1860–63, stereoscope.

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20 Milton Miller, The Tartar General, His Attendants and Servants, Group Made in Front of His Palace, 1860–63, albumen silver print.

clear that Miller had a wide range of compositional possibilities at his disposal, and in creating portraits for different subjects or purposes he made deliberate choices in the setting, gesture and spatial arrangement. The fifth single-sitter portrait among the eleven Miller images also reveals similar choices (illus. 7). Unlike the four frontal visages, here the woman leans on one side and looks downwards. The photographer has abandoned the frontal mode and has taken the picture from an oblique angle. Together with the attached chair and side table, the woman’s body constitutes a three-dimensional mass. We wonder why, in taking this portrait, Miller steered away from the ancestor portrait model. A possible answer is that the asymmetrical composition reinforces the woman’s languid manner and melancholy mood, which is taken as the purpose of this picture. Miller took more than one shot of this scene. Comparing the two existing versions (illus. 7, 18), we find that they differ slightly in the angle of the body and face. It is as if the photographer tried to find an ideal vantage point from which he could most effectively capture the heightened femininity of Chinese beauty. It is perhaps also not coincidental that Miller represented this same woman in a pair of stereographs (illus. 19). Because this type of image was typically created for wider reproduction and circulation, this additional evidence further proves the commercial nature of Miller’s enterprise in making this set of Chinese portraits. Simulating ancestor portraits, the four frontal images have a different objective in forging an essential, timeless Chinese portrait 41

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style. Again, it should be emphasized that the presumed clients of these works were Westerners in China or back home, whose interest in purchasing a Chinese image lay fundamentally in its exotic otherness, as a visual testimony of a foreign culture and mentality. By employing hired models, Miller could construct such images with ease: he could order them to put on different costumes and ornaments, to move this or that way and to form different groups. For the same Western clientele, however, he also hoped to demonstrate his artistic sensibility by representing the sitters’ character, a sensibility that would separate him from an old-fashioned illustrator of Oriental people and costumes. The combined outcome of these desires conforms to neither Chinese nor Western aesthetics in their own terms but mingles local visual norms, Western expectations and the photographer’s personal ambitions in a hybrid form. As we will see, this form would be further articulated and abstracted into a stereotype. But even in 1861, the two most dominant features of the four Miller portraits – Chinese sitters represented in the manner of an ancestor portrait – clearly separated them from other types of portraiture, advertising themselves as authentic Chinese images in both subject-matter and style. the chinese portrait style as a stereotype

Miller did not invent this style of portraiture; rather, he reinvented a local visual tradition to create quintessentially Chinese images for a global audience. Like many other Western photographers working in China at the time, he envisioned his Chinese subjects with both cultural superiority and fascination. His artistic/commercial endeavour in Hong Kong was embedded in a diverse array of colonial administrative practices and financial enterprises. That he worked within a colonial structure made his images readily accessible to the imaginative conceits of a broad range of Western viewers and also guaranteed the legitimacy of his Chinese style in a colonized territory, making it a model for local studios to follow. But what is a ‘local studio’ in a place like Hong Kong? It should be recognized that an uncritical use of the term already internalizes the colonizer’s approach and terminology. In actuality, commercial photo studios of foreign and Chinese ownership operated side by side in the centre of the city; there was no clear line demarcating their spaces and practices. Edwin Lai has argued that many early Chinese photographers had been trade painters producing Western-style pictures for 42

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foreign travellers and residents alike.52 Almost exclusively located in major treaty ports in the second half of the nineteenth century, their practices were heavily influenced and even controlled by the same array of colonial administrative practices, commercial enterprises and visual culture.53 Most of these studios learned their trade from their Western associates, and their advertisements explicitly emphasized such connections to propagate the authenticity of their products. In this political and economic environment, it is only natural that these Chinese studios would participate in the colonial construction of a typical Chinese portrait style and even claim this style as their own. Moreover, because this style actually derived its source materials from local culture, its reverse transformation into local culture was smooth and invisible. Further adjustments were made during this process of reclamation: new props were added, changing styles of clothes indicated shifting fashion and heavy-handed foreign references were sometimes neutralized. These adjustments, or reappropriations of an already appropriated indigenous visual tradition, concealed the colonial intent in the initial construction of the style, translating a Western fetish into Chinese self-imagination. By 1872, when Thomson wrote his report in the British Journal of Photography, the process of this transformation or reclamation had been largely completed. The fictive Hong Kong photographer A-hung could now give him a whole lecture on the Chinese portrait style, and another British photographer, D. K. Griffith, could also thoroughly attribute this style to Chinese sitters’ choices.54 These accounts, which had become unequivocal and self-evident in the 1870s, signalled a further transformation of the Chinese portrait style into a stereotype not only in visual representation but also in verbal discourse. Three operations made this second transformation possible, including a complete ‘fixity’ (or fixed perception) of a typical Chinese portrait;55 a deepening concealment of the Western participation in the style’s construction;56 and a forced divorce between this style and the concept of art. A single paragraph from Thomson’s report and the accompanying diagram (illus. 13) sufficiently demonstrate these operations. The paragraph reads: They [Chinese portraits] were all taken in the same pose seated at a very square table, or rather a table that looks like a number of carefully-constructed skeletons of cubes placed one above the other, like part of the apparatus of a lecture room designed to illustrate the principles of geometry. On the table there is a 43

i n v e n t i n g a ‘ c h i n e s e ’ p o r t r a i t s t y l e i n e a r ly p h o t o g r a p h y 21 Afong Lai, Western Man in Hong Kong in Chinese Costume, c. 1885, albumen silver print.

vase containing artificial flowers – gaudy caricatures of nature. The background of plain cloth is adorned with two curtains, arranged so as to form part of an isosceles triangle above the sitter, who is posed as if his figure were intended to demonstrate a proposition in Euclid.57 In this characterization, the Chinese portrait style connotes rigidity and an unchanging order reinforced by countless repetitions.58 Works of this kind deny gentle contours, spontaneous movements or a romantic atmosphere and exhibit only unfeeling, geometric shapes arranged in a cold symmetry. Envisioned as a natural outcome of the local mentality, this style is now defined as purely Chinese, freed from any of the cultural ambiguity or stylistic hybridity that once characterized Miller’s Chinese portraits. Significantly, Miller’s, or any Western photographer’s, role in the construction of this style is deliberately erased. Thomson specifies the strange, ‘very square table’ next to a Chinese sitter as a principal feature of a typical Chinese portrait, but we have seen that this table is in fact a permanent fixture of Miller’s studio and appears in seven of the eleven pictures studied in this chapter (illus. 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11). Finally, in Thomson’s aesthetic judgement, such unchanging, formulaic images cannot be qualified as art; this explains why he represents them with a drawing, highlighting the ‘gaudy’ artificial flowers erected on the side table. Homi Bhabha describes stereotyping as ‘a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’.59 By abstracting the Chinese portrait style into a crude caricature, Thomson dismisses the materiality of this style as well as its historical temporality, but his drawing also reveals an anxiety about facing real photographs, including those made by Miller. This stereotyping of the Chinese portrait style, then, provided a new basis for cultural dialogue and self-imagination. When Afong made a ‘Chinese’ portrait for a foreign man in 1885 (illus. 21), he not only dressed him in Chinese costume and equipped him with a water pipe but also asked him to sit frontally, staring into the camera; and he arranged the props – including artificial flowers on a square chaji – strictly according to the standard image caricatured by Thomson in his report (compare illus. 21 and 13). Echoing the first generation of Chinese portraits made by Miller 24 years earlier, this costume portrait no longer aimed to construct an authentic indigenous style, but only to consume it. 45

2. PHOTOGRAPHY’S SUBJUGATION OF CHINA: A ‘MAGNIFICENT COLLECTION’ OF SECOND OPIUM WAR IMAGES

the collection

Felice Beato (1832–1909)1 returned to London in 1861 with an impressive portfolio of photographs that he had cumulatively created during a three-and-a-half-year sojourn in India and China.2 Soon afterwards he sold them, including reproduction rights, to Henry Hering (1814–1873), a commercial photographer and dealer in London, who would recall two years later that he had bought ‘400 Views of India and China from Mr Beato’.3 Here a ‘view’ refers to a print from a single negative, not a ‘picture’ that is sometimes composed of multiple prints to form a panorama. If we trust Hering’s memory, then he only offered a selection of Beato’s photographs – 301 views constituting 243 pictures – for sale. The sale catalogue that he published in 1862 starts with a long heading that summarizes the content of the offerings: preparing for immediate publication by subscription,

22 Henry Hering’s subscription list of Beato’s China photographs, 1862.

by H. Hering, Photographer, Printseller, and Publisher to the Queen, 137 regent street, london a magnificent collection of photographic views and panoramas taken by signor f. beato, During the Indian Mutiny in 1857–58, and the late War in China, of lucknow, cawnpore, delhi, agrA, benares, & punjab, hong kong, the peiho forts, pekin, the summer palace, and canton, also portraits of the celebrities engaged during the mutiny in india and the late war in china.

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Below the heading are specifications of the size, form and price of the photographs, followed by their titles listed under ‘India’ and ‘China’. The ‘China’ section in turn consists of two series with the subtitles ‘From Hong-Kong to Pekin’ and ‘From Pekin to Canton’ (illus. 22). The first series consists of 54 views of 23 pictures and the second, 69 views of 62 pictures. What Hering did not mention in the catalogue, however, was that the prints he offered for sale were not made from Beato’s original negatives, but were printed from a second generation of negatives reshot from the ‘views’ that he had bought from Beato. Indeed, as scholars have noted, these reproduced prints and the original prints, if examined side by side, are not difficult to differentiate.4 Printed on thinner paper, the reproductions are generally darker, with greater contrast, and show less detail as a consequence of reshooting. A set of original photographs, even mounted in a single album, frequently displays inconsistent tonality, but the reproductions exhibit a striking visual uniformity, as they were created under similar conditions with identical techniques. These two kinds of prints also use different methods to inscribe serial numbers and captions. Whereas many original prints bear pencilled numbers on the verso and mount, numbers were written on the copy negatives in ink so they appeared white on the reproduced images. Now a permanent feature of the photographs, these indelible serial markers clinch the images’ identity as constituents of a larger entity. Likewise, the captions of the original prints were handwritten with changeable wording, but those of the reproductions are printed in letterpress and affixed to each mount below the image, again deleting any direct trace of a human hand. We need to pay attention to these differences because they signify changing concepts and processes of image-making. Beato produced the original prints at different times and places while journeying in the East. Although he sold these prints in groups, the content of a group was never stable and shifted case by case. It was reported in November 1860, for instance, that Lady Charlotte Canning (1817–1861), wife of the Governor-General in India Charles John Canning (1812–1862) and herself an established artist, commissioned a ‘complete set’ of Beato’s China photographs consisting of 38 images.5 But other sets handed down from British personnel engaged in the Second Opium War contain varying numbers of prints. Among them are 61 photos preserved in a lavish album, originally presented to James Bruce (1811–1863), the eighth Lord Elgin and British High

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Commissioner in China during the Second Opium War, and now in the National Gallery of Canada. Two of Elgin’s secretaries compiled their own sets of Beato’s China photographs: the set assembled by Henry Brougham Loch (1827–1900), now in the Canadian Centre for Architecture, has 45 images; the other set, originally assembled by Henry Hope Crealock (1831–1891) and now in the National Gallery of Australia, consists of 69 images.6 Interestingly, the two most extensive sets were both acquired by Americans. One of them, containing 85 photographs and now in the Peabody Essex Museum (pem) in Salem, Massachusetts,7 came from the collection of Albert Farley Heard (1833–1890), who managed his uncle’s firm, George Farley & Co., in Guangzhou and Hong Kong from 1853 to 1867.8 The other even larger set, consisting of 92 images, was passed down from Hetty Green (Henrietta Howland Robinson, 1834–1916), the ‘witch of Wall Street’, to her daughter Harriet Sylvia Green (1871–1951), before entering the Museum of Modern Art (moma) in New York.9 Judging from these and other existing sets of Beato’s original prints,10 he had not formed the notion of a standard ‘collection’ of his China photographs before returning to London, but sold prints in various groups based on the circumstances and clients’ interests. The different numbering systems found on his original prints must have resulted from this practice.11 Towards the end of his Far East sojourn, however, he began to sell his China photographs in large sets consisting of multiple groups, and also compiled a comprehensive list in which each picture was indexed by a letter or number. We know this second fact from a particular feature of Hering’s sale catalogue: it does not include numbers 1, 2, 9, 58–64, 79 or 82, which, if added to the listed 85 photographs, would form a corpus of 97 images. The absence of these twelve items in the catalogue surely did not result from negligence, because the existing sets of reproduced images closely match this ‘incomplete’ list.12 It is therefore necessary to ask why these twelve images were excluded. Based on several factors, I suggest that Beato and Hering omitted them (as well as 26 images from the ‘India’ series) to enhance the quality and saleability of the offerings. Combined with other changes that they made, these omissions aimed to produce a definitive set of Beato’s India and China photographs – a ‘magnificent collection’, as the sale catalogue promises – for the first public presentation of these works in the capital of the British Empire. Indeed, it must have been of crucial importance for Hering and Beato to stress the cohesiveness of the offerings. From 1861–2, the 49

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advertisements and reports related to these works consistently used the word ‘collection’ to describe them. Even before the sale catalogue became available, The Times reported on 18 October 1861 that, Signor F. Beato has just arrived from China with a large collection of photographic views of Pekin, the Summer Palace, the Peiho forts, Canton, Hongkong and the whole of the views taken during the campaign in China; . . . The whole collection will be shortly published, by subscription, by Mr. H. Hering, photographer etc. 137, Regent Street, London, where the list is open for subscribers’ names.13 The nearly identical wording of this announcement with the catalogue’s heading betrays Hering’s participation in composing both. When the catalogue came out the following year, as mentioned earlier, it further hailed the offerings as a ‘magnificent collection’. And when these works were reviewed in the British Journal of Photography on 1 July 1862, the anonymous reviewer again conceived of the photographs as a ‘collection’ that not only gives views of all the more interesting and best known spots connected with the [Indian] mutiny and the [Chinese] 50

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23 Felice Beato, Talien Whan Bay, July 21st, 1860, albumen silver print.

war . . . but also depicts the terrible sight of a battle field as it remained after victory and defeat.14 The effort to present the photographs as a coherent collection did not stop at the verbal level, but underlay many practical decisions which Beato, possibly together with Hering,15 made to enhance the photographs’ visual consistency and thematic coherence. We have mentioned that they selected 85 images out of 97, reshot them and made prints from the new negatives.16 David Harris has identified eleven existing photographs that Beato took in China not included in the Hering edition (hereafter referred to as ‘the collection’).17 Although he has suggested that Beato ‘apparently did not bring’ these prints to England and thus failed to reproduce them,18 an analysis of these eleven images reveals more complex factors involved in their exclusion. A rather obvious reason is the injuries that befell some of Beato’s original glass negatives. Early prints of Arch to the Memory of Virtuous Women, for example, show a crack around the lower left-hand corner of the negative. This image, seen in the moma and pem sets, was omitted in the collection.19 Talien Whan Bay presents a somewhat different case. The only existing full composition of this five-part panorama, now in the Canadian Centre for Architecture, shows 51

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thin black lines across the two left-hand prints, indicating cracks on the two corresponding negatives.20 For this reason, some later versions of the photograph omitted these two sections to form a three-part panorama, as demonstrated by examples in moma, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Getty Museum. The result was unsatisfactory, however, because the composition became unbalanced, with all British warships concentrated in the two sections to the left (illus. 23). By further omitting the section to the far right, Beato and Hering produced a third version for the collection which, though much truncated, regains a measure of visual coherence by focusing on the British fleet (Hering E, illus. 24). In addition, two of the eleven extra images were omitted to accommodate the decision to conclude the collection with portraits of three key players in the Second Opium War (discussed later in

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24 Felice Beato, Talien Whan Bay, July 21st, 1860, Hering E, albumen silver print.

this chapter). These two photographs are East Street from Yamun, Canton and The Heights of Canton, both taken in April 1860. In the moma set, they are inscribed with numbers 90 and 92. They are replaced in the collection with images of General James Hope Grant and Prince Gong. Artistic reasons also probably explain why these two Canton images were dispensable: the first image, featuring a wooden archway in a frontal view, resembles two other photos in the collection (Hering 60 and 77), whereas the second image is poor in print quality. Such concerns about repetition and visual quality possibly account for the omission of several other images.21 At the same time, Beato and Hering ‘edited’ selected pictures to improve their imagery and market value. In several cases they abridged multi-sectional panoramas; the rationale must have been that such pictures were both costly to make and difficult to sell.

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I have mentioned Talien Whan Bay, which was reduced to a two-part panorama focusing on the British fleet (illus. 24). Following a similar tactic, they shortened First Arrival of Chinese Expeditionary Forces by two sections. Taken from the Kowloon Peninsula towards Hong Kong Island, this picture originally consisted of six prints, with the left two dominated by a ragged hill in the foreground. By omitting these two sections, the fourpart panorama in the collection (Hering C) fills a broad sweep of land and water with numerous British camps, barricades and warships. The revision of a third picture, Panorama of Pehtang Fort, reflects artistic concerns more than political calculations. This photograph originally had nine sections, sweeping around to present the walled fort in the midst of an empty landscape.22 The version in the collection (Hering F) reduces the number of prints to seven by cutting off the left two. With this reduction, the camera’s vantage point is repositioned at the exact centre, corresponding to a courtyard house represented symmetrically from above. If the original version offers more geographical information, the edited version has a more balanced composition with a sharp visual focus. Another major editorial effort made by Beato and Hering aimed to bestow the collection with a coherent narrative structure. As mentioned earlier, the ‘China’ series in the sale catalogue consists of two subseries, ‘From Hong-Kong to Pekin’ and ‘From Pekin to Canton’, hence constituting a continuous expedition with a coherent temporal sequence. A deconstructive reading of this sequence, however, reveals that it resulted from piecing together five groups of photographs taken in a non-chronological order. Each group dates to a specific period and has a particular theme. According to the time of photographing, these are: (1) The build-up of the British expeditionary army in Hong Kong (photographed in March and June 1860); (2) architecture and the urban environment of Guangzhou (photographed in April 1860); (3) the northbound expedition of the Allied forces (photographed July to September 1860); (4) views of Beijing (photographed October 1860); and (5) portraits of two British and Chinese officials (photographed November 1860). As we will learn later, the chronological order of these groups was altered in the collection while new narrative elements were added. What is the purpose of such reordering and narrative construction? How do we read the collection as a whole? Did the general framework of the collection change the meaning of individual photographs? To answer these questions, I will first 54

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follow Beato’s steps to trace the creation of his China images in a chronological sequence, and will eventually return to Hering’s catalogue, exploring the mentality behind the new narrative sequence constructed for the collection. hong kong and guangzhou

When Felice Beato arrived in Hong Kong in 1860, Milton Miller had already spent about a year in this British colony working at the Weed and Howard Photographic Gallery (see Chapter One). The two Western photographers must have met in clubs and on the street. One coming from the American West Coast and the other from the British Empire via India, however, they differed markedly in their professional backgrounds, artistic interests and photographic styles. Miller had developed his career as a portrait photographer in commercial studios back in San Francisco; an enclosed interior space was all he needed to make pictures of men and women. Beato had learned a different sort of photography on the road. First following his brother-in-law James Robertson (1813–1888) and then working independently, he had been journeying since the mid-1850s to photograph architectural monuments and ruined battlefields. In 1855 he was noted as helping Robertson document the carnage of the Crimean War. Afterwards he and Robertson photographed ancient buildings in Jerusalem, Athens, Constantinople and Egypt.23 Beato then travelled alone to India to record the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, or the First War of Indian Independence. Whereas his photos of conquered Lucknow already betrayed a distinct sensitivity towards destruction and violence, it was his China images taken during the last stage of the Second Opium War (1856–1860) that established him as one of the most accomplished war photographers of the nineteenth century. Also known as the Arrow War, the Second Opium War enabled the British Empire to pursue several major objectives in its long-term plan to colonize China, including legalizing the opium trade, expanding coolie trade, opening all of China to British merchants and exempting foreign imports from internal transit duties. When Emperor Xianfeng (r. 1851–61) rejected these demands, the British, joined by the French, found excuses to ‘teach China a lesson’.24 The allies began military operations in 1856 and forced the Qing to sign the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858, which promised to open several new ports to Western trade and 55

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25 Ye Mingchen (Yeh Ming-ch’en), from G. W. Cooke, China: Being ‘The Times’ Special Correspondence from China in the Years 1857–58, frontispiece, photographer/artist unknown.

residence and to give foreigners, including Christian missionaries, the right to explore China’s interior. Negotiations in Shanghai later that year further legalized the importation of opium. But the war resumed in 1859 when the Qing reinforced the Dagu forts near Tianjin and defeated a British attack in June. Preparing for a major counter-offence, 173 British and French warships and 17,700 soldiers gathered in Hong Kong in early 1860. Lieutenant-General James Hope Grant (1808–1875), recently appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British troops, arrived on 13 March from India (where he had played an important role in suppressing the Indian Mutiny). On board with him was Beato. Although only tangential to the current discussion, Beato’s Indian experiences lay the groundwork for his China adventure in several crucial ways. It was in India that he became acquainted with some high-ranking British military officers charged with the imperial mission to colonize the vast East. One visual testimony of their relationship is a plate in a photo album entitled Lucknow, now in the Canadian Centre for Architecture, which displays Beato’s photographic portrait of six army officers and colonial officials serving in India at the time, including General Grant, General Robert Napier (1810–1890), Major John North Crealock (1836–1895), Major George Allgood, Sir Theophilus John Metcalfe (1828– 1883) and General James Charlemagne Dormer (1834–1893). Some of them, such as Grant, Napier and Crealock, were then dispatched to fight in China. Immersing himself among these men and following in their steps, Beato established a client base as well as an information network to advance his career as a war photographer. Also in India, he evidently heard about the unfolding war in south China. Not long before his arrival in Calcutta in February 1858, the British–French army bombarded Guangzhou. The city quickly fell and Viceroy Ye Mingchen (Yeh Ming-ch’en, 1809–1859), the highest-ranking Chinese official involved in dealing with the West, was captured on 5 January 1858. After staying 48 days on the British warship HMS Inflexible, he was brought to Calcutta and confined in Fort William. His capture was a sensational event widely reported 56

p h o t o g r a p h y ’ s s u b j u g at i o n o f c h i n a 26 Felice Beato (?), Ye Mingchen (Yeh Ming-ch’en), 1859, albumen silver print.

by the British media. George Wingrove Cooke (1814–1865), The Times’ special correspondent, recounted that Ye was photographed in Calcutta and included an etched reproduction of Ye’s portrait in his book (illus. 25).25 He did not identify the photographer, but a similar image is attributed to Beato or Pierre Joseph Rossier (1829–c. 1898) (illus. 26).26 Comparing these two portraits, it is clear that they were taken on the same occasion. Although the authorship of the two images remains indefinite, their photographic style shows a closer affinity to Beato than Rossier. In particular, this image resembles Beato’s later portrait of Prince Gong (see illus. 42) in several major aspects, including the posture of the subject, the framing and the photographic angle. Moreover, Beato’s time in Calcutta coincided 57

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27 Felice Beato, Panorama of Hong Kong Taken from Happy Valley, March 1960, albumen silver print.

with Ye’s stay in the same city, from 12 March 1858 to 8 April 1859, when Ye reportedly starved himself to death.27 Largely because of his close relationship with Grant, Beato joined the general’s inner circle in the capacity of ‘an artist’ eager to record the forthcoming battles in China. To Beato, this opportunity was like a dream come true: although he had always been fascinated by the brutality of the war, he had not yet been able to witness military action up close. In Lucknow he had the bones of dead soldiers uncovered and displayed among ruined buildings, but he must have known that he was just restaging a fake battle scene. Now, sailing in the same ship with the Commander-in-Chief of the British expedition army and other officers, he would have firsthand knowledge of military plans and gain immediate access to the battlefields. His status as a semi-official photographer was later confirmed by Grant in writing: before the Allied forces attacked Beijing, Grant allowed Beato to copy a military map of the city and recorded this episode in his private journal: ‘I had it photographed by Signor Beato, whom I had specially allowed to accompany the expedition, and who had previously photographed scenes in India and the Crimea.’28 This special relationship between Beato and the British military forces explains his activities in Hong Kong. Unlike other Western photographers who developed their careers in this exotic oriental city either as portraitists or landscape photographers, his first project was to document the British military presence. On 27 and 29 March 1860, a mere two weeks after arriving in Hong Kong, Grant sent a large photograph by Beato to Prince George William Frederick Charles (1819–1904), head of the British Army, and Sir Sidney Herbert (1810–1861), Secretary of State for War.29 It is a 180-degree panorama (Hering A) centred on the Victoria Harbour

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between Hong Kong and the Kowloon Peninsula. Judging from the colonial-style buildings in the foreground, Beato set his camera on top of Government House on Upper Albert Road. While this position allowed him to behold the entirety of Victoria Harbour, it also naturally embodied the authoritative gaze of the British governor. This significance of the photograph is doubly realized through the actual view: numerous British warships are anchored in the harbour, making the broad bay look like a bathtub. This awe-inspiring scene thus validated the politicized gaze that the camera position already implied. One can easily imagine the smiles of Prince Charles and Sir Herbert when they looked at the picture. This photo and two other highly sophisticated panoramas together constitute a self-contained group, representing the British expedition army in Hong Kong and Kowloon from changing angles and distances. One of the three (Hering B; illus. 27), still taken from Hong Kong Island but further west, juxtaposes Victoria Harbour and Happy Valley surrounded by rocky hills, so one can see both the warships in the bay and the race track in the valley. The third image (Hering C), now looking at Hong Kong from Kowloon, focuses on seemingly innumerable infantry camps, stretching from the low hills in the foreground to the waterfront in the distance, beyond which one sees the fleet in the harbour. Beato clearly put a lot of thought and work into making these panoramas. He must have searched for the best spots from which to take the views and must have arranged for special assistance to carry a bulky camera, a heavy tripod and fragile glass plates to locations in the hills and across the bay. He had to transport chemicals and a portable darkroom as well: photographers of this time had to prime and process glass negatives in the field.30 The result of such painstaking effort must have pleased

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his main patron and supporter General Grant, who wrote in a letter to Sir Herbert on 20 May 1860: I forward to you a number of photographs of Canton & Hong Kong which are very good – They are taken by an Artist – Mr Beato who was sent from India with me. I told him to give one copy to the War Office and one copy to the Duke of Cambridge to the Horse Guards. You will see an excellent Photograph of Kowloon & what an admirable place it would be for B[arrac]ks. – being very dry & exposed to the south west Monsoon which makes it much cooler than Hong Kong.31

28 Felice Beato, Nine-storey Pagoda and Tartar Street, Canton, 1860, albumen silver print.

This communication makes it clear that in addition to working in Hong Kong, Beato also took photographs in Guangzhou between 27 March and 20 May. This is consistent with the dates inscribed on his Guangzhou images, either ‘April, 1860’ or, more precisely, ‘April 10th, 1860’. Considering the impressive quantity of this group of works – 23 in Hering’s sale catalogue – he must have spent quite a few days in Guangzhou. It seems that after accomplishing the initial – and possibly assigned – task of depicting the British military build-up by making the three large panoramas, he shifted his eyes to this neighbouring Chinese city under foreign occupation, especially to its many masterpieces of traditional Chinese architecture. Isobel Crombie has suggested that this interest arose from Beato’s second identity as a professional photographer ‘keen to exploit the commercial potential offered by the forcible “opening up” of that country by Britain and France’. He thus divided his attention between photographing China and documenting the foreign invasion.32 Beato’s own track record supports this explanation: when he started practising photography in the early 1850s, he already displayed a parallel interest in depicting battlefields and foreign monuments. A major category of photographs he made in Constantinople, Greece and Jerusalem consists of classical monuments,33 which continued to be a major theme of his China images. Several of his Guangzhou photographs focus on the ancient Temple of the Six Banyan Trees (Liurong si), representing the grand Mahavira Hall (Hering 66, 75 and 79) and the Flower Pagoda (Hering 61, 70 and 81) from different angles and distances. His pictures of this latter monument (illus. 28) strikingly resemble the drawings of ruined pagodas by earlier European travellers, reflecting a time-honoured Western fascination with Chinese ruins.34 60

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29 Felice Beato, Name Hui Kung Temple, Canton, April 1860, albumen silver print.

Other major buildings featured in Beato’s Guangzhou photographs include the Taoist Five Immortals Temple (Hering 63, 67 and 72), Temple of Confucius (Hering 71 and 72), the Five-storey Pavilion (Hering 89) and the Mohammedan Mosque (Hering 87). Only two of the 23 photographs show street scenes (Hering 74 and 76); the others all focus on solemn traditional structures which at first glance seem devoid of people. His eyes are drawn to the intricate silhouettes of timber archways and pavilions and to the layered roofs whose curved corners stretch up towards the sky. Numbers 73 and 85 in Hering’s catalogue represent a single architectural complex from left and right, forming a pair of mirror images which together construct a three-dimensional view (illus. 29, 30). While these works have their places among the best specimens of architectural photography from the nineteenth century, they do not just express the photographer’s aesthetic sensitivity. Crombie 62

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30 Felice Beato, Name Hui Kung Temple, Canton, April 1860, albumen silver print.

is surely correct to point out Beato’s commercial motivations in creating such pictures, which sold well in the West.35 In fact, while in Guangzhou he also freelanced for the stereoscope company of Negretti & Zambra.36 Moreover, we should not ignore the political content of some of these seemingly timeless images. One of them (Hering 83, illus. 31) shows a grand hall with a heavy tile roof not unlike the Mahavira Hall in the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees, but its title tells us that this is the ‘Commissioner’s Yamun’. Yamun, or yamen in current romanization, is the Chinese word for an administrative office, and the building in the photograph was indeed the chief official edifice in Guangzhou. Traditionally it was the office of the Viceroy of Liang Guang (Guangdong and Guangxi), but when the Allied forces occupied Guangzhou in January 1858 it was taken over by the foreign commissioners until October 1861.37 Looking at the photograph closely, we recognize that the dozen people standing 63

zo om i n g i n 31 Felice Beato, Commissioner’s Yamun, Canton, April 1860, albumen silver print.

in front of the old hall are foreign officers and sailors. The building was now the ‘Commissioner’s yamen’, and it was the headquarters of the city’s new masters that Beato was photographing. battlefields

On 8 April 1860, the Qing government rejected a joint Anglo-French ultimatum which demanded, among other privileges, unrestricted passage to Tianjin and Beijing. As a result, Britain and France resumed military hostilities against China, and the Second Opium War entered a new phase. The Allied forces sailed to Hangzhou Bay in late April and occupied the Zhoushan (Chusan) islands, halfway between Hong Kong and Tianjin. It was then decided that Yantai (Zhifu) and Dalian Bay (Talien Whan), two coastal cities that guarded the entrance to the Bohai Gulf (Gulf of Petcheli), would offer the most strategic springboards to invade the Tianjin/Beijing area (illus. 32). Beginning in June, the French troops landed in Yantai in northern Shandong, while the English troops assembled in Dalian Bay in southern Liaoning, with its three divisions (the First Infantry Division, the Second Infantry Division and the cavalry and artillery) stationed at what had been christened Victoria Bay, Hand Bay and Odin Bay. Beato arrived at Victoria Bay on 21 June and immediately 64

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started to take photographs. During the next four months, he was a de facto member of the British expedition army, following its movements until it entered the Chinese capital. A brief outline of the key military operations during these months will provide a background for discussing Beato’s photographs from this period. For the allies to reach Tianjin and Beijing, they had to take over the Dagu (Taku) forts standing on the mouth of the Hai River (Peiho), a military stronghold which the Qing Imperial Commissioner Sengge Rinchen (1811–1865) had recently refurbished to protect the capital. This military base consisted of five major forts, three on the north and two on the south of the river. Each fort was a reinforced earthen structure 12–15 metres (39–49 ft) tall, covered with an external curtain of concrete and equipped with three large cannons and twenty smaller-calibre guns. Just a year before, on 24 June 1859, Sengge Rinchen won one of the rare Chinese victories here: the newly installed cannons enabled him to upset Admiral James Hope’s (1808–1881) attempt to force through the Chinese defence line, sinking four British gunboats and severely damaging two others. Taking the defeat as an intolerable shame, the Anglo-French army was determined to win a decisive battle at the same place in 1860; taking over Dagu thus became a central agenda in the military planning. On 1 August, a combined force of 4,000 British and French troops landed at the town of Beitang (Peitang) some 20 km (12½ miles) north of Dagu,

32 Map showing Yantai (Zhifu) and Dalian Bay (Talien Whan). Based on George Allgood, China War, 1860: Letters and Journal (London, 1901), pp. 31, 33.

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33 Military map showing Beitang (Peitang) and Dagu (Taku). Based on George Allgood, China War, 1860: Letters and Journal (London, 1901), p. 28.

and immediately seized two nearby forts on either side of the Beitang River (illus. 33). The next operation, realized on 12 August, was to conquer Tanggu (Tangku), a small town near Dagu. Finally, on 21 August, the invaders mounted a fierce attack on the Dagu forts, concentrating on the inner north fort. Although the Chinese soldiers fought bravely for over four hours from dawn to 10 a.m., eventually they were unable to sustain the allies’ heavy bombardment from both land and sea. The next day, the Anglo-French troops crossed the river and took over the remaining forts. The route to Tianjin was now open, and this major Chinese city fell on 2 September without mounting significance resistance. The distance from Tianjin to Beijing was merely 125 km (78 miles). The Allied forces departed for Beijing on 9 September. The troops temporarily halted their advancement before reaching Tongzhou, when the Qing government proposed an emergency negotiation at this ancient town 25 km (15½ miles) outside Beijing. The peace talks never happened, however. Instead, two ferocious battles – the last major fights in the Second Opium War – took place in Zhangjiawan and Baliqiao outside Tongzhou on 19 and 21 September. The result was disastrous for the Qing: its famed Mongolian cavalry under Sengge Rinchen’s commandership was doomed in the face of concentrated foreign infantry and artillery fire; the Chinese losses were estimated at between 20,000 and 25,000. 66

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After learning of the defeat, Emperor Xianfeng fled the capital, leaving Prince Gong (1833–1898) in charge of negotiation. The Allied forces reached the imperial palaces in Beijing’s western suburbs on 5–7 October. Beato was the only photographer who systematically recorded this series of events. At a time when the camera still could not capture movement, he focused on traces of military operations instead, while trying to convey a feeling of action as much as possible. We know 32 photographs from this period of his China sojourn, although he may have taken more.38 These 32 images, including some large panoramas, were taken at five locations: three at the Dalian Bay, seven at Beitang, two at Tanggu, twelve at Dagu and eight in the Tongzhou area. Historians of photography have paid minute attention to these works, which represent a major advancement of nascent photojournalism on the global stage. Consulting memoirs written by participants in the Second Opium War, scholars have been able to identify the location and timing of each image, to determine the position and angle of the camera and to differentiate copies from original prints. Such highly technical scrutiny has laid a foundation for us to further consider Beato’s changing visual modes in making these photographs, and to explore the reasons behind his decisions. These thirty-plus photographs mix large-scale panoramas of distant views and single prints focusing on specific scenes. Examined in a temporal scheme, the two panoramas that Beato took at Dalian Bay, his first landing point in north China, continued the style and subject of the three panoramas that he had made in Hong Kong. Entitled Odin Bay (Hering D) and Talien Whan Bay (Hering E), they consist of four and five sections, respectively, and both emphasize the magnitude of British military power. As in making the earlier panoramas, Beato set his camera on a commanding point far away from his subject, so the finished pictures could encompass full, horizontal views of the British fleet and camping grounds. This type of large-scale, panoramic representation would have served the role of providing military information, as Beato evidently made them with London’s War Office in mind. Earlier we mentioned that Grant sent Beato’s Hong Kong panoramas to Prince Charles and Sir Sidney Herbert, the head of the British army and the Secretary of State for War. On 23 and 25 July, right before the Allied forces began their offensive move to Beitang, Grant again mailed the new panoramas to these two men in London.39 67

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At the same time, Beato also began to produce an increasing number of single-sheet photographs, representing more focused views of encampments and battlegrounds. Some of these pictures include British officers. One such image, made in Dalian Bay and entitled Camp of the Headquarters, 1st Division, represents some canvas tents under tall trees.40 Two men in uniform stand in front of a stone embankment; a pencilled inscription identifies one of them as General John Michel (1804–1886), commander of the division. Two other photographs taken in Beitang again use British headquarters as the background: two white tents stand on top of a conquered fort, with the Union Jack flying in the wind. In the picture titled Headquarters Staff – Pehtang Fort, August 1st 1860 (Hering 4), three officers are engaged in a casual conversation in the foreground; the man staring to the right is Henry B. Loch, the private secretary of Lord Elgin (illus. 34). Another photograph taken from the same place, not listed in Hering’s catalogue, shows a group of five men, including, according to an inscription below the print, Loch, Crealock, James Stuart-Wortley (an attaché to Lord Elgin), Thomas William Bowlby (1817–1860, the Times correspondent) and a certain Mr Dock.41 Sometimes, a particular place was photographed because of its connection with a ranked officer. One such case is number 11 in Hering’s catalogue. At first glance, this image of the interior of a small temple seems out of place

34 Felice Beato, Headquarters Staff – Pehtang Fort, August 1st 1860, albumen silver print.

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among Beato’s visual records of battlefields. Reading the handwritten caption, we realize that Beato photographed this religious building because it was used by General John Michel as his headquarters in Beitang. Similarly, Beato photographed a mosque (Hering 41) not just for its architectural value but also because, according to the caption, it was ‘occupied by the Commander in Chief and Lord Elgin’ on 3 and 4 October. Although limited in number, these examples reflect a significant change in Beato’s photographic practice during the military campaign. Whereas in Hong Kong he acted as a free agent to take photographs in surrounding areas, he now stayed with British officers and became one of them. After he arrived at Dalian Bay, according to Robert Swinhoe (1836–1877), the army translator, Beato ‘made himself comfortable in a mound in a broad road running between hedges, and alongside was the tent of the provost-marshal’.42 George Allgood, the Deputy Assistant Quartermaster-General of the First Division, wrote to his mother on 20 July 1860: ‘Signor Beato (the same artist who took the photographs I sent home from Calcutta) is with us, and is busily employed in photography.’43 As the campaign went on, the officers became not only his daily companions but also his first customers; records show that Beato made sample prints to show to them almost immediately after a battle. According to LieutenantColonel Gother Frederick Mann (1817–1881), the commanding officer of the Royal Engineers’ 10th Company, Beato told him that ‘he [had] very numerous applicants [for his photographs] and [would] probably sell some thousands between Off[ice]rs of the force & Hong Kong people.’44 Mann himself bought several pictures from Beato and sent them, along with ‘a rough plan of our march from Pei Tang [Beitang] to the [Dagu] Forts’, to his wife on 9 September.45 None of the photographs that Mann mailed home still exist. Based on an itemized description that he wrote to accompany them,46 however, we can identify these images as numbers 4 and 8–13 (the last item could be 14 or 15) in Hering’s catalogue. This identification leads to three observations, which in turn guide us to think about some general aspects of the 32 images. First, the six photos that Mann purchased were all single prints except for a two-part panorama. Considering that one-third of the photographs that Beato made from Dalian Bay to the Dagu forts (8 out of 24) are panoramas, including some long ones, Mann clearly favoured single prints, possibly for their lower price and greater portability. Since army officers like Mann constituted Beato’s main customers, this 69

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case helps explain why he produced a far larger number of single prints than panoramas after the army moved to Beitang. Second, Mann used the six photos and the hand-drawn map to illustrate his verbal descriptions of the military campaign. For the last photograph of the six, which displayed the corpses of dead Chinese soldiers amid the ruins of a Dagu fort, he wrote: ‘This is an ugly picture, but required to complete the descript.’47 It is clear that he selected the images to construct a narrative sequence, starting from the occupation of Tanggu and ending with the capture of Dagu. This sequence is related to, but not necessarily identical with, a sequence that Beato had initially conceived and composed. The most coherent and dramatic of Beato’s sequences consists of eight views of the inner north Dagu fort (Hering 10–17). As Harris has demonstrated, this carefully planned series of shots took two or more days to accomplish, but not in the order of their final presentation.48 Shortly after the capture of the north fort, he took three pictures inside the defence structure, photographing the scene of carnage from different angles (Hering 13–15, illus. 35). The next day he captured a view from the rear of the fort, where more corpses lay in the open field (Hering 16, illus. 36).49 Over this and the following days, he photographed the fort from other angles and different distances, showing the gates from which British and French troops broke into the fort (Hering 10–12). Eventually he set his camera above the wall of the fort and took a four-part panorama, representing the entire structure in a continuous picture (Hering 17).50 Using these eight photographs Beato constructed a self-contained sequence. The first three guide the viewer closer and closer to the fort’s entrance. The next three scenes survey the devastated interior, followed by the seventh scene, which represents the field behind the fort. The corpses lying there may have belonged to Chinese soldiers who tried but failed to escape their doomed fate. The final image, the only panorama in the group, concludes the sequence with a comprehensive view of the fort, which is now still and silent. Finally, the fact that Mann’s package included photos of recent military operations demonstrates the impressive speed of Beato’s photographic production, especially when we consider the complex procedure of making albumin prints and the wartime conditions under which he was operating. The last of the six photos, that of the conquered northern Dagu fort, was taken on 21 August or the next day. Mann could have purchased it as early as 25 August, because Allgood wrote to his mother on the day that Beato had shown 70

p h o t o g r a p h y ’ s s u b j u g at i o n o f c h i n a 35 Felice Beato, Interior of the Angle of North Fort Immediately after its Capture, August 21st 1860, albumen silver print. 36 Felice Beato, Rear of the North Fort after its Capture, Showing the Retreat of the Chinese Army, August 21st 1860, albumen silver print.

this and related Dagu photographs to army officers: ‘Beato, the famous photographer has got several views of the fort with heaps of dead!’51 This means that Beato produced these photographs within three or four days of taking them. Such extraordinary speed may be explained by commercial motives: Allgood’s letter and Mann’s purchase prove how deftly Beato marketed and sold his works. But an equally important reason, I believe, lies in his elated mental state as a devoted war photographer. The conquest of Dagu provided him with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to document a brutal battle in nearly real time. David F. Rennie, a doctor in the 71

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expedition army, left a rare eyewitness account of Beato’s actions on 21 August:52 I passed into the fort and a distressing scene of carnage disclosed itself; frightful mutilations and groups of dead and dying meeting the eye in every direction. I walked around the ramparts on the west side. They were thickly strewed with death – in the north-west angle thirteen were lying in one group around a gun. Signor Beato was here in great excitement, characterizing the group as ‘beautiful’, and begging that it might not be interfered with until perpetuated by his photographic apparatus, which was done a few minutes afterwards.53 Crombie considers Rennie’s report the closest we come in the literature of the period to some insight into the photographer’s character. Beato’s enthusiasm for the aesthetic potential of the corpses . . . reveals both his great zeal for photography and his hardened, professional approach.54 Such zeal explains his urge to photograph the scene as well as to see it on paper, and to watch the British officers marvelling over his achievement: ‘Beato, the famous photographer, has got several views of the fort with heaps of dead!’ beijing

There is no way to guess how much Beato knew about Beijing before he got there. Born in Venice and a world traveller, however, he must have heard about Marco Polo’s visit to this legendary city. It is interesting to observe an abrupt change in his photographic interest when he finally reached Beijing’s vicinity: monumental architecture, not battlefields, suddenly dominated the photographs he took at Tongzhou. The glorious image of the Randeng Pagoda (Tung Chow Pagoda) must have astonished him (Hering 21, illus. 37). Founded in the sixth century, rebuilt in the eleventh century and redecorated in the eighteenth century, this brick structure, 45 metres (148 ft) high, rose up above the rest of the town, its bold silhouette melting into fine relief carvings under thirteen layers of tiled eaves. Near Tongzhou he also visited some elaborate graveyards of deceased Qing royalty, one of which was used by 72

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the allies as a depot for guns and ammunition. Everything here – gates and halls, memorial steles and incense burners – was frozen in stone. Beato took at least three photos to immortalize these masonry works, capturing the shifting light and shadow on their ornately engraved surfaces (Hering 52–4). These images seemed to belong to a different time, infinitely distant from the violence surrounding them. In reality, however, Beato took these pictures soon after the ferocious battle at Baliqiao. He did visit the battleground after the fighting was over. But his heart was no longer set on documenting the war carnage: only one of his photographs records this battle and it is not included in Hering’s catalogue.55 Displaying Chinese corpses lying in a flat, featureless field, the sharp contrast between this picture and his beautifully crafted architectural images seems especially crude and plain. He still followed the invasion army and was supposed to record its movements. But now he conveyed messages of the war mainly in the captions of his architectural photos, not in the images themselves. For example, his photograph of Baliqiao (Herring 54) emphasizes the bridge’s graceful arch and elaborate railings; no trace of the battle is seen. But under the picture he wrote: ‘Bridge of Palichian, the Scene of the Fight with Imperial Chinese Troops, September 21st 1860, near Pekin’. This interest in architecture then became his main tactic in representing Beijing.

37 Felice Beato, Tung Chow Pagoda, September 23, 1860, albumen silver print.

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In documenting Beijing and its architecture, Beato was aided by a military map provided by the Russian envoy to the Allied forces. Grant recorded this transaction in his journal: [General Ignatieff] showed us an excellent map, which he had caused to be made, of Pekin, wherein was represented every street and house of importance. This plan he kindly lent me to copy, merely stipulating that it should not be published, as it had not yet been sent to St Petersburg. I had it photographed by Signor Beato, whom I had specially allowed to accompany the expedition, and who had previously photographed scenes in India and the Crimea.56 With this map, Beato could identify, though not always correctly, important monuments and use the information to label the 29 photographs that he took in Beijing, later integrated into Hering’s catalogue as numbers 22–48 and 55–57. Attempting to capture the Chinese emperor in his Summer Palace, the Anglo-French troops advanced to the imperial pleasure gardens northwest of Beijing between 5 and 7 October. Dazzled by the art treasures in the two largest gardens, Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness) and Qingyi Yuan (Garden of Clear Ripples, later renamed Yihe Yuan), the soldiers immediately began to pillage what an official French campaign report euphemistically called a ‘collection of curiosities of the most precious nature’.57 It is often assumed that Beato took pictures of Qingyi Yuan during this period (Hering 43–8), but it is also possible, as will be discussed below, that he made these photographs later, just before British troops began to destroy this garden. On 13 October, under the threat of further military actions, the Qing government handed over control of Beijing’s Anding Gate (Gate of Peace and Stability) to the Allied forces. Beato was there and was clearly impressed by this massive architectural complex attached to walls as thick as 25 metres (82 ft) at the bottom. He photographed the gate’s double towers, which guarded one of the nine entrances to the city, and climbed onto the walls to have ‘a first view’ of the interior of Beijing. Like his photograph of Baliqiao, his images of Beijing’s gates and walls served a double role, simultaneously documenting these structures while referencing a key event in the war against China. A two-part panorama represents the northern city wall and the Altar of Earth divided by a broad 74

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stretch of land (Hering 27). His caption reads: ‘Position Taken Up by the English and French within the Enclosure of the Temple of the Earth Preparatory to Opening Fire on Pekin on 21st October 1860’. For another picture taken above the wall (Hering 26) he wrote: ‘Top of the Wall of Pekin Taken Possession of on 21st October 1860, Showing the Chinese Guns Directed against Our Batteries’.58 On 16 October, in response to the torture and death of a number of British, French and Indian captives, and more importantly to teach the Chinese a lesson,59 Lord Elgin authorized the burning of the Yuanming Yuan, Qingyi Yuan and some other pleasure palaces in northwest Beijing. The destruction, which took place on 18 and 19 October, was realized by the 3,500 soldiers in the First Division of the British force under John Michel’s command. According to Beato’s captions on his images of the Qingyi Yuan (which he called ‘Yuen Ming Yuen’), he photographed several imposing structures in this garden, including the Pagoda of Abundant Treasure (Duobao ta, Hering 43), the Tower of the Buddha’s Fragrance (Foxiang Ge, 38 Felice Beato, The Great Imperial Palace Yuen Ming Yuen, before the Burning, Pekin, October 18th 1860, albumen silver print.

39 Caption for illus. 38 inscribed by Beato.

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Hering 44, illus. 38), the Hall of the Sea of Wisdom (Zhihui hai, Hering 45) and the Pavilion of Flourishing Culture (Wenchang Ge, Hering 43), on 18 September. Given his close connection with the First Division and its commander, it is possible that he rushed to photograph these buildings when he heard about Lord Elgin’s decision. Indeed, at least two of the buildings that he photographed – the Tower of the Buddha’s Fragrance and the Pavilion of Flourishing Culture – would be burned down within 24 hours; Beato’s images are all that are left to us. It is difficult to envisage Beato’s inner feelings at this point. On the one hand, he clearly associated himself with the British army and used his camera to justify the invasion. On the other hand, his fine portrayals of various kinds of buildings speak volumes about his personal interest in architecture and his sensitivity to architectural beauty. Perhaps these two sides of him, which he had kept separate in his earlier practice, finally clashed at this moment in his career. This internal conflict reached its climax when he returned to the Qingyi Yuan after the garden’s destruction. He probably did not wait long to go back: he also dated the single photo he took on this second trip to 18 September.60 It is a panoramic view of Longevity Hill (Wanshou Shan), the site of the Tower of the Fragrance of the Buddha, which has by this stage completely vanished (Hering 47, illus. 40).61 In its place is a giant, empty stone platform. In taking this picture Beato must have mentally juxtaposed the empty space with the tower that he had photographed earlier (illus. 38), not only because the two images focus on the same place but also because they bear symmetrical captions that highlight their relation as a pair: ‘The Great Imperial Palace Yuen Ming Yuen, before the Burning, Pekin, October 18th 1860’ and ‘View of the Imperial Summer Palace Yuen Ming Yuen, after the Burning, taken from the lake, October 18th 1860’ (illus. 39, 41). Given the technical limitations of photography at the time, he could not possibly have captured the actual action of destruction. But ironically, this pair of before-and-after images evokes a deeper sense of trauma. The second photo does not present any trace of violence: there are no dead soldiers or abandoned cannons; instead the picture is permeated by a jolting stillness – a stubborn austerity with which the image maps a wounded locality. It is both a lament for a bygone monument and a ‘lesson’: in the dead silence of the imperial park one understands the doomed attempt to resist the West. On 24 October, the final rectification of the Convention of Beijing took place. The Qing government conceded payment of eight 76

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40 Felice Beato, View of the Imperial Summer Palace Yuen Ming Yuen, after the Burning, Taken from the Lake, October 18th 1860, Pekin, albumen silver print. 41 Caption for illus. 40 inscribed by Beato.

million taels each to Britain and France. Tianjin was opened to foreign trade and residence. Britain acquired the Kowloon Peninsula and obtained permanent right to diplomatic representation in the Chinese capital, while France secured the right for Catholic missionaries to own properties in interior China. The opium trade was legalized, and British ships were allowed to carry indentured Chinese to the Americas. Beato was at the signing ceremony to photograph Prince Gong, the Qing representative. The occasion was witnessed by many, but it was Grant who offered the most vivid record: In the midst of the ceremony, the indefatigable Signor Beato, who was very anxious to take a good photograph of ‘the Signing of the Treaty’, brought forward his apparatus, placed it at the entrance door, and directed the large lens of the camera full against the breast of the unhappy Prince Kung [Gong]. The royal brother looked up in a state of terror, pale as death, and with his eyes turned first to Lord Elgin and then to me, expecting every moment to have his head blown off by the infernal machine opposite him – which really looked like a 77

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sort of mortar, ready to disgorge its terrible contents into his devoted body. It was explained to him that no such evil design was intended, and his anxious pale face brightened up when he was told that his portrait was being taken. The treaty was signed, and the whole business went off satisfactorily, except as regards Signor Beato’s picture, which was an utter failure, owing to want of proper light.62 Beato would eventually take two good pictures of Prince Gong on 2 November in the residence of Lord Elgin (Hering 92; illus. 42).63 Waiting for this opportunity, he used his newly acquired diplomatic privilege to take photographs inside and outside the capital. According to Swinhoe, ‘the city was now open, and officers were allowed to stroll wherever they had a fancy to within its walls, except in the precincts of the Imperial grounds.’64 It was in this context that Beato created the two final groups of his China photographs dated to 24 and 29 October.65 The first group includes a six-part, 180-degree panorama (Hering 28), viewed from the balcony of the Front Gate (Qianmen). Above the main entrance to the Inner City of Beijing, the tower over the gate provided Beato with a perfect place to survey the city from the south. Also in this group are several views of the Temple of Heaven (Tiantan) and some ornate shop fronts, both located in the Outer City of Beijing (Hering 36–9, 42). By contrast, the six images dating from 29 October were all taken in the Inner City along the north–south axis (Hering 29–34). The sequence starts from Tiananmen, the front gate of the Imperial City. Next is the Meridian Gate or Wumen, the entrance to the Forbidden City. Since no one was allowed to enter the imperial precinct, Beato circled to the north side of the Forbidden City, where he climbed onto Coal Hill (Meishan or Jingshan) to photograph the White Pagoda in Beihai Park, and then photographed Coal Hill and the Forbidden City from the White Pagoda. These photographs contain no reference to the war in either image or caption. The military confrontation had ended and China had been subjugated. It was time for Beato to wrap up his China adventure and sell his China images in complete sets.

42 Felice Beato, Prince Kung, Brother of the Emperor of China, Signer of the Treaty, 1 November 1860, Beijing, albumen silver print.

coda: photography’s subjugation of china

Records show that Beato was selling his photographs in Tianjin in November, and that he arrived in Hong Kong on 20 December.66 Terry Bennett suggests that once in Hong Kong, ‘he would have 78

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been concentrating on maximising the sales of his photographs of the recent campaign in China’.67 As a large number of British officers and soldiers were returning home through this port city, the location must have offered Beato many opportunities to make a profit. I would add, however, that Hong Kong also provided him with an ideal place to organize and sell his China pictures in more extensive sets. It is almost certain that sets containing more than eighty images did not exist before this time. From various sources, we know that Beato had disseminated his photographs in smaller groups: Grant sent his photos in separate dispatches to London and lower-ranking British officers selected particular prints to compile their own collections of China images, sometimes combined with works by other photographers.68 As late as 15 November, William Wilberforce Harris Greathed (1826– 1878), an aide-de-camp to Robert Napier, wrote to Lord Canning: Having since learned from M. Beato that he had a commission from Lady Canning to send a complete set, I succeeded before leaving Pekin (which I did on the very shortest notice immediately after the signing of the Treaty) in obtaining copies of all those, taken up to that time, which are of any interest, and brought them with me that they might be forwarded as early as possible . . . I desired M. Beato to send about a dozen more pictures hereafter, consisting of architectural views in Canton and Pekin which were not available when I came away. The sheets sent are 38 in number.69 As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the two largest sets of Beato’s China photographs are now in moma and pem, consisting of 92 and 85 images, respectively. A number of reasons lead me to believe that Beato compiled them in Hong Kong in early 1861. Each set is consistently numbered and inscribed; this means that they did not result from gradual accumulation, but were compiled as coherent sets in both cases. Moreover, the two sets contain photographs printed from the original negatives and thus differ from Hering’s edition made in London from copied negatives. Finally, the pem set has a definite provenance: it was first owned by Albert F. Heard from Ipswich, Massachusetts, who managed his uncle’s firm in Hong Kong at the time.70 It seems logical that he acquired the set in that city.71 Several features of this set indicate its compilation process. It must have started as some discrete groups, not as a whole created on a single occasion. We know this from 80

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the discernable tonal and textural differences between the groups. Moreover, to better preserve the photographs, the museum removed them from the original album, thereby exposing the pencilled captions and serial numbers on the verso of most pictures. The absence of such inscriptions on the 26 Guangzhou images indicates their origin as a separate group. When Beato assembled these groups into a set for Heard, he inscribed the captions and serial numbers in pencil below each image, now pasted into an album. These numbers are consistent with those in Hering’s sale catalogue, indicating their close relationship. These two sets in moma and pem, as well as a third set in a private collection in New York, allow us to reconstruct an intermediate stage, during which Beato began to integrate separate groups of photographs into larger sets for specific collectors. The sequencing of these groups began to reveal certain narrative intents. As mentioned earlier, Beato’s China photographs naturally fall into five groups in terms of subject-matter and the point in time at which they were photographed: (1) The building-up of the British expedition army in Hong Kong; (2) architecture and the urban environment of Guangzhou; (3) the expedition of the Allied forces; (4) views of Beijing; and (5) portraits of British and Chinese officials. The moma set includes all five groups. It starts from the panoramas taken in Hong Kong and Kowloon (Group 1) and proceeds to show pictures recording the military campaign (Group 3). The views of Beijing and its vicinities (Group 4) come next, followed by portraits of Grant, Lord Elgin and Prince Gong, who participated in the signing of the Beijing Convention (Group 5). The set ends with the Guangzhou images that Beato took earlier (Group 2). The pem set and the New York set follow the same order but contain fewer groups: the former lacks the Hong Kong and Dalian Bay panoramas; the latter omits the entire Guangzhou group. Instead of judging them as ‘complete’ or ‘incomplete’, I would suggest that they were compiled to satisfy the specific needs of particular patrons: the moma set aimed at comprehensiveness and included the entire corpus of Beato’s China images minus just a few; the pem set seems to deliberately start from Beitang, the town where the Allied infantry troops started their march to Beijing. The first owner of the New York album had a more acute interest in the military campaign than architecture, and thus left out the entire Guangzhou series. It is interesting to note that in this way, this last set, though smaller, offers a more coherent structure. Whereas in the other two sets, the signers of the Beijing 81

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Convention appear after the Beijing views and thus place the following Guangzhou images in an isolated appendix, in the New York set these three portraits end the entire sequence with a symbolic representation of the British triumph. After Beato returned to London and started working with Hering to prepare the sale of his China and India photographs, the two men’s desire to present these images in a ‘magnificent collection’ required marrying comprehensiveness with an overarching framework. Recognizing the structural weakness of the large sets Beato had composed in Hong Kong, they reached a twofold solution that was as economical as it was effective. The first solution was to move the portraits of Grant, Lord Elgin and Prince Gong to the end of the whole collection, after the Guangzhou images;72 the second was to add the two subtitles to bestow the entire collection with a linear temporality. From such regrouping and reframing emerged a bipartite structure which, along with shifting photographic style and subject, generates a deepening sense of abstraction. The first part, ‘From Hong Kong to Pekin’, is anchored on a series of locations along the victorious route of the expedition army (illus. 27). Alternating panoramic and close-up views, it never fixes the viewer’s gaze onto individual buildings or figures. The expansive, bare land and water strike the spectator with a feeling of nakedness. The pictures seem to be waiting for someone to recount the journey with them as a visual aid. The second part, ‘From Pekin to Canton’, starts from the Randeng Pagoda in Tongzhou (illus. 37). This iconic image is followed by a series of photographs of the Anding Gate, through which the Anglo-French troops entered China’s capital. Whereas this initial sequence still follows the footsteps of the invading army, the images themselves shift from recording military operations to representing classical monumentality. The political implication of this shift is subtle but unmistakable: as landmarks of a conquered territory, these monuments can now be appreciated by the conquerors with a mixed feeling of awe and self-congratulation. It is in this context that the ‘before-and-after the burning’ pictures of the Summer Palace are presented (illus. 38, 39). It is also in this context that the language of the picturesque takes over to become the dominant photographic style. The military conquest, now successfully accomplished, seems to have led the photographer to revisit an archaic world laden with renewed symbolic meaning: belonging to a culture of the distant past, these ancient monuments and ruins symbolized China’s inability to transform itself into a modern nation, thereby 82

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legitimating the foreign invasion as a step necessary to bring the old country into present history. And yet, ‘the photographs retain a sense of nostalgia, as if imbued with a longing to return to a time before the ruins.’73 Renato Rosaldo has characterized similar phenomena as ‘imperialist nostalgia’, which ‘uses a pose of innocent yearning both to capture people’s imagination and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination’.74 Close to the end of the collection we see the nine-storey pagoda in Guangzhou (illus. 28), a photograph Beato took in April 1860 after he had just arrived in China and was about to join the northbound military expedition. Now placed immediately after the Beijing views, this and other ‘Canton pictures’ play a structural role in staging a flashback: having shown the destruction of the Chinese army and the conquest of China’s capital, the photographer returns to where he first started. Consequently, the collection draws a perfect route for the anticipated London viewers to follow: from Hong Kong to Beijing and back to Hong Kong, it stages a photographic journey for them to experience the British conquest of China.

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3. BIRTH OF THE SELF AND THE NATION: CUTTING THE QUEUE

historical background

43 Wang Yi’an before cutting off his queue, Beijing, 1912.

For over a thousand years, every educated Chinese person memorized and practised an instruction from the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiao jing), a Confucian canon composed by the sage Zengzi around 400 bce: ‘One receives one’s body, hair and skin from one’s parents and so one dares not damage them – that is the beginning of filiality.’1 Thus when the Manchus conquered China in 1644 and ordered Chinese men to shave the front of their head and plait their hair down their back in a queue, to do so was considered a forced conversion to barbarism; compliance meant betrayal of one’s ancestry and culture. There was a nationwide outcry in defiance; some die-hard Confucians committed suicide to protest. But the Manchu rulers, calling their new dynasty the Qing (1644–1911), made no concession to the resistance: ‘Either shave your hair or lose your head’ – anyone who dared to disobey the decree would be executed. But as the Qing gradually consolidated its rule and proved itself to be an enforcer rather than a destroyer of Chinese culture, the alien custom eventually prevailed. With its ethnic origin forgotten, the queue became the universal hairstyle of the male population over the next 200 years, until its legitimacy was challenged once again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By this time, the Qing had declined from a great empire into a frail giant incapable even of defending itself. It had lost multiple wars against colonial powers from both East and West, and had signed one after another ‘unequal treaties’ to trade its precious land for temporary peace. In the eyes of the foreign powers, Chinese officials’ ‘pigtails’ were the quintessential sign of a backward country clinging to an archaic past. Ironically, this view was shared by reformist Chinese intellectuals committed to rescuing their country from foreign aggressors. To them, China’s 85

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survival and revival depended on whether it could transform itself into a modern nation equal to the West and Japan; in service of this cause, the embarrassing pigtail had to go. Kang Youwei (1858–1927), a leader of the failed One Hundred Day Reform, summed up the ‘five maladies’ of the queue in 1898. In a memorial to the Guangxu emperor (r. 1875–1908), he accused the queue of isolating China from the international community, preventing Chinese people from working with modern machinery, being cumbersome in conducting military exercises, being filthy and unhygienic and making Chinese men look undignified.2 In fact, by this time, many Chinese men living in Singapore, Japan and America had adopted the Western hairstyle while, inside China, supporters of political reform had also begun to cut their queues as a political gesture. In 1900, for example, the famous thinker and writer Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936) publicly severed his queue in Shanghai. Five years into the new century, policemen in Tianjin shortened their queues. In 1909, students in the Guangxi Infantry Army School made a collective decision to cut off their queues altogether. The following year, the ‘Association to Promote Wearing Han Chinese Clothes and Cutting the Queue’ (Huafu jianfa hui) was founded in Guangdong. The trend reached a new height when more than 40,000 people attended a ‘Mass Assemblage of Queue Cutting’ (Jianbian dahui) in Shanghai on 15 January 1911. Led by Wu Tingfang (1952–1922), an influential Qing diplomat, more than a thousand people abandoned their queues that day. Less than a month later, 10,000 men in Hong Kong followed suit. Thus even before the Wuchang Uprising on 10 October 1911, which led to the abolition of the dynastic system and the establishment of the Republic on 1 January 1912, queue cutting had already gained considerable momentum among reformers and anti-Manchu revolutionaries. The Republican government, however, expanded the significance of this symbolic act by requiring all male subjects to sever their queues regardless of differences in class, occupation and ideology. Queue cutting thus came to define citizenship in the newly founded nation state. On 5 March 1912, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), the provisional president of the Republic, issued a decree entitled ‘The President Orders the Interior Ministry to Announce to All People to Have Their Queues Cut’ (Dazongtong ling Neiwubu xiaoshi renmin yilü jianbian wen), giving an explicit new meaning to queue cutting: ‘Today, the Manchu court has fallen and the Republic has succeeded [in replacing it]. All our countrymen should shed this filthy custom from the old regime to become 86

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citizens of the new nation.’3 In a non-negotiable manner, the edict demanded that the task be accomplished within twenty days; those who failed to comply would be punished by law.4 To carry out the policy as effectively as possible, the government organized ‘queue-cutting teams’, setting up checkpoints on city streets to sever people’s queues whether they liked it or not. Troops were also dispatched to rural areas to forcibly change men’s hairstyles. Such radical measures had a twofold impact on early Republican politics. On the one hand, forced queue cutting radicalized the Republican movement by sharply demarcating its supporters from conservative royalists, whose remaining (and sometimes concealed) queues most clearly expressed their attachment to the traditional political system. On the other hand, the forced change of hairstyle also generated confusion and even resentment from many ordinary men, who had become accustomed to their braid and thought little about its political symbolism. A local member of the gentry in Shanxi named Liu Dapeng (1857–1942), for example, one day found himself grabbed in the street in order to have his queue brutally removed. Traumatized, he retired home in disgust and refused to head the new county assembly.5 Historians have explored the complex meanings of queue cutting in relation to the founding of the Republic, the formation of a modern citizenry and social dynamics in early twentiethcentury China.6 Whereas their discussions have generally utilized textual evidence, this chapter focuses on printed images related to queue cutting, especially new developments in photography. These images fall into three groups. One group represents queue cutting in action as social events and falls into the general category of photojournalism. A second group consists of studio portraits that feature figures, standing next to full-length mirrors, who had their pictures taken before severing their queues. The last group also consists of studio portraits, but features headshots of famous historical figures who commissioned their portraits after abandoning their queues. Belonging to different photographic genres and reflecting divergent intentions, these images nevertheless emerged from the same historical context and addressed interconnected issues. Underlying these issues were two fundamental changes that redefined China and its people at this crucial historical moment, namely the country’s transformation from an antiquated empire into a modern nation and the emergence of individual subjectivity. Through documenting queue cutting and related experiences, these images 87

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actively entered into the ongoing political process. Indeed, if the two preceding chapters on Milton Miller’s staged ‘Chinese portraits’ and Felice Beato’s brutal war photos reveal colonialist practices of consuming China through photography, this chapter demonstrates the integration of photography into China’s visual culture to represent the new-born nation and the self. refiguring china

44 ‘No More Chinese Cheap Labor’, American trade card, 1880s.

How to represent a country or nation in anthropomorphic form? In Europe, the type of iconic image known as ‘national personification’ had a long history. Great Britain, for example, was personified as Britannia, a goddess-like figure wearing a Roman-style helmet, who had, over time, come to represent England’s classical heritage and the principle of liberty. As such, this and other allegorical figures of virtue and nobility were taken as national symbols and frequently appeared on political monuments. This visual tradition was absent in traditional China, where divine icons belonged to separate religious institutions while imperial portraits stayed within royal ancestral shrines. It was not until the mid- to late nineteenth century that a national personification for China – a highly derogatory image – was invented in the West amidst an intensifying anti-Chinese campaign. This was a stereotyped Chinaman, whose most distinct feature was a skinny queue hanging from the back of the head. Representing Chinese immigrants or the entire Chinese race, this image was frequently juxtaposed with national personifications of other countries and took on a similar meaning to such national symbols. On a late nineteenth-century American trade card, for example, a defeated Chinaman appears alongside two symbolic representations of the United States: Uncle Sam and a goddess with the American flag wrapped around her body. The goddess points to a pronouncement on the wall: ‘No more Chinese cheap labor’ (illus. 44). In a cartoon of a similar nature published in the British weekly Punch (The London Charivari) on 2 June 1888, a goddess, now representing Australia, is shutting the colony’s door 88

b i r t h o f t h e s e l f a n d t h e n at i o n 45 ‘Outside, Sir! Outside!’, cartoon in Punch, 2 June 1888.

on the face of the Chinaman, whose snake-like queue has found its way to sneak inside the protected house (illus. 45). This derogatory image acquired definite significance as a national personification of China in 1900, when Britain, France, America, Japan, Germany, Italy, Austria and Russia sent troops to China to suppress the anti-Western Boxer Rebellion and to punish the Qing government. The military operations of the Allied forces were endorsed by numerous anti-Chinese propaganda posters, postcards and newspaper cartoons, which typically employed the Chinaman image to represent China. On several German postcards, this pigtailed figure appears as an oversized Boxer looming over the Great Wall, attempting to counter a fleet of modern warships with a pair of gloved fists (illus. 47). A French cartoon depicts a figure with similar facial features. Now dressed in Qing royal costume, he watches helplessly as a big pie labelled ‘Chine’ is divided up by Britain’s Queen Victoria, German’s Wilhelm ii, Russia’s Nicholas ii, a Japanese samurai and Marianne, the symbol of France and an 89

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allegory for Liberty and Reason (illus. 46). A third example from the United States uses symbolic animals to represent nations: the American eagle, German vulture, British lion, Austro-Hungarian double-headed eagle, Italian wolf, Japanese leopard, French rooster and Russian bear. Armed to the teeth, these fierce beasts hover over a paralysed dragon, whose pronounced queue clinches its national symbolism (illus. 48). Understood against these political representations in the foreign media, the anti-queue movement in China had the goal of disassociating the country from this humiliating Chinaman image. Kang Youwei’s 1898 memorial, mentioned earlier, emphasized the

46 Henri Meyer, ‘China – the Cake of Kings and Emperors’, from Le Petit Journal, 16 January 1898.

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b i r t h o f t h e s e l f a n d t h e n at i o n 47 ‘War in China’, German postcard, 1900.

48 ‘The real trouble will come with the “wake”’: an American cartoon representing the European powers and Japan squabbling over a sleeping China as the American Eagle looks on. From Puck, 15 August 1900.

queue’s harmful impact on the dignity of China and the Chinese people. The Republicans further argued that since the queue was an alien custom originally forced upon the Chinese population by the Manchu conquerors, by abandoning it the citizens of the new nation state could free themselves from both Qing rule and the ugly Chinaman image. Foreign nations, for their part, were anxious to protect their treaty rights in China, but eventually they all established full diplomatic relations with the Republican government. This attitude explains the Western media’s generally positive coverage of the anti-queue movement. An early example of such coverage can be seen on the cover of the 5 February 1911 issue 91

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49 Cutting queues in Shanghai, cover of Le Petit Journal, 5 February 1911.

of the French magazine Le Petit Journal, representing a recent event in Shanghai (illus. 49). The anonymous illustrator has made an impressive effort to capture the exuberant atmosphere of the event: a large crowd gathers in an open space surrounded by yellow-tiled houses. In the middle of the space stands a temporary platform, on which a man is having his queue removed by a barber. Sitting comfortably on a stool, his gesture betrays no signs of alarm. To the left of the central platform and slightly farther off, another barber holds up a severed queue, displaying it to the onlookers, while the queue’s previous owner is touching the back of his head, seemingly in disbelief. Below the platform, several people at the lower right-hand corner are congratulating or consoling a man, who has just lost his queue and acquired a Western-style blue jacket. In the opposite direction, an old gentleman in Manchu official garb is running away from the scene, but all the other people show only curiosity on their faces, watching the haircutting as a public performance. The French caption on the picture reads: ‘La Chine se modernise: À Shanghaï, des chinois font en public le sacrifice de leur natte’ (China modernizes: In Shanghai, some Chinese sacrifice their queues in public). Judging from the depicted space and date of publication, this illustration very likely represents the ‘Mass Assemblage of Cutting Queues’ that took place in Shanghai’s Zhang Garden on 15 January 1911. Called Zhang Yuan in Chinese, this garden was a well-known place in the city to hold public gatherings. As mentioned earlier, more than 40,000 people gathered there on that day. From local reports we know that a platform was constructed in the garden, with a dozen or so ‘queuecutting stations’ providing free service to people who had decided to change their hairstyle. In the words of one reporter, ‘the place was filled with the sound of scissors snipping as well as cheers, handclapping, and congratulations.’7 Compared with this illustration constructed according to verbal reportage, photographs of queue cutting are less dramatic but convey a greater sense of real happenings. Still, some of these photos feature staged poses while others betray stronger documentary intent. An example of the former can be seen in the 6 April 1912 issue of The Graphic, a major British illustrated weekly journal (illus. 50). Its caption reads: ‘This picture shows young Republicans lopping off the badge of Manchu servitude, all China being now divided into two parties, pro and anti pigtail.’8 The photographer, W. H. Gellet, apparently sympathetic to the anti-queue position, imbued the 93

zo om i n g i n 50 ‘The Rape of the Lock’, cover of The Graphic, 6 April 1912.

51 ‘Freedom by Force’, cover of The Illustrated London News, 2 March 1912.

picture with a sense of humour: the act of queue cutting is played out by two chubby boys. Turning around towards the camera with a broad smile on his face, a ‘young Republican’ holds up a queue that he has just removed from the head of the other boy, who is seated on a tall stool and facing inwards. The young barber’s dramatic pose, the unusually large scissors he uses to cut the queue and the plain background all indicate the constructed nature of the picture and distinguish it from another queue-cutting photograph published two months earlier in The Illustrated London News. This earlier photo was featured on the cover of the magazine’s 2 March 1912 issue and records an actual queue-cutting activity taking place on the street in Nanjing (Nanking), the seat of the 94

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Republican government (illus. 51). A major difference between this photo and the one in The Graphic is that it represents the event as a coercive act. The central figure – an ordinary labourer in tattered clothes – has been stopped by a uniformed soldier. His long, neatly braided queue has been cut off, held up by the soldier as a solemn trophy. Expressionless, he diverts his eyes to one side to avoid the camera. He has probably tried to run away as well, which is why the soldier had to hold him tight to have the picture taken. The caption of the photo in The Illustrated London News, ‘Made to Walk Abroad an Obvious Republican: A Chinaman, Unwilling to have his Pigtail Removed Losing It at the Hand of Soldiers’, captures the irony of cutting the queue as both a liberating and intimidating act. Under this title is a longer explanation: Most of the Chinese have taken kindly to the abolition of the pigtail, and have willingly had their queues removed, in a desire to rid themselves of the ancient sign of servitude to the Manchus, and to appear as true Republicans. Others, more conservatively minded, have wished to retain their pigtails. To these the soldiery in Nanking, at all events, have been paying attention, relieving their pigtails by force.9 In spite of the many differences between these two photographs, their captions similarly present queue cutting as an essential sign of China’s modernization. Most Western China-watchers shared this pro-Republican approach. Edward Hume (1876–1957), the head of the Yale-in-China programme, commented on China’s political condition in 1912: This is the day of opportunity. The Rebellion in 1911 throws wide open the doors of reform and progress in China. It means that the educated, in the modern sense, are to lead the nation hereafter.10 Paul Crow (1884–1945), who arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and opened the first Western advertising agency there, reported on China’s progress with similar enthusiasm. Taking queue cutting as a definite proof of such progress, he described in vivid language how the Chinese editorial and printing staff at the China Press held a ritual queue-cutting day after everyone had determined to take this step together. Lucien Wolf (1857–1930), a British historian and 96

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journalist, wrote in an article entitled ‘China in the Melting Pot’ (published in the same issue of The Graphic as the photo showing the young Republican cutting the queue): China has given a lesson to the world in the making of a great political revolution. It is particularly curious to note how the innate conservatism of the people has asserted itself even in their adoption of the unfamiliar notions of Occidental Democracy.11 The article used several photographs to illustrate the ongoing revolution in China. The first features three young boys in traditional attire conversing with one another; the caption reads: ‘Even the children discuss the pigtail problem: The burning question of the hour in China.’ Below this picture, another photo shows the queueless son of Sun Yat-sen dressed in a Western suit. Spread by mainstream Western media, these photographs played a seminal role in undoing the pigtailed Chinaman image: as millions of Chinese abandoned the queue, this derogatory national personification of China now belonged to the past. In its place emerged new, shining images of the Republic, from its modern-looking leaders to its Westernized troops (see illus. 61, 62). Quite a few Westerners helped create and spread these images, although most of them left little information about their activities. The photo in The Graphic is credited to W. H. Gellet, about whom we know nothing. We are told that a certain Record Press provided the photo in The Illustrated London News, but a check of this publisher or news agency soon reaches a dead end. We do know more, however, about one Western photographer who documented the birth of the Republic and showed a special interest in the antiqueue campaign. His name was Francis E. Stafford (1884–1938), an American from Boulder, Colorado. Before leaving for China in 1909 he worked at the Pacific Press Publishing Association in Mountain View, California, where he learned photography and became an expert in photoengraving. This skill helped him to secure a job at the Commercial Press in Shanghai, to install a photoengraving plant and to train workmen to run it. This affiliation with a major Chinese publisher in turn facilitated his second profession as an independent photojournalist, allowing him to travel widely to document various aspects of Chinese society, including the Republican uprising. He was in Wuchang after the initial shots of 97

52 A man having his queue braided by a barber. Photo by Francis E. Stafford, c. 1912.

53 Francis E. Stafford removes a man’s queue. Photo by Francis E. Stafford, 1912.

b i r t h o f t h e s e l f a n d t h e n at i o n 54 A young man taking a picture after cutting off his queue, c. 1912.

the Republican Revolution were fired. Other events that he recorded on film included the founding of the Hubei Military Government, the fighting between the revolutionary army and Qing forces and Sun Yat-sen’s journey to Nanjing to take office as provisional president. Some of these images entered the first comprehensive visual record of the Republican Revolution, published by the Commercial Press in 1911 and 1912.12 Stafford’s photo archives, now housed in the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University, contain interesting materials that demonstrate his acute interest in the anti-queue campaign during the Republican Revolution. One of these photos documents an activity which was becoming obsolete: a man having his queue braided by a barber (illus. 52). The image’s documentary intent is revealed by the camera position. By taking the picture from the side, Stafford could record minute details of queue braiding – the barber’s equipment and his relationship with his customer – as a seasoned ethnographer would do. Interestingly, the same camera angle characterizes another of his photos, in which the photographer himself is performing the solemn ritual of removing a man’s queue (illus. 53). Once again, the side position of the camera allowed Stafford to capture his interaction with the sitter, especially the movements of his two hands: one delicately lifting the queue, the other holding the scissors to cut it off at the root. A third picture in the archives, a portrait of a young man standing before a trompe l’oeil landscape mural in a photo studio, is unlikely to be Stafford’s own creation (illus. 54). He collected this photo and sequenced it with the aforementioned pictures because it shows the young man after shedding his queue. Commenting on this image, Hanchao Lu and Ronald Anderson write: ‘Shorn of his pigtail, and with his new Western hairstyle, this man has been transformed into a “gentleman”.’13 By representing the traditional way of braiding the queue, the act of severing the queue and the new, modern hairstyle, these three images constitute a symbolic narrative of China’s transition from the Qing dynasty to the Republic. taking a picture before cutting the queue

The three ‘queue-cutting’ photos studied in the preceding section (illus. 50, 51, 54) all focus on the activity of removing the queue. Moreover they all place a clear emphasis on the ‘queue cutters’ – the young Republican barber, the uniformed soldier displaying 101

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a severed queue and Stafford – and not on their customers, who remain passive and anonymous. This emphasis is understandable because these queue cutters, as enforcers of the Republican policy, embody the role of the new nation state and the force of modernization. These images thus differ fundamentally from a second group of photographs made during the same queue-cutting campaign. Taken inside commercial photo studios, these are portraits of individual urban residents who have decided to finally remove their precious queues. We know this context from the inscriptions which they wrote on the back of their portraits. One of these inscriptions reads (illus. 55; see also illus. 43):

55 Wang Yi’an’s inscription on the back of a photograph from Lao zhaopian (Old Photos), 12 (December 1999), centrefold (see illus. 43).

In the eighth month of renzi [1912], I determined to cut my queue. Therefore I used a large mirror to reflect my back, to preserve [the image of my queue] for memory’s sake. It was on the third day of the eighth month, or September thirteenth in the new calendar. The photograph was made in the Lifu Studio on an upper floor of Quanyechang. I had two prints made and paid eighty cents in the silver dollar standard. Inscribed by Yi’an who is twenty-seven years old.14 According to Ms Wang Wenjie, who shared this family photo with Old Photo (Lao zhaopian), a magazine enormously popular in the 1990s that will be the subject of Chapter Seven, the young man in the picture is her paternal great-grandfather. Yi’an should be his style name.15 Not particularly good-looking, he clearly cared about his appearance, as evinced by his fashionable robe with a high collar and narrow sleeves, by the shining, patterned silk used to make the robe and especially by his long, thick queue, which must have been partly artificial (illus. 43). In the photograph he stands in a three-quarter pose while looking at the camera with a dejected expression, which seems at odds with his opulent clothes and the ornate environment: the photo studio is furnished with trompe 102

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l’oeil murals, potted flowers and a full-length, free-standing mirror ornamented with a complex openwork frame. Placed behind him, the mirror captures a clear view of his queue, hanging down below his thighs. Wang Yi’an’s inscription creates the impression that he made a personal decision to use a floor mirror to preserve the image of his queue. This impression is doubtful, however, because another gentleman had utilized this same device four months earlier in a very similar circumstance. Like Wang Yi’an, this gentleman also wrote an inscription on the back of his portrait: A piece of memorabilia of the perished Qing dynasty: this is the last image of my queue. It was taken on April fourth, in the first year of the Republic, or the seventeenth day of the second month of renzi [1912], at 12:00. I had this photograph taken before cutting off the queue in order to commemorate the event. Inscribed by Yuxiang.16 Yuxiang is the style name of Li Hongchun (1890–1946). The photograph was taken when he was 22, possibly still a law student. According to Li’s daughters Li Bin and Xiao Cheng (alias), their father, the third son of an affluent family with broad social connections, never held a steady job after finishing school. Living near the main commercial district on the south side of Beijing, he became a patron of Peking Opera actors and courtesans, and spent much of his time smoking opium and drinking hard liquor. He seemed to wield considerable influence in the local business world, but neither daughter was aware of the source of such influence or his income.17 Five years apart in age, Li Hongchun and Wang Yi’an lived in the same city in 1912 and may have known each other, because the Lifu Studio, where Wang Yi’an took his portrait, was also located on the south side of Beijing, beyond the Meridian Gate. Judging from Wang’s portrait, we can also imagine that he belonged to a similarly well-to-do social class. Although both portraits employ full-length mirrors, they differ in several other aspects. Most apparent, in addition to his double images inside and outside the mirror, Li Hongchun appears for a third time in the picture, standing next to himself and the mirror (illus. 56). This effect was achieved by using the ‘double exposure’ method, which allowed the photographer to merge Li’s multiple portraits into a single photo.18 While this technical trick had been 103

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56 Li Hongchun before cutting off his queue, Beijing, 1912.

around for half a century, it was used in this 1912 portrait to convey serious meanings in relation to the queue-cutting campaign. In the photograph, a frontal portrait of Li occupies the right-hand half of the composition. Standing in a relaxed pose, this elegant, wellgroomed young man wears a hat and holds a white handkerchief in one hand, seemingly prepared to go out or receive a visitor. This ‘normal’ social image is reversed in the one next to it: here Li stands without a hat and turns his back towards the spectator; what the camera captures is his queue. This second Li is again reversed by the free-standing mirror, placed in front of him to reflect his face. The person inside the mirror stares back at himself, with a quizzical expression that seems to be silently asking: is this the last time I will see myself with a queue? He answered this question on the back of the photograph. Other photographs with similar compositions exist.19 But with inscriptions written by the subjects themselves, these two images offer us rare opportunities to explore two sets of questions related to the form and content of portrait photography at this pivotal moment in China’s modern history. In terms of form, was there a pre-established tradition of using full-length mirrors in making portraits? What kinds of people used this device? Why did Chinese men like Wang Yi’an and Li Hongchun borrow this photographic formula in having their own portraits taken? Did such borrowing introduce new elements into this visual tradition? In terms of content, both Wang and Li state clearly in their inscriptions that they had their portraits taken for commemorative (jinian) purposes. But what exactly did they intend to commemorate? Why did both of them record the time of making the portraits according to two different calendars? What is the connection between the images’ commemorative purpose and their temporality? Before answering these questions, it is important to know that there had been a long tradition of using full-length mirrors to represent the subject in portrait photography. The most distinguished name associated with this device is Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822–1865), a noted portrait photographer of the Victorian era.20 Another significant group of portraits that utilize a full-length mirror was created by Erb Bunnag (1879–1944), a consort of King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868–1910) of the Kingdom of Siam. In a series of photographs she portrayed Dara Rasmi (1873–1933), another royal consort who later became High Queen, standing or sitting in front of large mirrors.21 In China, at least from the turn of the twentieth 104

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57 A postcard produced by Sze Yuen Ming (Shanghai) showing a courtesan standing in front of a fulllength mirror, c. 1903.

58 Princess Su in front of a full-length mirror, Fung Tai Studio, early 1900s.

century, portrait photographers frequently used one or more tall mirrors to document the front and back of high-class courtesans and Manchu ladies, focusing on their ornate headdress or hairstyle (illus. 57). Although the Qing court artist Jiao Bingzhen (1689–1726) once made a painting showing a woman watching herself in a full-length mirror,22 this early eighteenth-century image pre-dated these photographs by nearly 200 years. The latter should have been inspired by similar photographs that had been circulating around the world. Unlike Lady Hawarden’s portraits of her daughters and Bunnag’s portraits of Rasmi, however, these Chinese examples rarely represented named individuals, but rather recorded exotic customs of the Orient for interested foreigners. The only exception is a portrait of the consort of Prince Su, which she had taken in Beijing’s Fengtai (Fung Tai) Studio before or after a court audience (illus. 58).23 By 1912, therefore, there was an established practice in Chinese portrait photography of using tall mirrors to represent the subject’s hair arrangement. When gentlemen like Wang Yi’an and Li Hongchun decided to preserve the images of their prized queues before cutting them off, it was natural for them to resort to commercial photo studios specializing in this type of portraiture. 106

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Comparing the left-hand half of Li Hongchun’s portrait with Princess Su’s image, we find almost identical poses and camera angles (illus. 57, 58). Wang Yi’an’s portrait also resembles a number of images of Manchu ladies backed by floor mirrors.24 In fact, used to preserve the image of a long queue as completely as possible, a vertical freestanding mirror realized its usefulness as a photographic device better than in any of the courtesan and Manchu lady pictures, which mainly focus on the sitter’s head. Li Hongchun’s portrait further combines his mirror images with the ‘double-portrait’ format, adding another layer of inversion in representing the self. But when gentlemen like Wang Yi’an and Li Hongchun adopted this visual convention, they also changed it in three fundamental ways. First, before them, most if not all people portrayed with free-standing mirrors were women. In other words, such mirrors only reflected female features, either their front or their back. Wang and Li’s portraits thus marked a fascinating ‘gender switch’ in this photographic formula. Second, the courtesans and Manchu ladies in front of a floor mirror are mostly anonymous figures, frequently identified as a ‘Chinese woman’ or ‘Tartar lady’ in the pictures’ captions. The mirror is used to record exotic customs of an alien culture and has little to do with the self-expression of individual subjects. Wang Yi’an and Li Hongchun, however, employed fulllength mirrors precisely to express their personal feelings and thoughts in responding to the queue-cutting campaign, and in so doing redefined the social meaning of this type of representation. Finally, instead of documenting cultural customs that are supposed to be timeless and unchanging, the mirrors in Wang and Li’s portraits record a specific moment in their lives and in Chinese history. This then leads us to focus on a particular feature of their inscriptions: both men made a special point of writing down the precise time at which they took the portraits. What is the significance of this moment? How did they conceive the temporality of this moment in relation to the images’ commemorative purpose? One way to think about these questions is to compare the two portraits with the ‘journalistic’ photographs studied in the preceding section, which represent queue cutting as actual happenings (illus. 50, 51). Whether staged or spontaneously taken, these journalistic photos focus on the moment when a queue has just been cut off and is now being held up by a ‘Republican barber’. These images thus evoke a heightened sense of happening, as the queue, which was attached to a living body a moment ago, has now become a 108

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disembodied object, flaccid and lifeless. In comparison, Wang Yi’an and Li Hongchun had their portraits taken in anticipation of severing their queues. They had both decided to change their hairstyle; but before it happened they wanted to preserve their images with their queues for posterity. The portraits record neither their past existence as Qing subjects nor their future identity as queueless Republican citizens, but a transitory moment that mingled nostalgia for the past and a recognition of the present. Such a conflicted, in-between temporality finds an acute expression in their dating of the portraits: both men independently used dual calendric systems – the traditional lunar calendar and the Western solar calendar – to register time. Li Hongchun further identified the year as ‘the first year of the Republic’, hence perceiving the regime as a new beginning in Chinese history. Still, the transitory quality of the portraits cannot be defined entirely within the general frame of China’s political history. As Li Hongchun expressed in his inscription, the Qing had already perished; yet he still retained his queue. He was thus living in both past and present at this very moment, and it was his queue that embodied this dual temporality. When he had the portrait made, he envisioned it as ‘a piece of memorabilia’ of the old regime and as the ‘last image’ of his queue. The portrait thus linked two histories, one national and the other personal, while generating tension between the two. taking a picture after cutting the queue

Wang Yi’an and Li Hongchun were not public figures. Their 1912 portraits-cum-inscriptions betray no strong sentiment towards either the recently abdicated Qing emperor or the freshly inaugurated Republic. Instead of allying themselves with revolutionaries or royalists, they most likely just followed the political tide of the time. They certainly did not oppose the Republican demand to abolish the queue, but their portraits and inscriptions expressed lamentation. Indeed, one can imagine that the few months after the announcement of the queue-cutting policy were not easy times in their lives, as they had to decide whether or when to discard their shining braid, which had been with them since they were little boys. When they finally made up their minds to join the trend of getting rid of their queues, they experienced no excitement or joy. Instead, to compensate for the inevitable loss of this vital part of their bodies, 109

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they resorted to immortalizing their images when they were still whole. The portraits resulting from this decision were private ‘pieces of memorabilia’ that conserved their memories of themselves. These images stayed with them and then with their families for nearly a century, until their descendants transmitted them into the public domain. A radically different, or semantically opposite, situation is attested to by another group of photographic portraits related to queue cutting. These are well-known images of famous public figures, including the ‘founder of modern China’ Sun Yat-sen, the ‘father of modern Chinese literature’ Lu Xun (1881–1936), the Peking Opera star Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), the leading educator Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), the ‘last emperor’ Aisin-Gioro Puyi (1906–1967) and many others.25 Several features make these portraits a homogeneous group. The most important concerns their temporality: these portraits were all made after the subjects had voluntarily – or even ‘vehemently’ – severed their queues. The pictures neither record the removal of the queue nor anticipate such action, but document the irreversible consequence of queue cutting as a self-initiated event. In each of these portraits, the queue is gone and so is the man’s previous self. The image represents a transformed being who aspired to embrace the future; photography provided the ideal means to ratify this transformation. This future-oriented attitude and self-conscious image-making is sometimes explicitly displayed in the portrait itself. The young Mei Lanfang, already famous in 1912, is said to have possessed a long, captivating queue reaching all the way below his knees. After he abolished it that year, he took a photograph that shows the front of his head still shaven; the hair on the back, instead of being groomed into a braid, is cut short and arranged to cover the shaven area as much as possible (illus. 59). The eighteen-year-old actor wrote directly on the negative so the words could be reproduced and circulated together with the image: ‘The first photograph of Mei Yuanhua [Mei Lanfang’s style name], on June fifteenth, the first year of the Republic’. Creatively, he divided this passage into three separate lines to frame his portrait. Both the layout of the inscription and the half-length portrait format reveal the public nature of the image. Not surprisingly, many photo studios in Beijing and Shanghai displayed it in their front windows. Such public demonstration of his support of the Republican policy won praise from left-wing media, while Mei’s queueless hairstyle also introduced a new fashion.26 110

59 Mei Lanfang after cutting off his queue, 1912, photographer unknown.

An even more famous ‘after cutting the queue’ portrait belongs to Lu Xun. But in this case, the meaning of the image needs to be carefully rethought. The first serious author to write in the modern vernacular, Lu Xun is considered by many to be the most important twentieth-century Chinese author. In the 1930s he became the titular head of the League of Left-wing Writers. Writing tirelessly in various capacities as a novelist, editor, translator, literary critic, essayist and poet, he used his pen to promote radical change 111

zo om i n g i n 60 Lu Xun after cutting off his queue, 1903.

through criticism of antiquated cultural values and repressive social customs. Lu Xun cut his queue in 1903, when he was a second-year student at the Kobun Academy in Tokyo. This event has often been interpreted as a clear sign of his intellectual independence and social consciousness as a very young man. Lu Xun himself, however, claimed two decades later that his cutting off of the queue ‘had nothing to do with revolutionary ideas – after all, it was simply for convenience’.27 Still, we cannot totally trust such studied casualness in a retrospective self-reflection, since his change of hairstyle clearly 112

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meant much more to him than simple practicality; otherwise he would not have had pictures taken after severing his queue and given them to the two people closest to him at the time: his younger brother Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) and his schoolmate Xu Shoushang (1883–1948). Zuoren, then studying in Nanjing, recorded in his diary on 9 April 1903 that he had just received ‘a photograph with the queue cut’ (duanfa zhaoxiang yizhang) from his older brother (then known as Zhou Shuren), and noted it again as ‘a small portrait with queue cut’ (duanfa xiaozhao yizhang) on 26 April.28 He must have got these descriptions from Lu Xun’s letter that came with the picture. This photograph in Zuoren’s possession was not published and did not survive. His diary entries acquired visual reality in 1926, when they were associated with a portrait of Lu Xun from 1903 published in On Lu Xun and His Works, the first volume of criticism about Lu.29 Because of Lu Xun’s direct involvement in the book’s compilation, it is commonly believed that he provided the picture. It is a small half-length portrait, 10 cm (4 in.) tall and 6 cm (2½ in.) wide, which features Lu Xun as a young man dressed in a militarystyle jacket that must be his school uniform at Kobun (illus. 60). It is important to note, however, that he did not wear the school hat; the portrait thus differs from those taken on formal situations. One such formal portrait is a group photo made in November 1902, in which Lu Xun, still with the queue, appears in the full regalia of the school uniform, including a hard-topped hat.30 Zhou Zuoren recalled later that when he received Lu Xun’s 1903 portrait, he immediately noticed this difference: ‘He had a new photo taken without the cap and sent it to me to show what he looked like now.’31 In the hatless portrait published in On Lu Xun and His Works, supposedly the same one that Zuoren was referring to, short hair covers the front part of his head; the picture must have been made one or two months after he changed hairstyle. Lu Xun left two other uniformed portraits from the Kobun period. In neither picture does he wear a hat, so we can see that his hair has grown longer and thicker.32 Having been connected with the ‘photograph with the queue cut’ that Zhou Zuoren received from his brother, this 1903 studio portrait of Lu Xun stood out from his many other images and gained an independent life. It acquired a new significance when Xu Shoushang, another recipient of the portrait in 1903, wrote about it 33 years later (in a tribute to Lu Xun published eight days after the death of the great writer), relating the photograph to a 113

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well-known poem by Lu Xun. Xu subsequently mentioned the photograph and the poem several times, but each time altered his accounts; the inconsistency has generated much confusion among scholars. In his first report in October 1936, he said that in 1903, when he and Lu Xun were both students at Kobun, Lu Xun ‘gave him a small photograph and later added the poem to it’.33 Two months later, he changed the story, saying that the poem, entitled ‘Inscribed by the Author on a Small Likeness’ (‘Ziti xiaoxiang’), was actually written on the back of the photo.34 The third time he mentioned the poem and the photograph, in October 1947, he maintained that they formed a unit, but dated both to 1904, after Lu Xun had left the Kobun Academy.35 Despite the contradictions in these reminiscences, the portrait and the poem have become firmly linked together since 1936, providing a joint ground for interpretation that is as fertile as it is uncertain. Paired together, the poem provides the picture with a heightened sense of patriotism and self-sacrifice: My mind fails to avert arrows of the gods, The winds and rains, black as boulders, darken my old home. I entrust my thoughts to the star of a cold night, the king does not understand, I would offer up my blood to Xuanyuan [China’s progenitor].36 But can we be so confident as to read these lines into the portrait, as if the young student in the picture were silently reciting them? To be sure, the poem contains no direct reference to haircutting, and Lu Xun never connected it with the photo, although he used it as a text several times in calligraphic works he made for friends. Even if he indeed inscribed it on the portrait that he gave to Xu Shoushang in 1903, there is always the possibility that he had composed it on a separate occasion. With all these problems unsolved, we must resist the temptation of taking the poem as our primary evidence in interpreting the portrait; we must instead rely on the intrinsic features of the portrait in contemplating its meaning. These features include its timing (taken shortly after Lu Xun cut his queue), its format (half-length frontal portrait), the image it bears (Lu Xun without a hat and exposing the new-grown hair on the front of his head) and its purpose (to record Lu Xun’s new look and to be sent to relatives and friends). These tangible and demonstrable factors reveal the 114

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basic intentions of the portrait: it aimed to both represent and present a new, transformed self. Captured in a photograph, the representation was considered as final and immutable as reality itself. Presented to friends and family members, the image became a declaration, announcing the beginning of a new phase in the subject’s own life. Only on this basis of visual and contextual analysis can we incorporate other information from 1903, including the poem cited earlier, which would provide further evidence to explore Lu Xun’s intellectual development and political attitude at the time. As Mei Lanfang’s and Lu Xun’s ‘after cutting the queue’ images show, this kind of portrait was often prompted by certain political or ideological aspirations. Partly for this reason, when studied retrospectively, their meaning is often simplified or exaggerated, especially when the men in question later became revered historical figures. In such cases, these images are often taken as ‘early evidence’ of extraordinary political insight and determination. Lu Xun’s portrait of 1903 is one such over-interpreted image. In a similar vein, Sun Yatsen’s haircut and related portraits have acquired unusual importance outside their original historical framework. Sun, who would become the leader of the anti-Manchu movement and the first Republican president, cut his queue in 1895. A standard interpretation of this act was provided early on by historians like Lyon Sharman, who wrote in 1935 in Sun Yat-sen; His Life and its Meaning: A Critical Biography: When Sun Yat-sen cut off his queue he did more than disguise his appearance; he accepted as final his break with the old China; he sealed his own resolve nevermore to be subject to the Manchus.37 This and similar interpretations prepared a foundation to restage the event in dramatic forms. The popular tv serial For the Sake of the Republic (Zouxiang Gonghe, 2003), for example, freely recreated history to lionize Sun’s revolutionary spirit in amputating his queue: in the thirteenth episode of the serial, the future Republican president marched alone to the Guangzhou governor’s office with a pair of scissors in hand, announcing that he was ready to cut off his queue to ‘break with the rotten, cruel, and corrupt regime’. Tortured by soldiers in front of townspeople, he struggled to sever the queue and threw it into the air.38 115

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In actuality, Sun Yat-sen cut his queue secretly at the home of Feng Jingru, a Hong Kong merchant in Yokohama, when he escaped to Japan after the failed Canton Uprising in October 1895. According to the recollection of Feng’s son, Feng Ziyou, one day, two men with long hair came to their shop and spent a long time discussing things with his father. He found out afterwards that they were Sun Yat-sen and Chen Shaobai (1869–1934), another anti-Qing revolutionary. A few days later, Sun and Chen came again and cut off their queues in the shop. Tan Fa, the owner of a clothing store in the city, dressed them in Western suits. Zheng Shiliang (1863–1901), another comrade of Sun’s, postponed cutting his hair because he was returning to China to promote revolution.39 Sun’s own reminiscence of his queue cutting is similarly uneventful; in fact, he may have even misremembered the place as Kobe, a city he passed through before settling in Yokohama: At Kobe, whither I fled from Hong Kong, I took a step of great importance. I cut off my cue [sic], which had been growing all my life. For some days I had not shaved my head, and I allowed the hair to grow on my upper lip. Then I went out to a clothier’s and bought a suit of modern Japanese garments. When I was fully dressed I looked in the mirror and was astonished – and a good deal reassured – by the transformation. Nature had favoured me. I was

61 Poster of the Revive China Society (Xingzhonghui) with a portrait of Sun Yat-sen after cutting off his queue, 1895.

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b i r t h o f t h e s e l f a n d t h e n at i o n 62 Calendar from 1912 bearing Sun Yat-sen’s portrait.

darker in complexion than most Chinese, a trait I had inherited from my mother, for my father resembled more the regular type. I have seen it said that I have Malay blood in my veins, and also that I was born in Honolulu. Both these statements are false. I am purely Chinese, as far as I know; but after the Japanese war, when the natives of Japan began to be treated with more respect, I had no trouble when I let my hair and moustache grow, in passing for a Japanese. I admit I owe a great deal to this circumstance, as otherwise 117

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I should not have escaped from many dangerous situations.40

63 ‘New Inventions’, advertisement of Shengchunxuan in Shanghai, from L’Illustration, 3595, 27 January 1912.

This last sentence seems to imply that Sun cut his queue for a pragmatic reason: disguised as a Japanese he could avoid the watchful eyes of the Qing government. On the other hand, while this could be the direct motivation for his action, the significance of his newly acquired queueless image clearly exceeded simple camouflage. Indeed, two photographs that he took shortly after cutting his queue demonstrate how actively he displayed this image and used it for political purposes. One of the photos shows the three men mentioned in Feng Ziyou’s recollection: Sun Yat-sen, standing straight and tall in the centre, is flanked by Chen Shaobai and Zheng Shiliang, all dressed in Western suits and holding Panama hats. There is no feeling of defeat or surreptitiousness in Sun’s image; instead it projects confidence and heroism. The second photo, a half-length portrait of Sun Yat-sen alone, conveys the same aura of leadership. Its 1895 date is secured by a poster distributed by the Revive China Society (Xingzhonghui), established in Honolulu the previous year, which featured him as one of the three principal leaders of this anti-Qing organization (illus. 61). This image then became the prototype for a series of Sun’s official portraits, taken and publicized at various historical moments. Upon the founding of the Republic on 1 January 1912, for example, the China Book Company printed a poster, featuring Sun’s up-to-date likeness under the five-striped Republican flag. Dressed in a Western suit and with his short hair freely parted, he appears as a personal embodiment of the modern nation state (illus. 62). Two colourful panels, displaying the traditional lunar calendar and the new solar calendar of that year, flank Sun’s image. We have seen a similarly mixed use of the two calendars in Wang Yi’an and Li Hongchun’s inscriptions on their portraits. In all these cases, the juxtaposition of the two calendars defines a transitional period in history. But if Wang and Li’s nostalgic inscriptions expressed their attachment to the past, Sun’s image in the poster symbolized the beginning of a new era. 118

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Because of its inherent newness, this modern image, like Mei Lanfang’s after-queue-cutting portrait, quickly infiltrated urban popular culture. As a piece of evidence, Shanghai’s Shengchunxuan, a photo studio and tailor’s shop, put out an advertisement in 1912 in sync with the birth of the Republic, portraying the new president as a fashionable, Westernized gentleman, sporting a smart haircut and pointed moustache while holding the Republican flag (illus. 63). The title of the poster – Xin faming or ‘New Inventions’ – technically refers to the latest photographic devices that the studio was introducing. Placed next to Sun Yat-sen’s portrait, however, the printed characters also invite people to read the portrait as the ultimate representation of the new era. coda: the death of the queue

Exactly at this historical juncture, Aisin-Gioro Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, abdicated the throne on 12 February 1912. In exchange, he and his court were allowed to remain in the northern half of the Forbidden City in Beijing. He was then six years old; royal affairs were supervised by his father Zaifeng (1883–1951) and the Empress Dowager Longyu (1868–1913), and practicalities handled by the Imperial Household Department. Ghettoized but promised a hefty annual subsidy of four million silver taels by the Republic, this remnant Qing court became a living relic inhabiting its own time and space. The clearest marker of its suspended temporality is again the queue, which, though banned throughout the new nation, continued to ensure the Manchu identity of the child emperor and all other occupants of the Forbidden City. This isolated space occasionally came into contact with the outside world. At one such moment in 1919, Reginald Fleming Johnston (1874–1938), an Oxford-trained former British diplomat, was appointed tutor to thirteen-year-old Puyi. Johnston’s main official duty was to teach Puyi English. But he did much more than this, to the extent that within five years he succeeded in becoming a personal model and the embodiment of Western civilization for the abdicated emperor. Recalling his relationship with Johnston, Puyi wrote half a century later in his memoir: In my eyes, everything Johnston did was the best. He made me feel that foreigners were the wisest and most civilized people and he the most learned man of all Westerners.41 119

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Johnston established such authority through daily interactions: he showed Puyi foreign magazines filled with First World War pictures of aircraft, tanks and artillery, and talked about their functions and different makes. He brought Puyi European sweets to eat and explained how the modern knowledge of chemistry had helped produce them. He lectured on tea-party manners. Little by little, these instructions opened up an alluring world for the boy emperor and, more importantly, shaped his imagination of himself not as a successor of Manchu royalty but as, in his words, ‘a gentleman in the British tradition’:

64 Pu Yi after cutting off his queue, 1922, photographer unknown.

From the time I first saw the World War magazines I became interested in foreign periodicals. I was especially struck by the advertisements and immediately ordered the Household Department to order foreign bred-dogs and diamonds from abroad like the ones in the magazines. I also bought some foreign-style furniture and had the real sandalwood table with brass fittings used on the kang for the support of the elbows changed for a small painted desk with porcelain fittings. Imitating Johnston, I also ordered a pocket watch with chain, rings, tie pins, cuff links, neckties, etc., etc. I also asked him to give me a foreign name as well as ones for my younger brothers and sisters and ‘empress,’ and ‘consort.’ I was called ‘Henry’ and my ‘empress,’ ‘Elizabeth.’ I even imitated his way of talking in a mixture of Chinese and English with my fellow students . . . The woolen cloth of his suit made me question the value of Chinese silks and brocades; and the fountain pen in his pocket made me ashamed of my writing brushes and Chinese writing paper.42 Thus when Johnston compared the queue disparagingly with a pigtail, no further persuasion was needed for Puyi to get rid of this undignified bodily feature. This event took place on 27 April (the first day of the fourth month in the traditional calendar) in 1922.43 Within the next few days, more than 1,000 other queues inside the Forbidden City were gone; only three elderly Chinese tutors and 120

b i r t h o f t h e s e l f a n d t h e n at i o n 65 Reginald Fleming Johnston with Puyi, Pujie and Runqi in the imperial garden in the Forbidden City, 1922, photographer unknown.

a few senior functionaries retained theirs. This small revolution occurred without forewarning. In fact, for the previous nine years, the Household Department had stubbornly resisted the request of the Republican government to abolish the queue in the Forbidden City. When the change finally took place, it was not brought about by any fundamental institutional reform. Rather, the adolescent last emperor, who had just reached his sixteenth birthday in February, rebelled against tradition to adopt a fancy, Western look. This look 121

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66 ‘Puyi’s Queue’, from Palace Museum Weekly, 65, 3 January 1931.

was captured in many photographs that he took in the early and mid-1920s. The earliest one, presumably taken shortly after he had cut his queue, is a standard half-length portrait of a young man, who has grown short hair in the originally shaven part of his head (illus. 64). A slightly later picture shows Johnston with his three queueless royal tutees (Puyi, Pujie and Runqi) (illus. 65). The photo must have been taken before September 1924, when Puyi was forced out of the Forbidden City. Immediately after the departure of the Qing court, the Republican government appointed a special committee to inventory the imperial possessions in the Forbidden City. In January 1925, Lian Quan, the committee head, recorded a hat-box in the Duanning Hall with a label attached to it: ‘On the third day of the intercalary 122

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fifth month, in the thirteenth year of Xuantong [1922], a queue was submitted to [the Household Department].’44 Opening the box, there was indeed an intact queue, cut off at the root from someone’s head. When a photograph of this queue appeared in the Palace Museum Weekly (Gugong zhoukan) in January 1931, it was identified as ‘Puyi’s Queue’ (illus. 66). Taken after Puyi had left the palace, the photograph had nothing to do with him as the nominal last Qing emperor. Yet it also had little to do with urgent issues in contemporary politics. In 1931, the controversy about queue cutting was largely forgotten. The Republic was entering the twentieth year of its existence and continued to fight for its control over the whole of China. The struggle between the Kuomintang and the Communist Red Army was rapidly escalating. Japan was completing preparations to invade China and Puyi would soon be installed as the puppet ruler of Manchukuo. Although Puyi’s severed queue was far from ancient – he had cut it off less than a decade before – it was perceived as an ancient relic, featured together with antiques from the remote past in the Palace Museum Weekly; Lian Quan even wrote a poem in the style of ‘lamenting the past’ (huaigu) to commemorate its discovery. Its image thus adds another layer of temporality to the photographs studied in this chapter, taken before, during or shortly after the cutting of the queue. In brief, the subject of this 1931 photograph is a previously disembodied queue. Instead of capturing events and sentiment related to actual queue cutting, the image provides the ultimate proof of the queue’s already realized death.

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4. SELF AS ART: JIN SHISHENG AND HIS INTERIOR SPACE

67 Jin Shisheng, Riverbank (2), 1935, gelatin silver print.

None of the photographs discussed in the last chapter – the journalistic records of queue cutting, Wang Yi’an and Li Hongchun’s nostalgic portraits, queueless images of aspiring revolutionaries and reformers – were created as works of art. Photography’s entrance into the domain of ‘Chinese art’ occurred later, when a new generation of photographers, predominantly young urban intellectuals exposed to Western artistic and cultural influence, organized photo societies and coterie exhibitions in the 1920s and ’30s to promote ‘fine art photography’ (meishu sheying). Taking a formalistic approach, historians of Chinese photography have conventionally described this development as a delayed response to an earlier trend in European photography. The meaning of meishu sheying lies not in form alone, however, but should be understood as a radical redefinition of photographic images in the Chinese context. Instead of simply recording reality, these photographers endowed photography with the mission of expressing their own perceptions and emotions. When Liu Bannong (1891–1934) distinguished xieyi zhaoxiang (subjective photography) from xiezhen zhaoxiang (realistic photography) in 1927, he was attempting to make precisely such a redefinition.1 As the term xieyi zhaoxiang implies, this kind of photography shifts its focus and interest from the world of phenomena in front of the camera (zhen) to the photographer behind the camera and his mind (yi). In the 1920s and ’30s, this shift triggered various experiments in Chinese photography, ranging from stylistic and technical innovations to how photography was conceptualized.2 Among those who participated in these experiments, Jin Shisheng (1910–2000) was unique in simultaneously developing two lines of images. One line, conventionally termed huayi sheying 125

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or ‘pictorial photography’, adhered to a dominant trend in fine art photography at the time. His pictures of this type – whether of a rural path, the sunset over a pavilion or an ancient Buddhist temple – were filled with rich tones and hazy beams of light to generate a painterly effect (illus. 67). In creating these images, the artist keenly explored the subtle poetry of the observed world and transformed this world into art. Whereas these and other examples of pictorial photography have won praise from critics for their visual sensitivity, and have consequently dominated the study of 1930s Chinese photography,3 it is important to note that among Jin’s works, a considerable number reveal a separate line of artistic experimentation beyond the genre of pictorial photography. The difference between these two types of photograph lies not in their divergent styles, but in the separate subjects and goals of artistic representation. This second group of works no longer aims at transforming reality into painterly images, but instead reflects on the role of the photographer and on photography as a special visual technology. In these works, all the essential technical and social aspects of photography, including the camera, the photo studio, camera shops, photographic exhibitions, the photo album, photography books and magazines, and especially the photographer, are captured as subjects with unwavering dedication. This was quite unusual not just in the 1930s but also over the entire course of Chinese photography. Indeed, one can say that through making these images, Jin Shisheng articulated a specific goal for ‘fine art photography’ as exploring the interior world of the photographer and photography.     watching the self

In 1936, while still a student at Tongji University, Jin Shisheng was already revealing himself to be one of Shanghai’s most talented young photographers. That year he took a self-portrait in his dormitory, in which he is sitting on the narrow metal frame of his bed, his head down, intently studying a book (illus. 68). Both the compact space of the student dorm and the young photographer’s attire – he wears a white short-sleeved shirt and a pair of dark overalls – depart from the conventions of formal portraiture. He is casually dressed not because this is a snapshot, however. In fact, many other elements that seem candid and informal about the picture are intentionally arranged to structure the image. The 126

68 Jin Shisheng, Selfportrait in his dorm, Shanghai, 1936, gelatin silver print.

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photographer, all of 26 years old, placed himself in the forefront of the composition. His temporary perch on the bed frame would not have been comfortable for even a few minutes (which must explain his conspicuously rigid posture), but allows for proper placement of his body in front of the camera, to be surrounded and framed by various objects and pictures. In short, his position in the physical centre of the photograph is compositionally relevant, but also denotes that he is at the emotional centre of his personal world. On the right side of the composition is a bookcase with a few small photographs on the top, showing his family and close friends. The shelves are full of books. Since the top shelf gets the best light, an observant viewer can identify the book titles and understand the interests of the room’s inhabitant. To the left are four issues of Das Deutsche Lichtbild (German Photography Annual), published annually starting in 1927. It was hugely influential, becoming one of the most important international photography publications of the time. Besides this publication are two Japanese books called A Collection of Beautiful Photographs and The International Portrait Photography Catalogue, and then the British Journal Photographic Almanac and a Rolleiflex camera handbook. The few science and engineering titles present were textbooks for Jin’s course of study. In opposition to the bookshelf, the two magazines on the bed to his left are arranged as though they have just been read but not yet put away. One of the magazines is the German Photofreund Jahrbuch (Photography Yearbook); the other is The Young Companion (Liang you), a Chinese-language art periodical. Inaugurated in 1926, The Young Companion quickly became China’s most popular photographic journal on art and urban life and the favourite reading material for young artists like Jin Shisheng. This was especially so after a new printing method was adopted in 1930 that increased the ability to reproduce higher-quality photographs, including colour pictures, and the magazine grew to 42 pages long. If the books are in constant dialogue with the human figure in the photograph, then the pictures in the room constitute another conversation partner for him. These include both paintings and photographic works. Except for the family portraits on the bookshelf and the small landscape photograph partially obscured by Jin’s head, the two most important images are the ink brush painting above the bed and the photo portrait hanging above the bookshelf. Together with Jin Shisheng’s reading figure, the three form a 128

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triangular structure. The painting’s vertical orientation echoes the leisurely brush strokes forming a mountain peak and ancient trees. Its presence alone hints at the literati interests of the room’s occupant.4 Directly above the bookshelf hangs what must be Jin Shisheng’s self-portrait, actually a self-portrait within a self-portrait. Jin’s head in this nested self-portrait turns slightly to one side, as though he is looking out through an open window and peering at what the seated Jin Shisheng is reading. Meanwhile, the real Jin, absorbed in his book, seems completely unaware of this surveillance. Within the annals of art history, there is a phenomenon in which works arising in different time periods and places can reveal structures and intents of astonishing similarity. We can’t just claim ‘influence’ to explain away all of these coincidences. In many situations, the works’ resemblance to one another reflects parallel experiments by artists straddling changing eras and experiencing new cultural currents. Perhaps similar circumstances a few hundred years before Jin Shisheng’s self-portrait led one of the artists of the Ming dynasty to create a work with nearly the same composition, referred to later as One or Two? (Shi yi shi er tu) or Double Portraits of Myself (Er wo tu) (illus. 70).5 This picture entered the Qing dynasty imperial collection after the Manchus conquered China. Supposedly Emperor Qianlong (r. 1735–96) loved this piece so much that he commanded several court painters, including the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), to borrow its composition to

69 Ding Guanpeng, One or Two? (Emperor Qianlong), colour and ink on paper, 18th century.

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70 Anonymous, One or Two?, Ming dynasty (1368–1664), colour on silk.

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paint several of his own portraits (illus. 69). These appropriations of the Ming painting reflect Qianlong’s particular interest in creating a personalized interior space: following his instructions, these court artists not only surrounded Qianlong with objects selected from his vast art collection, but also portrayed the emperor twice, thereby creating a portrait within a portrait. The central figure in the Ming dynasty One or Two? is a scholar seated on a low couch in front of a landscape screen, positioned at the focal point of the square composition. Surrounding him in an arc are a few pieces of furniture and some objects, including a lotus-shaped incense burner and a table supporting books, scrolls and a Chinese zither. Additionally, in the foreground there is a flower arrangement in a porcelain vase resting on a stone pedestal. Three key images in the painting are therefore aligned along the central axis, starting in the foreground and extending into the background: the stone pedestal, the scholar and the painted screen behind him. The fresh flowers on the pedestal and the screen balance each other in both positioning and symbolism. The flowers originate in nature, but have been arranged by human hands to become art. Meanwhile, the screen, depicting a rural southern countryside scene, was created entirely by human hands. These two elements, the flowers and the screen, complement each other as two representative aspects of nature, and through their placement in front of and behind the scholar, connect and interact with him and each other. In the same painting, a servant boy is pouring tea from a teapot into a teacup. His posture shows respect, and the scholar is smiling gently upon seeing him. This harmony is interrupted by a third image: the portrait hanging above the seated figure. The image is in the scholar’s likeness; quite possibly it is his self-portrait. The face in the portrait is neither friendly nor amiable, however; instead it looks down with a grave expression, as though he were intensely studying his actual self. The presence of the portrait radically changes the reading sequence of the painting: following his solemn gaze, we look at the seated scholar, then at the boy and finally at the other objects in the painting. Emperor Qianlong had at least three portraits of himself made on the basis of this Ming painting (illus. 69 is one). On the surface, they are all very similar. The emperor sits in the same position that the original scholar inhabits, and each uses the same compositional framing: behind the emperor is a painted landscape screen, and on the screen hangs the portrait of the emperor (compare illus. 131

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69 and 70). However, if we look carefully, we will discover many alterations, all of which involve the seated figure’s identity and his related preferences. In the portrait by Ding Guanpeng (illus. 69), the rectangular desk from the original has been replaced by a circular table in a Sino-European style that the emperor favoured. The original humble objects displayed on the tables are also gone, replaced by priceless antique bronzes and ceramic vases from the emperor’s art collection. On the screen, a rigid landscape painting in the Qing orthodox style now replaces the original rural marsh. Additionally, the Qianlong emperor has inscribed a poem on the painting, expressing his political ideology of integrating different philosophical schools in order to unify the country: One or two? My two faces never come together yet are never separate. One can be Confucian, one can be Mohist. Why should I worry or even think?   There is no evidence that Jin Shisheng ever saw these ancient paintings and could thus have been influenced by them before he created his self-portrait in 1936, which we could call a modern version of One or Two? It is more likely that his own artistic experiment coincidentally produced a similar image. Like the historical One or Two? pictures, his work also constructs a selfsustaining interior space through artistic representation. The space is ‘self-sustaining’ because the subject of representation is the artist himself, not external reality. This representation derives all its visual elements from this subject, either from the photographer himself or from things and images directly related to him that can be considered an extension of himself. From this perspective, this self-portrait does not aim at achieving a physical resemblance of a human subject. Instead it focuses on the connotations of the self, including the subject’s living environment, his artistic passions, his intellectual aspirations and the integration of all of the above. In the photograph we see a modern youth of the 1930s. Since childhood, Jin had received an education in Chinese culture and art, but he chose the path of modern science for his university studies and future profession. His areas of knowledge were traditional as well as modern – the books in multiple languages and the ink painting hanging on the wall reveal a delicate tension and negotiation between past and 132

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present. The full bookshelf of photography books mirrors his special interest in this particular art form. Among them, the Rolleiflex camera handbook indicates his ownership of this very specialized camera. (Interestingly enough, this is the very camera he used to take the 1936 Self-portrait in his Dorm, illus. 68.) It is Jin’s selfportrait hanging within the picture, however, that best encapsulates his subjectivity. Although the ‘painting-within-a-painting’ is an established formula in art history, this nested image, gazing down at himself in the larger self-portrait, reflects an acute self-awareness of the photographer as an advocate for fine art photography.     the camera as photographer

This nested self-portrait on the wall is also something like a mirror. The gaze of the person within it reflects the camera’s gaze, as well as the photographer’s vision projected from the outside. We can associate this mirroring structure with Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) analysis of an image in Diego Velázquez’s (1599–1660) masterpiece Las Meninas: the mirror in the background of this painting that reflects the king and queen standing outside the picture’s frame (illus. 71, 72). As they look at the princess, the royal couple becomes the object of attention for figures in the painting, including the painter, the princess and her attendants.6 Jin Shisheng’s self-portrait on the wall can also be interpreted as a type of mirror image because it reflects the gaze of the external photographer, who is both looking at the reading figure in the photograph and at his private surroundings. In this picture, therefore, Jin Shisheng assumes three identities: the representational object of the photograph, an image observing himself in reality and the photographer who creates the picture. Among the three, the second and the third roles are symmetrical, thereby implicitly identifying the photographer with the camera. In other words, the gaze of the self-portrait on the wall actually reflects the camera’s ‘vision’ directed towards the seated Jin Shisheng inside the picture. The significance of this nested selfportrait, therefore, is both to orient the viewer’s eyes towards the reading figure seated on the bed and to reveal an external existence, which, according to Foucault, controls a representation without being represented. Such a reading connects this photograph to many other pictures by Jin Shisheng. In all of these works, the camera is represented as the photographer’s second self. Among these, the earliest is a picture 133

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71, 72 Diego Velázquez (1599– 1660), Las Meninas, 1656–7, oil on canvas, and detail.

dated to 1926. Although Jin did not personally take this picture, it pinpoints the origin of his indissoluble relationship with the camera. Years later he recalled how he obtained his first camera:   Back when I would soon be entering middle school, my father brought home two things to show my mother. He said that an acquaintance needed cash and had asked if he could sell these things to us. When my mother looked, she saw an opium pipe with a jade mouthpiece and a portable box camera. My father said the pipe wasn’t bad. My mother replied, disapprovingly, ‘A pipe? How is our family going to use this? We don’t need it! The camera we can give to our kids to play with. It would be a good thing if they can learn photography.’ So it was my mother who won this camera for me. I loved it so much I couldn’t put it down. I didn’t have a teacher – I just taught myself and that worked out pretty well.7   The sentiment ‘I loved it so much I couldn’t put it down’ is exactly the subject of this 1926 photo (illus. 73), taken in a portrait studio in Yangzhou. The sixteen-year-old Jin Shisheng is carefully dressed in a grown man’s gown and jacket, holding the Kodak 3a folding camera he had received earlier that year. His stern expression seems ill-fitting for someone of his youth. In the photo he seems to be experiencing an important event, or we can say that the picture records a crucial moment in his life. This event or moment is undoubtedly related to the camera in his hands: the way he is carefully cradling it shows how precious it is to him, and he intentionally showcases it by turning it lengthwise. His posture also mimics that of the camera, with his left foot in front, resulting in a side view. According to Jin Hua, Jin Shisheng’s son, this picture was the collaborative outcome of his father and the studio photographer.8 Despite this, the young Jin’s solemn expression and posture are quite his own, making it possible to consider this photo as his first selfportrait. Many years later, when Jin was discussing photography with beginner-level students, he clearly remembered the excitement he 135

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73 Jin Shisheng and His First Camera, Yangzhou, 1926, gelatin silver print, photographer unknown.

felt when he first received this camera and began to take pictures. As he wrote:   Photography is a very exciting thing. From the moment you first hold a camera, when you begin to understand its use and load your first roll of film, you feel so happy. Then, when you get back your first roll from the developer and you see each picture you took, you secretly gasp at your great masterpieces, assured you must be an overnight success! You think, ‘Photography isn’t that hard – I’ve only been studying it for five minutes!’9   But, as he said later in the same piece, this feeling of instant success is fleeting, and is followed by the never-ending longing for the ‘art’ of photography. For Jin Shisheng himself, this longing for art was intertwined with a persistent interest in this strange, fascinating machine called a camera. Two years after taking the 1926 portrait, he entered Shanghai’s Pudong High School, and on this occasion, at his request, his parents purchased a Kodak 127 Brownie for him. In 1931, after he was admitted to Shanghai’s Tongji University’s Department of Civil Engineering, he further acquired a kw Company (Kamera-Werkstätten) camera, which used medium-format (120 mm) negatives. Not long after, he bought a Rodenstock mediumformat camera. During his fourth year of university, he began to take rolls of film with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera, which he had purchased right after its introduction to the market in 1935. In 1937, while studying abroad in Germany, he added both a Leica 3b and 3c to his collection. The growth of his camera collection is visible through the progression of his work, as each new camera parades through and plays an allegorical role in his photographs. At times, the cameras are like the photographer’s most faithful companions, accompanying him through countless days and nights. In others, the camera and the photographer become one, indivisible from one another. Two self-portraits in 1932 fully embody this kindred relationship. One was again shot in his dormitory, right after he had matriculated at Tongji University (illus. 74). In the picture he is sitting on the bed, intently admiring a fold-out plate in a photography book. The low angle of the lamp beside him casts an enormous shadow. Balanced with this figure/shadow combination is a camera on a tripod, silhouetted against a white wall in the 136

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right-hand half of the picture. The placement and stark form of the camera allow it to contrast with the figure and shadow on the left, generating tension as well as equivalency. The confined space of the room, with only artificial light illuminating it, creates a feeling of intimacy and secrecy. It could be the dead of night and yet the photographer is sitting on his bed, pondering the mysteries of photography. In conversation with him are two cameras; I say two because in the room there is not only the brand new Rodenstock medium-format camera visible in the photo, but also the camera he used to take the photo, his well-used medium-format kw. The Rodenstock is featured in another self-portrait that Jin Shisheng took in the same year, although here we can only see the lens and not the entire camera (illus. 75). The focal image is the photographer’s likeness reflected in the optical glass. This piece intentionally misleads the viewer: in a normal situation, the mirror image reflected in the lens would only be the camera used to take this picture and could not be the photographer behind the camera. When this photo first appeared in 1933 in the eighth issue of the Chinese Journal of Photography, it was accompanied by Jin Shisheng’s explanation of how he had created the image: 

previous: 74 Jin Shisheng, Selfportrait: Reading a Photo Magazine in his Dorm, Shanghai, 1932, gelatin silver print. 75 Jin Shisheng, Selfportrait in Rodenstock Lens, Shanghai, 1932, gelatin silver print.

This picture was made with the method of double exposure. First, I placed the camera in front of a mirror to shoot its mirror image. The time was 6 p.m. on an autumn day; the camera lens was about a foot away from a window. After considerable adjustment, I found the right place where the lens did not reflect any light. [Author’s note: This means that in the mirror, the centre part of the lens appeared completely dark.] I marked the position of this part of the lens on the camera’s ground-glass screen, and then made a 2.5-second exposure. Next, I surrounded an existing photograph of myself with black flannel, and illuminated the image with a 50w bulb, avoiding any reflection of light on the flannel. Finally, I reloaded the previously exposed negative and aimed the camera at my portrait, making sure that the image overlapped with the dark lens in the negative. The process was completed after a 15-second exposure.10 The method described here was not very difficult, but it required delicate handling and a lengthy process. This raises the question: why did Jin Shisheng go to all this trouble to create this 140

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composite image? The answer should be clear: he hoped to create a perfect combination of himself and his camera in a single image. This picture has two other interesting details demanding attention. One detail is that the lens visible in the photograph has the shutter speed set to T, which allows the shutter to stay open. The other detail is that the aperture is on the widest setting. These two specifications allow the lens to be as open as possible, almost like an unblocked tunnel. The viewer can thus imagine that the photographer appearing in the middle of the lens is situated on the reverse side of the camera looking out, while the viewer is on the lens side, looking in at him.     photography about photography

From the beginning of fine art photography, the photographer’s desire for self-expression had been simply insatiable. Around 1850, the brothers William and Frederick Langenheim took a picture showing Frederick studying a few portraits, including one of himself (illus. 76). It is interesting to note that the two brothers had a deepseated interest in photographic techniques. In 1849 they purchased the American rights to use William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype process, and also helped pioneer other photographic advancements, including the use of glass negatives and positives to make prints and projections and the calotype process to make stereo images. Within the aforementioned photograph, a daguerreotype, Frederick is looking at calotype (talbotype) pictures. This image thus does not just represent his likeness or his ‘portrait-within-a-portrait’, but also reveals the two brothers’ ardent enthusiasm and excitement about new photographic techniques. A print of this photograph is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where another interesting photograph also exists. Taken in around 1900 by an anonymous French photographer, the work shows decorative wood panelling inside a room, elements of which indicate a Neoclassical style (illus. 77). Oddly, in the panel above the fireplace that would normally display a framed painting, there is a rectangular mirror instead. Reflected in the mirror is the blurry image of a photographer and his assistant next to a camera on a tripod, preparing to take a photo. Even more puzzling are the surroundings in the reflected image: it appears that the photographer and his assistant are in an open courtyard surrounded by tall buildings, while the wood panelling and fireplace are located inside a room, as normal. Possibly a 141

self as art 77 Unknown French photographer, Wood Panelling Photographed from in Courtyard, 1900– 1910s, gelatin silver print.

76 William and Frederick Langenheim, Frederick Langenheim Looking at Talbotypes, daguerreotype, c. 1849–51.

composite of two shots, this photograph shifts the viewer’s attention from the indoor scene to the photographer and his practice. I bring in these two Western works – and there are other similar examples – because they deal with relationships parallel to those represented in Jin Shisheng’s self-portraits. In one, for example, Jin is absorbed in examining a photographic plate in a magazine (illus. 74); his image echoes that of Frederick Langenheim (illus. 76). Similarly, the French photographer’s mirror in the image above reminds us of Jin’s Rodenstock camera lens (illus. 75), which contains his self-portrait. Just as in the comparison made at the beginning of this essay between Jin’s 1936 self-portrait (illus. 68) and the historical One or Two? paintings (illus. 69, 70), parallels between his works and the two earlier European photographs do not result from direct influence. Rather, their similarities reflect some fundamental interests inherent in photography itself, which transcend cultures and persist through time. We could call these works, collectively, ‘photography about photography’, meaning that their true intent, instead of simply recording a figure or a situation, is to reflect on the photographer’s own practice. We have discussed Jin Shisheng’s infatuation with his camera; so much so that we could even say it reveals a narcissistic bent. From here we can go further to decipher some of his other works, often portraits of his family members. In 1934, for example, he gave a Kodak pocket camera to the younger sister closest to 143

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78 Jin Shisheng, Female University Student with her Kodak Pocket Camera (1), 1934, gelatin silver print.

him in age, at that time a student at Jinling Women’s University in Nanjing, and took two photographs on that occasion. In the first photo, his sister is looking into the distance, both hands holding the camera in front of her chest (illus. 78). The upward angle disproportionately enlarges her hands and the object they cradle, thereby emphasizing the camera’s importance in the representation. The perspective in another picture is level. His sister is still holding the camera, but is looking down into its lens (illus. 79). The photographer clearly wants to emphasize the delicacy of the moment. Not only does he bestow the picture with a gentle, soft

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79 Jin Shisheng, Female University Student with her Kodak Pocket Camera (2), 1934, gelatin silver print.

tonal effect, but his image also captures the way his sister is lovingly holding the camera and looking at it with a small, meaningful smile. All these features effectively convey the camera’s emotional value to her. We may relate this picture to Jin’s Rodenstock self-portrait: looking intently into the camera lens, his sister is, in a sense, looking intently at her brother. But to Jin Shisheng, the objective of photography is not limited to an interest in the camera, and his ‘photography about photography’ also goes beyond merely representing the relationships between people and cameras. There are at least three other recurring

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themes within his works that can be understood as subjects of ‘photography about photography’. The first arises through his close relationship with Shanghai’s Guan Long Photographic Supply Company; the second focuses on the display and viewing of photographs and the third shows photographers, including himself and others, in the act of taking pictures. The vast majority of these photographs were taken in the 1930s, leaving behind a precious record of the world of photography in Shanghai at this time. The Guan Long Photographic Supply Company was established in 1931 at 445 East Nanjing Road, Shanghai (the current address is 190 East Nanjing Road). Before this, starting in 1904, camera equipment in Shanghai was mainly sold by foreign stores of French, Japanese, American, English and German ownership. In 1920, Yi Chang Photography Supply opened, becoming the earliest store of its type to be operated by Chinese people. By the 1930s, stores such as Hua Chang, Guan Long, Zhong Xi and Xin Chang had been founded. Among them, Guan Long was known as the largest supplier of camera equipment, with brands from Germany, the United States and England. In addition to selling photographic supplies, these stores underwrote other businesses and cultural activities related to photography, such as developing film and enlarging photographs, importing foreign photography magazines and books, organizing photography competitions, publishing photography magazines and more. In July 1930, the first Kodak Magazine was published by Shanghai’s Kodak branch to widespread success. Following this example, Hua Chang Photographic Supply published a photography magazine called Morning Wind (Chen feng) in December 1933 and then published Hua Chang Photographic Monthly (Hua Chang sheying yuekan) in October 1935, when the company established a branch in Hankou in Hubei province. In March of that year, Yi Chang Photographic Supply brought out a photography magazine called Long Rainbow (Chang hong). Not wanting to fall behind the others, Guan Long decided to publish a higher-calibre photography magazine. Subsequently, they found Jin Shisheng, still a university student, and the result was the birth of the magazine Flying Eagle (Fei ying). The following account, written by the Photography China reporter Ding Bingxuan in 1984, preserves Jin Shisheng’s reminiscence about his early involvement with Flying Eagle:   One day, I [that is, the reporter Ding Bingxuan] took two large volumes of Flying Eagle to Mr Jin’s apartment. When he saw 146

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the magazines, it was as though he were reuniting with a friend he hadn’t seen in many years, he was so excited. Without me urging him, he eagerly flipped through the magazines and began to reminisce. He said that for him, his engagement with the magazine was entirely driven by his personal interest. One day, halfway through 1935, he went to Guan Long Photographic Supply on Nanjing Road to buy equipment. He was a longtime customer, and so he and the store manager were on familiar terms. The manager told him about his intention to publish a photography magazine and invited him to be the editor. The manager was willing to underwrite all the expenses. After that, Jin discussed this opportunity with his friend Jiang Bingnan (1910–1967), who had just graduated from university and didn’t have a job at the moment. [Author’s note: This may not actually have been the case.] The two of them were both very excited about this. Soon after, the Guan Long Company building added a desk in their upstairs office. This is how the editorial office of Flying Eagle was established.11   What is not mentioned here is that upon receiving Guan Long’s invitation, Jin Shisheng raised one condition before accepting: lack of wages was no problem, but he wanted to be able to use the company’s darkroom and try out all of the new cameras and photographic equipment. The shareholders of the company agreed. Jin then invited his photography enthusiast friends Jiang Bingnan (1910–1967) and Feng Sizhi (1911–1984), both about the same age as him, to join him to edit Flying Eagle. At that time, Jiang and Feng were still students at Shanghai Daxia University. When the magazine’s first issue came out in January of 1936, the first run sold out within two or three days. They subsequently increased the print run of each issue to 3,000 copies, and even then there weren’t many left over. After the sixth issue, Jiang and Feng graduated from university. Feng took a job in Nanjing, so Jiang became full-time editor of Flying Eagle. Although Jin Shisheng jokingly referred to himself as a ‘part-time editor’, he truly remained the spirit of the magazine, writing the magazine’s introduction to each issue.12 In view of this historical background, Jin Shisheng’s photographs of the Guan Long company do not just record a commercial venue, but must reflect his close observations of a place with which he had a deep relationship. In one picture, Jin’s younger sister is standing behind the display counter, talking to a customer (illus. 80). In front of her and behind her are glass cases filled with 147

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80 Jin Shisheng, Guan Long Photographic Supply Company, Shanghai, 1935, gelatin silver print.

boxes of film; the case to her left displays various kinds of cameras and film projectors. Another shot represents Guan Long’s Kodak display section (illus. 81). The impeccably dressed man behind the counter could be Guan Long’s primary shareholder and manager Zhou Dongsui. The lowest shelf inside the case contains photo albums and Kodak Brownie cameras; the middle shelf has silver bromide photo paper and Kodak pocket cameras; and the top shelf displays Kodak film. These products were all advertised in Flying Eagle. Another related photograph was taken at night with Guan Long’s window display as its subject (illus. 82). Inside the window, hung on the back wall, are three photographs under the label ‘Award for Excellence’. These must be the winners of Kodak’s monthly competition. Resting to the left on the floor of the window is Jin Shisheng’s ‘Plum Flowers’, a good example of ‘pictorial photography’ published in the first issue of Flying Eagle. Next to this photograph, in the centre of the window, is a statuette of a flying eagle. Coupled with Jin’s photograph, this statuette announces the birth of the Flying Eagle magazine.13

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self as art 81 Jin Shisheng, Kodak Display Section Inside the Guan Long Photographic Supply Company, Shanghai, 1935, gelatin silver print.

Jin Shisheng’s other works relating to the world of photography have two mutually intertwined subjects, simultaneously portraying the display of photographic works and the viewing of these works. Some of these images represent his siblings eagerly viewing their big brother’s photography albums. We have already seen him browsing through photography books and magazines in his self-portraits (see, for example, illus. 74). When he took pictures of his friends, he would have them do the same (illus. 83). Photographic books, magazines and albums are continually featured in these portraits and self-portraits, and they constitute a crucial link between the people in the pictures. Beyond this social significance, these photographs at once depict real-life situations – Jin and his photographer friends were constantly examining new photography books and magazines – and reflect how photographers like him learned the art of photography. Jin Shisheng never received formal training, so he drew his knowledge of the art and science of photography primarily from books and then from actual practice. In the essay he wrote for the first issue of Flying Eagle, he summarized his experience, advising other photography 149

zo om i n g i n 82 Jin Shisheng, Guan Long Photographic Supply Company Display Window, Shanghai, 1935, gelatin silver print.

enthusiasts to broaden their range of knowledge by looking through photo books and reproductions, and by continually educating themselves about various international photography styles:   For those who want to study photography, the first step is to spend time looking at photographic publications. Look at every country’s photographic almanac, every kind of photography magazine and individual photographers’ photo albums: the more you look, the more you will appreciate what you see. Some people lose interest because of the language barrier; nevertheless, I believe this barrier does not present a large obstacle. Art has no boundaries – whether photography, painting, sculpture or other art forms – all works of art are the same; the more one looks, the deeper one’s understanding will be, and thus, verbal explanations become unnecessary. Each country’s style, each photographer’s composition has its own distinguishing features. By viewing and studying a wide range of styles, you can improve and renew your own work.14 150

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In addition to books and magazines, exhibitions provided yet another channel for showing and looking at photography, hence becoming one more subject of Jin Shisheng’s ‘photography about photography’. His earliest picture of this type came from 1934, showing his very first solo show at Tongji University (illus. 84). In the picture, his photographs are mounted on white paper and hung against temporary walls made of white fabric. Beneath each photograph is a label that details each picture’s technical specifications and the conditions under which it was taken. Jin also photographed two other photography exhibitions, both of which were seminal events in the history of Chinese photography. One, in April of 1937, was the ‘Black and White Society’s Fourth Photography Exhibition’ held on the fourth floor of Shanghai’s Daxin Department Store. The other was the national photography exhibition organized by the Shanghai Photography Association in 1947 after Japan’s surrender. One of his photos featuring this 1947 exhibition captures three men sitting in front of a few works on display,

83 Jin Shisheng, Jin Shisheng’s Friend Reading ‘American Annual of Photography’, Shanghai, 1936, gelatin silver print.

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self as art 86 Jin Shisheng, Students Shooting at Sporting Event at Tongji University, Shanghai, mid-1930s, gelatin silver print.

84 Jin Shisheng, Solo Photo Exhibition at Tongji University, Shanghai, 1934, gelatin silver print. 85 Jin Shisheng, Hu Junlei and Lang Jingshan at the National Photography Exhibition Hosted by the Shanghai Photography Association, 1947, gelatin silver print.

taking a brief rest. Among them is the famous photographer Lang Jingshan (1892–1995) (illus. 85). The last group of Jin’s ‘photographs about photography’ could be called ‘photography in action’ because he chose to focus his lens on photographers in the midst of a split-second process. What’s interesting here is that no matter whether he was at a sports competition or a wedding reception, his attention was invariably attracted by the photographers at the scene instead of the unfolding events: holding different types of cameras, they were absorbed by what they were observing, hoping to capture the most exciting moments (illus. 86). In addition, he recorded film shoots illuminated by mercury lamps, as well as his photographer acquaintances in the midst of taking pictures. But the figure who appears most in his photographs is still himself: pointing his camera towards people or places outside the picture frame, he always seems aware that there is another camera watching him and taking his image.   coda: jin shisheng as an artistic construct

This last observation takes us back to an argument made earlier in this chapter: this group of photographs by Jin Shisheng constructs a self-sustaining interior space. It is self-sustaining because the 153

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previous: 87 Jin Shisheng, Self-portrait in Mirror with Rodenstock Camera, Germany, 1939, gelatin silver print. 88 Jin Shisheng, Selfportrait in Mirror with Leica Camera, Germany, 1940s, gelatin silver print.

images do not rely on the external world but instead represent photography itself, the subjects being the photographer and all photography-related mechanisms and situations. We wonder why, among all known photographs made in 1930s Shanghai, his works most explicitly display this tendency towards self-reflection and self-construction. One reason can be found in his own identity: the photographer named ‘Jin Shisheng’ is actually his artistic creation. His legal name was Jin Jingchang, which is well known in the fields of engineering and urban planning even today. After graduating from Tongji University in 1937, he received a grant from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany to continue his studies there and in 1940 received a professional engineering degree from Darmstadt Technical University. In 1946 he returned to China and established the country’s first ever department of urban planning, which, within its first fifty years of existence, produced over 1,000 urban planners. Under the name Jin Jingchang, he also developed a new theory of urban planning and contributed to three designs of Shanghai’s metropolitan area, eventually assuming the post of Director of Shanghai’s Research Institute on Planning and Architecture in 1978. If we take a comprehensive look at his life, therefore, Jin seems to have been two people in one: the public figure of Jin Jingchang became a well-known professor and scholar of urban planning; the multi-talented, meticulous photographer Jin Shisheng remained his private, artistic self. Thus by his own measure, photography always belonged to an internal and aesthetic space. The veracity and intimacy of photography were most clearly reflected in work he produced during the two most difficult periods in his life. The first was his time in Germany during the Second World War. No record of his frame of mind and mood during that period is available, but the several dozen self-portraits provide evidence more truthful and direct than anything written at the time could have been. Most of these pictures were taken as he looks into a mirror: the photographer’s face and camera appear out of a dark background. In one he holds a Rodenstock, while in another he uses a Leica 3b (illus. 87, 88). These two pictures were taken in the dead of night, in a confined indoor space. The lonely, isolated photographer stares straight at himself. What he gazes at, as well as what he photographs, is nothing but the co-dependence between the photographer and his camera. The second difficult period was the decade of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. Jin was labelled an academic 156

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reactionary and was severely criticized. Zhang Tingwei, a student of his during this time, recalls the following moment. With a dark sense of humour, this anecdote perhaps most profoundly conveys Jin Shisheng’s indissoluble relationship with photography:  In 1967 during the Cultural Revolution, a ‘revolutionary’ faction organized a mass gathering to criticize him. Due to his status as an academic authority, the Liberation Daily newspaper sent a reporter to cover the event. When members of the revolutionary faction held Mr Jin on the stage and ordered him to ‘plead guilty’ in response to his charges, he did not say a word. Looking at him closely, I found that he was gazing out at the reporter sitting in the first row, captivated by the camera in his hands (a Hasselblad single lens reflex – quite rare at the time). In spite of everything, he had completely forgotten where he was! This, precisely, was Mr Jin Shisheng.15

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PART TWO HISTORY REVISITED

5. SEARCHING FOR IMMORTAL MOUNTAINS: THE ORIGINS AND AESTHETICS OF CHINESE LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY

89 Lang Jingshan, Pavilion in Yellow Mountains, 1936, gelatin silver print.

An investigation of Chinese landscape photography may start from two images created respectively by Lang Jingshan (1892–1995) and Wang Wusheng (b. 1945), two noted Chinese landscape photographers separated by half a century. Both images depict the Yellow Mountains in Anhui province, the result of each artist’s pursuit of an individual pictorial language within a shared tradition of landscape art. The picture by Lang Jingshan, dating from 1936, shows an ancient pavilion seemingly suspended in a vast void, out of which emerge a withered tree in the foreground and mysterious mountain peaks in the background (illus. 89). No perspectival system connects the images into a rational perceptual framework; tangible forms are linked instead by empty spaces supposed to represent clouds and mist. Wang Wusheng’s photograph, created 55 years later in 1991, represents one of the Yellow Mountains’ 72 peaks more realistically (illus. 90). The image is a symphony of dark and light and of substance and absence. The strange, vertical peak emerges from a gossamer mist that veils a deep abyss. Its impressive height is suggested by the silhouette of tall trees in the foreground, yet it is dwarfed by the huge precipices looming above it. How do we analyse these images? The answer to this question, explored throughout this chapter, is that we must look beyond them to trace a unique type of mountain imagery invented thousands of years ago in China. Both photographs retain almost all the essential features and qualities of an immortal mountain in traditional Chinese art: a particular iconography of mountain peaks, the fundamental role of clouds and mist, a heightened feeling of mystery and a sense of infinity generated by a mountain represented as both macrocosm and microcosm. If in the last chapter on Jin Shisheng’s work I have emphasized that similar visual structures can occur independently 161

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at different times and places in art history, the basic argument presented here is that certain artistic and cultural conventions provide necessary precedents as well as contexts for inventiveness. My discussion in this chapter will therefore adopt an unusual strategy in discussing photography: I will transgress the conventional division between ancient and modern art, starting from the remote past in order to rediscover the fundamental logic of a principal genre of Chinese pictorial photography that focuses on mountainscape. inventing immortal mountains in chinese art

The first person in Chinese history to describe immortal mountains at length was the great Eastern Zhou poet Qu Yuan (c. 340–278 bce). Among the mountains mentioned in his poems is Kunlun, whose three peaks are called Hanging Garden, Chilly Wind and Flat Phoenix Tree. The following lines from his masterpiece ‘Encountering Sorrow’ (‘Li sao’) describe the poet’s spiritual journey to the immortal terrain of Kunlun:1 I started out in the morning on my way from Cangwu [where the sun rises]; By evening I had arrived at the Hanging Garden. I wanted to stay a while in those fairy precincts, But the swift-moving sun was dipping to the west. I ordered Xi He [the Sun God] to stay the sun-steed’s gallop, To stand over Yanzi Mountains and not go in; For the road was so far and so distant was my journey, And I wanted to go up and down, seeking my heart’s desire.

90 Wang Wusheng, Wolf’s Fang Stone in the West Sea Valley, Taken at Cloud Dispelling Pavilion, Yellow Mountains, 1991, gelatin silver print.

Qu Yuan never found his immortal land, and we have found no pictorial images of immortal mountains in Eastern Zhou art. Following the establishment of the Han dynasty at the end of the third century bce, however, there emerged a serious attempt to depict such mountains, believed to hold the secret of eternal life. People of the Han were unsatisfied with mere metaphysical contemplation. They wanted to discover an actual immortal paradise, and if this was impossible, then they wanted to create it on earth. The emperors dispatched magicians and military expeditions to locate the Three Mountain Islands of the Blessed in the east and Kunlun in the west. None of these expeditions succeeded. The failure resulted, of course, from the inherent contradictions in the premise 163

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of the search. An immortal land could only exist in the imagination; if it had actually been discovered, it would have immediately lost its attraction. The same dilemma also existed in creating visual images of immortal mountains: how could one create images of a paradise based on familiar, earthly models? Han artists found a solution to this dilemma by developing a pictorial vocabulary from three sources: Chinese pictographic writing, symbols of immortality and a reinterpretation of pre-Han decorative patterns. The modern Chinese character 山, shan, which means ‘mountain’, consists of three vertical strokes connected by a horizontal line on the bottom. This character evolved from an ancient pictograph that shows a mountain with three pointed peaks in silhouette (illus. 91). In George Rowley’s definition, such a pictorial form is ‘ideational’, a mental image that represents an idea, reduced to its essence.2 Call to mind the abstract notion of ‘mountain’; instantly it will appear as peaks in profile before one’s mind’s eye. This simple image of a triad provided the ancient Chinese with a basic structure for visualizing immortal mountains. Thus, we find three immortal mountains in the East China Sea and Kunlun comprising three peaks. This triadic form was carried into decorative and pictorial art, on the painted coffins from the famous Mawangdui Tomb No. 1 (illus. 92), on the silk banner from Jinqueshan in Shandong and in carvings in an Eastern Han tomb at Yinan, Shandong.3 All these forms, which represent a mountain with three adjoining triangular peaks, designate the immortal mountain Kunlun. Kunlun, however, is sometimes described in traditional texts as a great mountain that ‘resembles the shape of a flat basin, and is

91 Modern Chinese character and ancient pictograph of shan (mountain).

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s e a r c h i n g f o r i m m o r ta l m o u n ta i n s 92 Immortal Mount Kunlun flanked by auspicious deer and clouds. Early Western Han (first half of 2nd century bce), lacquer painting on a coffin from Mawangdui Tomb No. 1, Changshan, Hunan. 93 The Queen Mother of the West on Mount Kunlun, late Eastern Han (mid2nd century ce), rubbing of a stone carving from Songshan in Jiaxiang, Shandong province.

narrow at the bottom and broad on the top’.4 This alternative form appears frequently in Han art. A stone carving from Jiaxiang in Shandong, for example, shows the goddess Queen Mother of the West seated on a mountain throne that looks like a mushroom with a winding stem (illus. 93). A prototype of this peculiar mountain image is found on a painted lacquer bowl from Lelang in present-day Korea, but here it appears actually to be a gigantic mushroom rather than a mushroom-shaped mountain.5 This kind of mushroom, called lingzhi in Chinese or Ganoderma lucidum in Latin, was believed to be the basis of an elixir that would induce longevity (illus. 94). Kunlun shared the shape of the divine lingzhi mushroom because both symbolized immortality. 165

zo om i n g i n 94 Lingzhi mushroom (Ganoderma lucidum).

The third source of images of immortal mountains was decorative art. During the Han, people started to give literary meaning to abstract designs on bronze and lacquer wares. In intricate patterns they saw clouds, mountains and plants, as well as animals and figures running through this geometric maze. Such imagination was greatly reinforced by a widespread belief in the universal energy called qi, a belief which has continued to occupy a central place in the aesthetics of landscape art in China. The preHan understanding of qi was close to an abstract philosophical concept of the vitality inherent in the cosmos and in the human body, but people in Han times preferred more tangible illustrations of these ideas. Qi allegedly became an observable phenomenon

95 The Queen Mother of the West on Mount Kunkun and surrounded by auspicious qi-clouds, mural from a 5thcentury tomb at Jiuquan, Gansu province.

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and, according to Han official records, appeared as clouds in the shapes of pavilions, banners, boats, mountains and animals. More importantly, it was believed that when searching for an immortal land, one had first to seek its qi (illus. 95).6 The most sophisticated images of immortal mountains during the Han are mountain-shaped incense burners, which may represent the fabled Penglai Island in the East China Sea.7 The beautiful example shown here was found in the tomb of a second-century bce Han prince named Liu Sheng (illus. 96). The multilayered, finger-like protrusions on the upper part represent the immortal mountain peaks, and the swirling patterns on the bowl depict ocean waves. Numerous such mountain-shaped censers have been found, demonstrating the extraordinary popularity of this type of object during the Han. When incense was burned inside it, fragrant smoke emerged from the burner and swirled around the sculptured

96 Incense burner, midWestern Han (second half of 2nd century bce), bronze with gold inlay.

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mountain. One can hardly imagine a more vivid image of the immortal mountain with its two essential elements at this time of its development – its fantastic peaks and qi. painting immortal mountains

If the immortal mountain acquired a basic iconography in the visual culture of the Han, it was further associated with the practice of painting, religious meditation and individual scholar-artists during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period (3rd–6th centuries ce). During this period Buddhism prevailed in China, and religious Taoism also developed rapidly, adding a new conceptual and perceptual framework to the allure of the immortal mountain. An important personage in this development was Zong Bing (375–443 ce), who combined elements of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism in a discourse on how to represent sacred mountains.8 Unlike the longevity seekers of Han times, Zong Bing not only longed for sacred mountains but worshipped them. To him, such mountains embodied divine wisdom, which could be comprehended when his own spirit merged with them. He described this religious feeling in his treatise Instruction to Painting Landscape (Hua shanshui xu): I respond to the wilderness where grottoed peaks tower on high and cloudy forests mass in the depths. The sages and virtuous men shed light from the distant past, and a myriad delights are fused into their spirits and thoughts. What then should I do? Freely expand my spirit, that is all. What could be placed above that which expands the spirit?9 When his infirmities no longer allowed him to meditate in real landscapes, Zong Bing travelled in his mind through painted scenery by meditating in front of his landscape painting. It is recorded in his biography that on the walls in his chamber he depicted all the sacred mountains that he had visited in his lifetime. He told his friends, ‘I strum my lute with such force because I want all the mountains to resound.’10 No painting by Zong Bing has survived, but a mural from the famous Cave 249 at Dunhuang, Gansu Province, may provide us with clues for speculating on his landscape imagery. The mural was created in the early 6th century, not too long after Zong Bing’s death. Here, a series of hills are depicted directly above Buddhist musicians, 168

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who are playing musical instruments in painted niches like mountain caves (illus. 97). Below the musicians, the Thousand Buddhas are meditating. Clearly deriving their forms from Han depictions of immortal mountains, the hills are finger-shaped, wave-like and multicoloured. Similar hills also appear in the sky. Without a supporting ground, they form isolated clusters like mirages. Above these floating mountains, flying immortals and heavenly beasts surround a principal deity in elaborate chariots pulled by phoenixes. Some interesting parallels link this scene with Zong Bing’s lost murals, as described by his biographers. In both cases, landscape was associated with spiritual cultivation. Viewing the Dunhuang painting, we can almost visualize Zong Bing meditating among his sacred mountains, playing his lute and listening for the mountains to resound. From this echo he would have realized the Tao through the medium of landscape or painted landscape. Lothar Ledderose has suggested that in traditional Chinese art, ‘pure’ landscape painting grew out of religious landscape representations while retaining the idea of transcendence: 97 Mural in Dunhuang Cave 249, Western Wei (early 6th century), Dunhuang, Gansu province.

During the gradual and complex metamorphosis that turns religious values into aesthetic ones, the former do not disappear without trace. Religious concepts and connotations

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tend to persist and continue to influence aesthetic perceptions to a more or less explicit degree.11 The transformation described here underlies numerous depictions of the Yellow Mountains, which constituted an important tradition within Chinese landscape art from the seventeenth century onwards. Scholars have traced the history of these paintings and ascertained their relationship with contemporaneous prints, local social networks and political events.12 This chapter further connects this tradition to modern landscape photography, which continues to derive artistic inspirations from the same mountains. Located in the southeastern corner of Anhui Province, the Yellow Mountains acquired their present name of Huangshan in 747 to commemorate the legendary Yellow Emperor, who is said to have travelled there to gather ingredients for an elixir of immortality. Since then, and especially after the sixteenth century, the mountains’ status changed from a relatively obscure place to one of the most celebrated scenic spots in China.13 But its basic significance as a ‘place of immortality’ has persisted through the ages and has underlain all the human activities associated with the mountains, from constructing Buddhist and Taoist temples and seeking political refuge to simply making a leisurely climb. Paintings and illustrations of the Yellow Mountains from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were based on the same premise. As much as they served different purposes and took different forms, they derived their basic visual mode from earlier depictions of immortal mountains.14 Indeed, few of them, even the topographical drawings, are faithful reports of actual places. The general tendency is to combine selected features of the place with a visual ‘schema’ of immortal mountains that had developed since Han times. This tendency is clearly demonstrated by a woodblock illustration in the late Ming pictorial encyclopedia Picturing the Three Powers (Sancai tuhui), published in 1607. Composed of two vertical prints, it represents the Yellow Mountains from an imaginative vantage point in the sky (illus. 98). From this angle, we see the mountains as an assemblage of vertical peaks, some of them needle-like, emerging from an ocean of clouds. More clouds swirl around the jagged pinnacles that reach the upper part of the picture. There is no attempt to depict human activities; the artists followed the tradition to focus on fantastic peaks of an elusive immortal mountain (see illus. 93 and 96). 170

s e a r c h i n g f o r i m m o r ta l m o u n ta i n s 98 Yellow Mountains, woodblock print, illustration in Sancai tuhui (1607).

Similarly, one of the earliest extant paintings of the Yellow Mountains represents the place as a fantasy world (illus. 99, 100). Created in the first half of the sixteenth century and now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it bridges the traditions of popular topographical drawings and fantastic images with later literati depictions of the place.15 As in a topographical illustration, sites are labelled. It also continues the tradition of immortal mountain images: the painter exaggerates the verticality of sheer peaks and has also painted some crags as shadowy stone giants. Standing in the foreground or emerging from gorges, these eerie figures evoke a strong feeling of the supernatural. A focal scene further identifies the mountains as a passage to heaven: beyond a grand cave, several people are approaching a celestial palace. At the same time, this painting attests to a greater attention to human activities, as it represents many travellers visiting temples and other sites on the mountains. Such activities became a main feature in later literati representations of the Yellow Mountains. It has been suggested that literati artists ‘secularized’ the Yellow Mountains in the seventeenth century, because these men frequented the place on non-religious missions and painted the mountains as artistic exercises.16 This contention requires some rethinking since, as mentioned earlier, the religiosity of a landscape representation resides not only in the work’s function but also in its pictorial language and the artist’s self-identity. Some of the 171

zo om i n g i n 99, 100 Anonymous, Peaks of the Yellow Mountains, handscroll, ink and light colours on silk (details).

most famous seventeenth-century literati painters of the Yellow Mountains, such as Hongren (1610–1661) and Shitao (1642–1707), were ordained Buddhist monks. Others stayed in temples on their journeys to the mountains and crammed their writings with Buddhist and Taoist references. The most significant change that these painters introduced into the art of the Yellow Mountains, I would suggest, is the individualization of the place. Instead of portraying it as an embodiment of general religious beliefs, they imbued it with personal experiences and associated it with individual painting styles. This observation implies that in discussing these paintings we should not take the images as manifestations of an overarching ideology. Rather, each artist forged individual ties with the Yellow Mountains – we can even say that each artist created individualized Yellow Mountains for himself. Among these painters, Hongren, Shitao and Mei Qing (1623–1697) are the most famous for their depictions of the place. A native of Anhui, Hongren became a monk after the fall of the Ming in 1644 and led the life of a recluse in the region of the Yellow Mountains until his death.17 His depictions of the mountains demonstrate a highly personal style, characterized by dry and linear brushwork, a minimal use of texture strokes and repeated geometric units that construct hills and cliffs (illus. 102). The austere, almost transparent imagery evokes the feeling of insuperable loneliness. There is evidence that he identified himself 172

101 (left) Mei Qing, Pine Valley of the Yellow Mountains, c. 1690, hanging scroll, ink on paper. 102 (right) Hongren, The Coming of Autumn, c. 1658–61, hanging scroll, ink on paper.

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104 Shitao, Eight Views of the Yellow Mountains, eighth leaf of an album of eight leaves, undated, ink and colour on paper.

103 Shitao, Landscape of the Yellow Mountains, leaf three in an album of 21 leaves, ink and colour on paper.

with this cold, chaste landscape: scholars have found that in signing his paintings Hongren sometimes used the names of the Yellow Mountains’ peaks in place of his own name.18 In contrast to Hongren’s tendency towards detachment, Mei Qing and Shitao made images of the Yellow Mountains to engage the natural world. As attested by the hanging scroll Pine Valley of the Yellow Mountains (Huang Shan songgu), Mei Qing’s portrayal of the mountains expressed no agony, but only a gentle longing for transcendence (illus. 101). The painting shows a deep valley hidden in mist. Rising above the mist is a fantastic vista of mountain peaks’ pointed spires. Both the peaks and the mist are painted with a soft, wet brush with minimum outlines and texture strokes. The poem he inscribed at the top of the painting highlights the work’s central theme: ‘Taking a step forward, I realize the immortal realm is close, / Looking back, the path from the mortal world turns dim.’19 Shitao painted the Yellow Mountains in all the three major formats of traditional Chinese painting: album, handscroll and 175

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hanging scroll (illus. 103). The formal complexity and emotional intensity of these works surpassed all previous images of the place. Eight Views of the Yellow Mountains, a famous album that he painted to record one of his journeys to the mountains, contains eight pictures that depict the artist travelling through the mountains’ famous scenic spots while discovering their secrets.20 Displayed on successive leaves in an album, the pictures gradually reveal his initial anticipation of the journey, his exploration of the mountains and his encounter with the ‘Master of the Yellow Mountains’ in an image that represents his ascent of the Heavenly Capital Peak (illus. 103, 104). Near the centre of the composition, rock boulders configure a stone giant. Shitao wrote an inscription next to it: ‘Ice his heart and jade his bones, stone and iron make this man. He is the master of the Yellow Mountains and the minister to Xuanyuan.’ Here Xuanyuan refers to the Yellow Emperor, China’s mythical founder, who had gone to the Yellow Mountains thousands of years ago to collect herbs for making an ‘elixir of immortality’. Interestingly, Shitao portrayed himself below the stone giant in the same pose, thus making himself a miniature version of the master of the mountains. photographing the yellow mountains

Shitao died in 1707. Many painters since then have depicted the Yellow Mountains, but none can match his imagination and artistic creativity. The only event that has posed new, conceptual questions regarding the ‘art of the Yellow Mountains’ was the introduction of photography to China in the second half of the nineteenth century. Before long, amateur and commercial photographers alike had discovered the mountain’s exceedingly photogenic properties. Scenic China (Zhongguo mingsheng), an early series of publications on landscape photography by the Commercial Press in Shanghai, devoted its first issue to the Yellow Mountains in 1912 (illus. 105). Photographic reproductions of the mountains in this and similar publications impressed the audience with their ‘painterly’ quality. Indeed, many of these images were composed in the manner of traditional ink paintings and took ru hua, ‘paintinglike’ or picturesque, as their selling point. When such images were reproduced in advertisements, tourist guidebooks and even the designs of paper bills, they finally erased the boundary between fine art and popular visual culture. Consequently, a counter-movement emerged to restore the elite status of the ‘art of the Yellow Mountains’ 176

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105 View of Yellow Mountains from Scenic China (Zhongguo mingsheng) (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1912).

– a mission that the noted photographer Lang Jingshan took upon himself in the late 1930s and ’40s. Born in 1892 in Jiangsu, Lang Jingshan took up the study of photography at age twelve under a teacher of traditional ink painting, who was fascinated with this new visual technology.21 He entered the news business in 1911 when he was nineteen, and became the first professional photojournalist in China when he started to work for Shanghai’s Times newspaper in 1928. In the same year he and some friends founded the Chinese Photography Association to promote art photography and to preserve traditional Chinese culture. This twofold goal motivated him to invent what he called ‘composite photography’ (jijin sheying) and to take the Yellow Mountains as a central subject of his experiments. According to Lang Jingshan himself, composite photography is akin to photomontage in piecing together fragmentary images into a photographic work, but differs from the latter in its purely artistic aspiration and naturalistic style (illus. 106). In his 1940 essay titled ‘Composite Pictures and Chinese Art’, he described his technique at 177

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length and explained why he considered it the best means to fuse the modern medium of photography with the aesthetics of traditional Chinese painting. In a manner reminiscent of the Song master Guo Xi (c. 1020–1090), he theorized a traditional painting as a composite image of fragmentary visual memories and took it as the model of composite photography: Chinese artists of the traditional schools are often accused of painting from imagination. Nothing could be further from the truth. They do not paint from imagination but from memory. What differentiates them from the Western artists is that they paint what they have seen instead of what they are seeing . . . A collected and retouched view of nature is expressed in the artists’ own work . . . With composite pictures, photographers can now do just the same as Chinese artists: they now have their choice among natural objects; they may now make their own compositions in photography. Neither time nor space need hereafter be an obstacle. All the products of Nature are now their materials, which can be utilized freely, to construct their ‘Land of Heart’s Desire’.22 Thus, like a traditional Chinese painting, according to Lang Jingshan, a composite photograph is a ‘post-image’. Instead of representing a definitive subject in a fixed moment, it is a fictional construct of fragmentary images based on the photographer’s visual memories. Take his work Majestic Solitude (Chunshu qifeng), for example. It is composed of two snapshots that Lang Jingshan took on different occasions in photographing the Yellow Mountains (illus. 107, 108). In the final product (illus. 109), the sharp contrast between the trees in the foreground and the mountain peaks in the background generates a view of great distance, which is further enhanced by the misty mid-ground, a standard feature of a traditional landscape painting. Cautioning viewers not to take such images as mere visual trickery, Lang Jingshan evoked a central concept in traditional Chinese painting theory as his ultimate goal. This concept is qi yun, ‘spiritual consonance’:

106 Lang Jingshan, Boating on a Misty Lake, 1951, gelatin silver print.

The most important principle of Chinese painting is ‘spiritual consonance’. Although we do not have an exact theory of what this means, the essential idea is to imbue a painting with a spirited and animated quality . . . To be sure, a painting may 178

107, 108 Lang Jingshan, Majestic Solitude, 1934, original photographs.

109 Lang Jingshan, Majestic Solitude, 1934, gelatin silver print, composite picture.

zo om i n g i n 110 Yuan Lianmin, Thriving with Each Passing Day, 1977, colour photograph.

capture the actual appearance of its subject. But if it does not have an inner life, it only has an external appearance and no soul. This is also true with photography.23

111 Wang Wusheng, Eighteen Disciples of Buddha and First Grade Peak, Taken at Peak Lying on the Clouds, Yellow Mountains, 2004, gelatin silver print. 112 Wang Wusheng, Surging Waves in Front Sea, Taken at Brightness Summit, Yellow Mountains, 1984, gelatin silver print.

Since the time of Lang Jingshan, many Chinese photographers have pictured the Yellow Mountains, and some of them have made this their lifelong obsession. Yuan Lianmin (b. 1932), for example, made more than eighty trips to this natural monument and published some 1,300 photographs featuring the mountain’s scenery. One of these pictures, taken immediately after the catastrophic Cultural Revolution, bears the symbolic title Thriving with Each Passing Day (Zhengzheng rishang) to allude to the country’s rebirth (illus. 110). It was featured prominently in People’s Pictorial in 1978 and has been displayed in the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square. Although this and many other images of the mountain made in the People’s Republic convey a strong political significance, their visual language remains that of the picturesque. Without exception, they showcase the fractured surfaces of the mountain’s granite cliffs and its strange rock formations, and the seas of clouds that envelop the peaks, leaving the craggy summits looming out of the mist like illusive islands. Embellished with images of twisted pine trees growing from the rocky crevices, these images, often in glowing colours, have filled travel magazines and also repeatedly entered national photo exhibitions. Against this historical background, we can better appreciate the Yellow Mountains images by Wang Wusheng, a relative latecomer in this time-honoured visual tradition. Unlike most of the ‘Yellow 182

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Mountains photographers’, he is not interested in the conventional iconography of landscape, such as the anthropomorphic contours of some named peaks and the rainbows that occasionally feature miraculous images of the Buddha. His pictures are gorgeous, but their beauty does not come directly from the natural scenery (illus. 111, 112, 113). Rather, the mountain’s wonders have been transformed into artistic spectacles through the artist’s commitment to the medium of black-and-white photography, his insistent pursuit of dynamic movement and metamorphic images and his emotional engagement with his subject. His mountain peaks are often densely dark – a kind of velvety darkness that seems full of colour. The Tang dynasty art historian Zhang Yanyuan (c. 815–c. 877) writes in his Record of the Famous Painters of All the Dynasties (Lidai minghua ji) that, in a great painting ‘ink encompasses all the five colours’ (mo fen wu se).24 What he means is that when used well, ink can produce endless layers of subtle shades, implying a multitude of colours without representing them. What the artist can capture in an ink painting, therefore, is not the outward appearance of things, but the yi or ‘mind’ – his comprehension of the phenomenal world. Zhang summarizes this view: If by using ink a painter can allude to the five colours, we say that he has grasped the mind. But if an artist’s mind is fixed on true colours, the essence of things will escape him.25 Wang Wusheng’s pictures manifest the same idea, only his medium is no longer ink painting, but black-and-white photography. His dark mountain peaks are not static, two-dimensional silhouettes, but dynamic substances that interact with other natural phenomena – clouds and mist, wind and rain, light and shadow – in a ceaseless movement (illus. 113). Believing that ‘the art of the East essentially expresses the artist’s mind (xie yi)’,26 he claims that these images reflect his inner vision of the mountain. He writes: Different cultural background, education, life experience, personalities, and personal interests lead to different responses to the world. Therefore each person forms his or her own unique, subjective ‘Yellow Mountains.’ The Yellow Mountains I have tried to capture over the past thirty years is such a subjective entity in my own mind.27 184

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This does not mean, however, that his images are artificial inventions. To the contrary, he insists that his photographs must be loyal to the real place, and for this reason he rejects Lang Jingshan’s composite picture-making. To him, although a good photograph must express the artist’s vision and personality, it should never violate the nature of photography as a means of spontaneous recording. Any kind of photo editing or computer simulation, in his view, confuses photography with other art forms and undermines its independence. His own method of producing an ideal image requires a prolonged process of decision-making at multiple stages. From finding an inspiring location and moment to selecting a suitable negative and to determining the best composition and tonal effect, it often takes several weeks or even several months to make a satisfactory image.28 Interestingly, although he rejects Lang Jingshan’s composite method, he shares Lang’s view that, as a work of art, a finished photograph is by nature a carefully articulated ‘post-image’. Separated from Lang Jingshan by half a century, Wang Wusheng’s photographs represent the achievement of the newest wave of pictorial photography in contemporary China. This wave started in 1979. Before this moment, and especially during the

113 Wang Wusheng, First Grade Stone, Taken at Peak Lying on the Clouds, Yellow Mountains, 2004, gelatin silver print.

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Cultural Revolution, publications and exhibitions of photographs in the People’s Republic of China were controlled by the government and served strict propagandist purposes. The appearance of the first unofficial photo club and exhibition in Beijing in 1979 changed this situation fundamentally. Organized by the April Photo Society, the Nature, Society and Man exhibition opened in Beijing’s Sun Yat-sen Park on 1 April that year and created a sensation in China’s capital. The exhibition’s preface hailed the idea of art for art’s sake as the exhibition’s goal: News photos cannot replace the art of photography. Content cannot be equalled with form. Photography as an art should have its own language. It is now time to explore art with the language of art, just as economic matters should be dealt with by using the methods of economics. The beauty of photography lies not necessarily in ‘important subject matter’ or in official ideology, but should be found in nature’s rhythms, in social reality and in emotions and ideas.29 Contemporary Chinese photography has come a long way since that exhibition. A documentary movement emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s, and in turn laid the ground for experimental photographers to undertake wide-ranging artistic experiments since the mid-1990s.30 These later developments, however, do not mean that fine art photography has disappeared or completely lost its vitality. It is true that the April Photo Society’s advocacy of art for art’s sake has led to formalism and, in the worst cases, to a pretentious, stylized salon style. But as Wang Wusheng’s photographs of the Yellow Mountains demonstrate, pictorial photography remains a vital genre, continuing to produce important works when an artist is passionately committed to it. Born in 1945 in Anhui, Wang Wusheng was a university student at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. His field of study, physics, did not prevent him from being considered politically untrustworthy. In 1968 he was sent to an army reclamation farm to receive re-education. After two years of hard labour, he started to work in a local cultural centre and fell in love with photography. In 1974 he made his first trip to the Yellow Mountains. Twenty years later, he recalled his experience at that moment, when he reached the top of the mountain and saw the world with fresh eyes:

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I felt that I had left behind the noisy mortal world, and had arrived at the centre of the Universe. Nothing here had been contaminated by human society, and everything here was pure, fresh and harmonious. I was amazed by the vastness and magnificence of heaven and earth. Compared to them, men’s struggle, greediness and selfishness seemed so pitiful and insignificant. I felt I was confronting history. Compared with the long, eternal movement of history, a man’s life, whether thirty or one hundred years, was no more than a brief instant. My chest had never felt so expansive. I felt I could tolerate anything in the world. My soul seemed purified, and all of my worry and pain had disappeared, like smoke or vapour vanishing of its own accord. My body and mind were filled with peaceful love and benevolence. Since that climb, I have experienced the same powerful feeling whenever I return to the Yellow Mountains. Each time, I stand there five or six hours on end, forgetting everything around me and only savouring this feeling, this beauty. My eyes are moist, and a voice comes from the void: ‘Here is the origin of your art and the meaning of your life.’31 Unknowingly, he is repeating what has been said by Zong Bing, the fifth-century monk artist who believed that divine wisdom could be attained through meditating on a sacred mountain. Similar words were also uttered by Qian Qianyi (1582–1664), the seventeenthcentury writer and martyr, when he wondered how he could return to the dusty world after visiting this heavenly place.32 Is this because Wang Wusheng’s experience was close to that of Zong and Qian, who also led uncertain lives in troubled times? Perhaps the real meaning of Wang Wusheng’s emotional outcry on top of the Yellow Mountains can only be comprehended in light of the Cultural Revolution, which displayed ‘men’s struggles, greediness, and selfishness’ at their most intense moment. But his photographs of the mountains seem to rise above the necessity of such contextualization. As many viewers in different countries have told him after seeing his exhibitions, ‘Your images are timeless.’

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6. A SECOND HISTORY: AN ARCHIVE OF MANIPULATED PHOTOGRAPHS

114 Zhang Dali, ‘The Ten Thousand Li Yangzi River’, A Second History No. 89, exhibition panel, Beijing Commune gallery, 798 Art District, 2005.

Created by Zhang Dali (b. 1963) between 2003 and 2006, A Second History is a massive artwork consisting of 130 sets of reproduced photographs, mostly historical images of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and the Chinese revolution. Before this, Zhang had undertaken several art projects of similarly impressive scale, including Dialogue (1992–2006), One Hundred Chinese (2000–2003) and Chinese Offspring (2003–10). Each of these projects evolved over multiple years. A Second History, however, is unique in its emphasis on archival research and construction. Indeed, it resembles a detective enterprise of an impassionate sleuth, who in this case has become obsessed with tracking down deliberate alterations to historical and news photos. Juxtaposing multiple iterations of a photograph on a display panel and annotating them with detailed publication information (illus. 114), Zhang Dali is able to demonstrate irrefutably the systematic fabrication of a large number of documentary images. On many occasions, his search has come up with not just two, but three or four versions of a single photo. On other occasions, his findings challenge the notion of an ‘original photo’ (yuanshi zhaopian), because the negative was already retouched, or the first print already combined multiple shots. As the project progressed further, Zhang Dali realized that almost every iconic photo of the Chinese revolution has a hidden story. A Second History displays different versions of these photos and lays bare their secrets in the open. Its first public showing took place in 2005, in the Beijing Commune gallery in the 798 Art District (illus. 115). At the time, the exhibition, titled Sublimation: A New Art Project by Zhang Dali, consisted of only 38 sets of images.1 This 2005 exhibition became the core of what later became known as A Second History. Zhang Dali’s initial findings stimulated 189

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115 (above) ‘Sublimation: A New Art Project by Zhang Dali’, exhibition, Beijing Commune gallery, 798 Art District, 2005. 116 (above right) ‘A Second History’, exhibition at Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou, 2010. 117 (right) Audience reading an earlier version of the present chapter, featured as the introduction to the exhibition ‘A Second History’, Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou, 2010.

his desire to discover further secrets in historical photos, which in his view actually reveal the secrets of history itself. Collecting and comparing historical photos in mainstream publications, his eyesight grew sharper. It seems that he even acquired a ‘sixth sense’ in reading images: presented with two seemingly identical prints, he could immediately intuit a certain disparity, and such instinct was often proved correct. Each time I called him to enquire about the project, he was bursting to tell me his new discoveries. He then made a major breakthrough in February 2006: after incessant persuasion, he was finally admitted into the internal archives of People’s Pictorial (Renmin huabao), the most authoritative 190

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official news magazine in China. Like a dedicated archaeologist, he conducted a thorough excavation there, discovering many pieces of first-hand evidence of photographic manipulation, including photo proofs bearing the editor’s instructions for making alterations. These finds became a component of the final version of A Second History, which debuted at the Sixth Kwangju Biennale in Korea in 2006.2 After travelling to the u.s., Germany and England,3 the exhibition returned to China and appeared at the Guangdong Art Museum in 2010.4 There it aroused strong reaction from the Chinese audience. People flooded the exhibition, scrutinizing each picture and copying down the explanatory texts (illus. 116, 117). Fascinated by the unknown stories that Zhang Dali had uncovered, they also wanted to know why a contemporary artist had spent several years compiling a photo archive like this. reading a second history

A Second History has a tripartite structure, consisting of three thematic sections representing (1) Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution, (2) Communist leaders and heroes and (3) the revolutionary masses. The last section also incorporates Zhang Dali’s discoveries in the archives of People’s Pictorial. Zhang Dali’s definition of manipulated image agrees with the standard definition of the term, meaning a photographic print that ‘differ(s) from what the camera “saw” in the instant at which the negative was exposed’.5 Made before the invention of Photoshop, all the manipulated photos in A Second History were produced in the post-production or darkroom stage, using methods such as retouching, overpainting, masking, bleaching, combination printing and photomontage.6 Whereas a doctored historical photo by definition alters a pre-existing image, the news photos in People’s Pictorial often combine multiple shots through collaging or composite printing.7 Nearly half of the images in A Second History feature Mao Zedong. The earliest dates to 1933 when Mao organized the Assembly of Representatives of Poor Peasants from Eight Counties in Southern Jiangxi and Western Fujian; the latest shows his corpse displayed at the Great Hall of the People in 1976. These photos were published countless times between the 1950s and 1970s; people who lived through that period knew them intimately. Few, however, noticed the discrete changes made in each photo and realized that many 191

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118 Zhang Dali, ‘Chairman Mao in Northern Shaanxi’, A Second History No. 33: (lower right) Edgar Snow, 1936, from People’s Pictorial, July 1965; (upper right) from People’s Pictorial, May 1972; (lower left) People’s Pictorial, January 1975; (upper left) from Selected Photographs of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1978).

of these iconic images were constructed through successive darkroom manipulations. When these pictures are gathered together in A Second History, they reveal three principal agendas and strategies in perfecting Mao: to idealize him by transforming him into a god-like figure; to cement his unparalleled position in the history of the Chinese revolution; and to erase or change figures surrounding him in historical photos, often his old comrades who were later disgraced during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). A group of images stemming from a photograph taken by the American journalist Edgar Snow (1905–1972) in 1936 demonstrate the first agenda/strategy. Of the four versions of the picture collected in A Second History, the most primitive one is black and white and looks quite humble. Standing before a dilapidated wall, Mao stares at the camera with a stern expression; his emaciated face and the wrinkles between his eyebrows betray fatigue and worry (illus. 118, lower right). In 1936, the Red Army had just arrived at Yan’an in Northern Shaanxi after the excruciating Long March. Their immediate task was to build a revolutionary base in this poor rural area from scratch, yet the escalating Japanese aggression threatened China’s very existence. Considering this historical context, this image seems to reflect Mao’s state of mind at the time. But when the photo was reissued in People’s Pictorial in 1972, some of the cracks on the dilapidated wall had been artfully repaired (illus. 118, lower left). Mao’s face, now smooth and wrinkle-free, radiates with a delicate sheen. For the next few years, this new version became the basis of further idealization and dehistoricization, a process which eventually produced the image in Selected Photographs of Mao Tse-tung, a commemorative album published in 1978 (illus. 118, upper left).8 With rosy cheeks and a redefined hairline, a youthful Mao is glowing with heroism. After a complete makeover, the black-and-white historical photo had now been transformed into an exuberant colour image resembling a pastel calendar poster. The second agenda/strategy in perfecting Mao’s images, that of elevating his position above all other mortal beings, was closely linked with an important change in Chinese politics in the first thirty years of the People’s Republic: the growing personal cult of Mao that finally turned him into a semi-divine figure during the Cultural Revolution. Corresponding to this shift, his photographic presence was artificially separated from other human figures, 192

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119 Zhang Dali, ‘Chairman Mao in Yan’an, 1943’, A Second History No. 30: (right) from In Memory of Mao Zedong (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1989); (left) from Selected Photographs of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1978).

including high-ranking cadres and party leaders. Many historical photos and news photos were revised to serve this purpose. Again using a Yan’an-period image as an example, the photo was taken when Mao was leaving an outdoor gathering. Capturing him walking towards the camera, the photo shows a score of people not far behind him (illus. 119, right). Similar to the transformation of Snow’s 1936 photo, this black-and-white image was made into a colour picture during the Cultural Revolution (illus. 119, left). Furthermore, the retoucher erased the figures behind Mao, save a few in the remote landscape background. The vacant midground, artificially conjured up in the darkroom, guarantees Mao’s dominance over the entire space and helps create a new symbolic structure within the photograph: having been disassociated from other human figures, Mao is juxtaposed with the famous Yan’an Pagoda, the architectural symbol of the Chinese revolution. In the original photograph, the pagoda is barely distinguishable in the haze. In the revised photo it has a sharply articulated silhouette against the blue sky. Standing directly behind Mao, its monumentality reinforces Mao’s position as the supreme leader of the revolution.

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a s e c o n d h i s to r y 120 Zhang Dali, ‘Chairman Mao Reviewing the 359 Brigade of the Eighth Route Army in November 1944’, A Second History No. 36: (top) from Liberation Army Pictorial (September 1970); (bottom) from Mao Zedong: Great Man of a Generation (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2003).

A similar manipulation also transformed a photograph from 1944 which represents Mao reviewing the 359th Brigade of the Eight Route Army. In the original picture he is accompanied by two military leaders: to his right is the Chief Marshall of the Eighth Route Army, Zhu De (1886–1976), and to his left, the General of the 359th Brigade, Wang Zhen (1908–1993) (illus. 120, bottom). When this photo was republished at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the September 1970 issue of Liberation Army Pictorial, Zhu De and Wang Zhen were both erased. The part of the picture containing Zhu’s image is cut out; the vacuum left by Wang’s absence is filled with soldiers and part of a dirt road (illus. 120, top). Since Zhu De was not a target of criticism 195

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121 Zhang Dali, ‘The Great Communist Warrior Lei Feng’, A Second History No. 12: (right) from Learning from the Good Model Lei Feng (Beijing: Xinhua tongxunshe, 1965); (left) from Photographs of Lei Feng (Dalian: Dalian chubanshe, 1990).

during the Cultural Revolution, the reason for his removal can only be the absolutism in idolizing Mao. This image thus differs from many other examples collected in A Second History, in which Mao’s old revolutionary comrades were erased in the course of relentless political purges. We are familiar with this type of manipulated photo, which has been produced in various times and places under totalitarian rule.9 In the examples collected in A Second History, the eliminated figures include, among others, Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969, China’s President from 1959 to 1968), Lin Biao (1907–1971, Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1958 to 1971), Peng Dehuai (1898–1974, Minister of National Defence from 1954 to 1959), Bo Gu (1907–1946, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1932 to 1935), Ren Bishi (1904–1950, military and political leader in the early Chinese Communist Party), Peng Zhen (1902–1997, Chairman of the National People’s Congress from 1983 to 1988), Kang Sheng (1898–1975, Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1973 to 1975), Yang Chengwu (1914–2004, Deputy Chief of General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army from 1954 to 1965 and from 1974 to 1980) and even Mao’s last wife Jiang Qing (1914–1991), the self-styled ‘Great Flag-Carrier of Proletarian Art and Literature’ during the Cultural Revolution. While the deletion 196

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of these figures follows a long tradition of iconoclasm and shows little originality, one wonders why this crude method has had such longevity. The answer must be that the elimination of people from historical photographs remains an efficient tool in realpolitik, and that in a power struggle, the most severe punishment for political adversaries is to eradicate them from history and memory. After images of Mao Zedong, A Second History presents two groups of photographs featuring Communist heroes and the revolutionary masses. Different methods are used to alter images in these two groups because of their different subject-matter. In refining images of revolutionary heroes, including the ‘father of proletarian literature’ Lu Xun and the model soldier Lei Feng (1940–1962), the photo editor adopted methods similar to those used in perfecting Mao’s images. For example, Lu Xun and Lei Feng are frequently isolated and magnified in doctored photographs. Figures next to Lu Xun in old photos constantly disappear, leaving mysterious shadows beside him. A tranquil landscape replaces the messy background in a Lei Feng picture (illus. 121). In another portrait of him, even his dirty cuff has been smoothed and cleansed. People suspect that many so-called ‘snapshots’ of this Communist hero were actually staged; the retouched versions further optimized them as propaganda posters. When historical photographs are altered to represent activities of the ‘revolutionary masses’, a frequently employed technique is to add written words or to revise existing ones. Such revision provides an image with an internal interpretative framework, simultaneously defining the content of the image and controlling the viewer’s perception. A set of two images in A Second History best exemplifies this strategy. Both images show a parade, in which peasants are beating gongs and drums. Near the centre of the composition, a man holds up a paper flag to display a written passage. The passage in one of the photos reads: ‘Let’s unite together, find Jing Xixiang at the Hall of Preserving Goodness’ (illus. 122, bottom).10 In the other version of the photo, the passage has been changed to ‘Reducing rent for land, reducing interest on loans’ (illus. 122, top). The writing in the first photo is spontaneous and follows the uneven surface of the paper flag. That in the second photo is rigidly written in uniformly dark lettering and is clearly a substitution. ‘Reducing rent for land, reducing interest on loans’ (Jianzu jianxi) was a policy promoted by the Chinese Communist Party during the Sino-Japanese War to attract poor peasants’ support. By changing 197

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the written passage in the photo, a key piece of visual evidence was fabricated to prove the mass support of this policy. An important feature of A Second History is that it includes evidence that Zhang Dali discovered in the internal archive of People’s Pictorial. This large-format photo magazine was established soon after the founding of the People’s Republic. Run by the Central News Photography Bureau under the Press General Administration of the People’s Central Government, it was charged with the mission of spreading the bright, progressive image of socialist China. The 122 Zhang Dali, ‘Reduction of Land Rent, Reduction of Loan Interests’, A Second History No. 137: (top) from Liberation Army Pictorial (September 1970); (bottom) from Selected Photographic Works of the Revolutionary War (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1974).

opposite: 123 Inaugural issue of People’s Pictorial (July 1950).

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124 Zhang Dali, ‘Chengzhuang Agricultural Labour School’, A Second History No. 85, original black-and-white negative in the People’s Pictorial archives, archive no. 144465.

magazine’s title graphic was based on Mao’s handwriting. The first issue, published a month later, had a run of 40,000 copies (illus. 123). In the years to follow, the magazine became not only the most popular pictorial within China, but was also distributed all over the world in English, Russian, French, Japanese, Spanish, German, Hindi, Arabic and other languages. The number of copies also skyrocketed, breaking the 500,000 mark in 1963 and reaching 1 million in 1972. Even when most periodicals were suspended during the Cultural Revolution, it continued to flourish with the blessing of the central authorities, joined only by People’s Daily, Liberation Army Daily and Red Flag (the theoretical journal of the Chinese Communist Party). The attention it received from the top leadership was unmatched by any other photo magazines in the country: Premier Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) personally proofread the journal from 1970 to 1971. Following Mao Zedong’s example, Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) and Jiang Zemin (b. 1926) both wrote dedications for it. As China’s paramount official photo magazine even today, People’s Pictorial fully internalizes the government’s cultural policy as well as the aesthetics of propaganda art. Its representation of the

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125 Zhang Dali, Chengzhuang Agricultural Labour School, photograph published in People’s Pictorial, February 1969.

People’s Republic is actually a self-representation of the state under the Party’s stewardship. Not surprisingly, some basic methods for doctoring historical photos have also been used to manipulate news photos in this magazine, especially during the Cultural Revolution. In quite a few cases, words are added to or altered in photographs to constitute what I have called an ‘internal interpretative framework’ that bestows an image with explicit political meaning. In a published photo entitled ‘Chengzhuang Agriculture Labour School’, for instance, the tree on the left side has been removed, making the slogan ‘Never Forget Class Struggle’ written on one wall entirely visible. The photo editor also repainted an adjacent wall and added another slogan on it. The content of this second slogan – ‘Down with the Big Traitor Liu Shaoqi!’ – complements the first slogan by defining the specific target of ‘class struggle’ at that moment in the Cultural Revolution (compare illus. 124 and 125). Other cases testify to the overpowering demand for emphasizing Mao’s absolute authority. It became a common practice during the Cultural Revolution to insert the portrait of the Great Leader into all sorts of news photos. In the published version of ‘The New Beijing University Fearlessly Advances under the Leadership of the

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Working Class’, for example, the back wall has been made taller, providing extra space to display a Mao portrait. This added image changes the picture’s visual structure completely: Mao’s image, like a religious icon, defines a commanding visual centre above the revolutionary masses. At the same time it stares directly at the viewers outside the photo, subjecting them to his scrutiny (compare illus. 126 and 127). Materials from People’s Pictorial also reveal new dimensions of photographic manipulation beyond the usual tactics used in revising historical photographs. Frequently, shots are pieced together to form more attractive compositions (illus. 128); figures are excised not because they are enemies of the revolution but because they are deemed superfluous. Instead of facilitating an obvious political agenda, such editorial decisions reveal the strong impact of Socialist Art on news photography. Borrowing concepts from the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party defined Socialist Art as an integration of Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary

126 (below) Zhang Dali, ‘The New Beijing University Advances Fearlessly under the Leadership of the Working Class’, A Second History No. 87: original black-and-white negative in the People’s Pictorial archives, archive no. 144967. 127 (right) Zhang Dali, ‘The New Beijing University Advances Fearlessly under the Leadership of the Working Class’, photograph published in People’s Pictorial, March 1969.

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a s e c o n d h i s to r y 128 Zhang Dali, ‘Victory Over Winter’, A Second History No. 60: (top) photograph published in People’s Pictorial, February 1955; (bottom) original black-andwhite negatives in the People’s Pictorial archives, archive no. 21032.

Romanticism in order to represent the country’s progress towards a brilliant future in a single image. Under this doctrine, an artificial, sugary style permeated Chinese art from the 1950s to 1970s, in which everything is bright and all people are happy. Because of its susceptibility to technical manipulation, photography provided the most flexible tool to meet such demands. Fusing fiction with reality, manipulated documentary photos represented Mao’s China not as what it was but as what it ought to be. § A Second History is not a conventional photographic work. After all, Zhang Dali did not create any image mounted on its 130 panels; what he did was to find and compare the images, and to group and show them in a structured order. We may in fact consider this process of culling, comparing, cataloguing and exhibiting the images the real content of the work. From the onset of this project, Zhang 203

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Dali envisioned A Second History as an ‘image archive’ (tuxiang dang’an) and defined his own role as that of a programmer rather than a creator or interpreter. After participating in the Sixth Kwangju Biennale in 2006, he wrote: This is a work in the form of a pure archive. Its existence relies on the physical materials. I have found these materials in heaps of old papers. They were already there, and they are not going to change because of my subjective feelings.11 Zhang’s conceptualization of A Second History implies two paradoxes, however; both are crucial to understanding the work’s significance beyond simply exposing ‘darkroom tricks’ in creating propaganda pictures. In the first place, a standard definition of an archive is ‘a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people’.12 In this understanding, an archive preserves historical evidence that can be used to reconstruct the past. But as an ‘image archive’, A Second History testifies, in Zhang Dali’s words, to ‘a history which is related to facts but also betrays facts’.13 In other words, what he hopes to show is a ‘second history’ that falsifies history. The second paradox concerns Zhang Dali’s role in uncovering this false history: although he rejects any overt interpretative impulse, any exhibition of historical data must reflect the practitioner’s purpose and is therefore also rhetorical. Zhang Dali is not blind to this fact. Rather, he transfers his own subjectivity to the work: according to his plan, once the archive is created, it automatically exposes its own ‘anti-historicity’ (fan lishixing) and ‘pseudo-historicity’ (wei lishixing). From Zhang Dali’s point of view, therefore, A Second History is neither an activist project with a specific political objective nor a purely conceptual artwork detached from reality, but something that combines these two aspects to reflect on the construction of history in general and on China’s experience during the Cultural Revolution specifically. Related to this second purpose, his introspective look at fanaticism and obscurantism during the Cultural Revolution is also a retrospective look at himself, as he writes: Since [Socialist aesthetics taught that] art should transcend life, there were all the reasons to rectify photographs for present needs. Indeed, almost all workers in the art field accepted this logic [during the Cultural Revolution], taking up scissors and 204

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airbrush to change pictures and hence forfeiting their precious individual spirit. I have no intention of criticizing my seniors. If I had been living in that age, I would have done the same.14 chen shilin: a master beautifier of mao’s images

129 Chen Shilin in his office, 1952.

One of the ‘seniors’ Zhang Dali refers to is Chen Shilin (b. 1929), who in 2007 still insisted that it was a glorious vocation to create photographs ‘originating in life but higher than life’. Chen Shilin is a special figure in the history of Chinese photography (illus. 129). This is not because he is a famous photographer. In fact, although he played an important role in creating Mao’s images, he never took a single picture of the Great Leader. Rather, he made his contribution in a hidden darkroom in the Great Hall of the People next to Tiananmen Square. From the founding of the People’s Republic to the Cultural Revolution, his duty was to edit photographs of top leaders; almost all official images of Mao went through his hands. Just like his darkroom, he was himself an invisible man for many years. Even though the images he had helped create filled all sorts of spaces and were worshipped by millions of people, only a few individuals knew of his existence. This situation finally changed after the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic in 1999: around this time, Chinese media networks developed an interest in the early days of the People’s Republic and some confidential information consequently came to light. The name Chen Shilin appeared in newspapers for the first time, identified as a chief engineer of Mao’s official effigy hanging in Tiananmen Square. Details about Chen’s life and work were then reported in 2007. In July that year, the journalist Zeng Huang found the 78-yearold Chen and interviewed him. Part of the interview appeared the next year in People (Renwu) magazine, while Zeng Huang also posted a more detailed version on his website.15 These were followed by a flurry of interviews and reports in China Newsweek (Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan, no. 34, 2008), Tonight Daily (Jin wanbao, 20 June 2008) and other papers and magazines. The broadband portal Leshi (LeTV) featured him in its popular Oral History online programme in 2011.16 The story of Chen Shilin had finally become public knowledge. 205

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According to these interviews and reports, Chen was born in 1929. He dropped out of school when he was fifteen to work at a commercial photography studio in Yangzhou, where he learned how to print photos. Two years later he followed his father to Nanjing and secured a job in a prominent photo studio. From 1948 to 1950, he worked at the Grand Cinema Company (Daguangming dianying gongsi) in Hong Kong. He returned to mainland China in 1950 and entered the Photography Division of the Xinhua (New China) News Agency. Because of his familiarity with photographic production, he played a key role in that department, becoming the head of the Technical Workgroup and the Editing Workgroup in the Photography Division and the head of the National Workgroup of Leaders’ Photographs during the Cultural Revolution. All published reports portray Chen as an unsung hero working in Mao’s darkroom. But as I see it, these materials not only provide invaluable evidence for studying the politically motivated manipulation of photographs, but also possess a significance that transcends their specific political context. This is because although we know that countless numbers of doctored photographs exist worldwide, there is only scant information about the immediate circumstances and decision-making process behind their creation. The reason for the lack of information is easy to understand: to present the altered images as authentic historical records, the manipulation process has to be carefully concealed. In addition, photo editors in government agencies are usually silent about this process because of the sensitive nature of their jobs; the photographs that have gone through their hands often feature powerful political figures and important events. In China, the editing of Mao’s photos was a forbidden topic when he was alive. Thirty years after Mao’s death, however, Chen Shilin could tell people about his work without political consequences. In his interviews with Zeng Huang and other reporters, he gave a vivid description of six occasions on which he edited Mao’s photos, producing images that then became famous icons in China. Because of the personal nature of these accounts, my summaries below intend to preserve their original flavour by citing Chen’s words as direct quotations. (1) Mao Zedong’s first standard portrait

I extracted Chairman Mao’s first standard portrait [biaozhunxiang] from a 1950 group photo, in which 206

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130 Mao Zedong’s first ‘standard portrait’, 1950. 131 Mao Zedong meeting national war heroes and model workers in September 1950.

he poses with model workers [illus. 131]. I then scraped off the people behind Chairman Mao with a blade and filled the holes as part of the background. The image became the first official standard portrait of Chairman Mao, to be used in all publications [illus. 130]. At that time, New China had just been founded and many things had to be dealt with. It was impossible to have the Chairman come over to take a picture, asking him to pose like this and like that. Moreover, although in 1949 the relevant department sent four photographers to photograph Chairman Mao, for various reasons all the pictures were unusable. So the only method left was to find an image of the Chairman from a previous group photo.17 According to Fu Liwen, a reporter at the Beijing Evening Daily (Beijing wanbao), the source of this portrait is a group picture that was taken of Mao Zedong with national war heroes and model workers in September 1950. Chen Shilin cut out a bust of Mao above the third button on his jacket and enlarged the image. In order to change the backdrop, which appeared too dark, he tried different kinds of photo paper with various levels of contrast and also used the techniques of dodging and burning, producing a dozen or so 12-inch prints with different contrast and density. Next, he retouched Mao’s head and face and erased the other figures. Reshooting this retouched picture, he produced a new negative from which he printed out the final image. Twenty million copies of this portrait were made in less than a year and distributed to more than forty countries. Until 207

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the year 2000, the 20 yuan and 100 yuan Chinese banknotes both featured this portrait.18 (2) Mao Zedong’s second standard portrait

Like the first one, we extracted the second standard portrait of Chairman Mao from a group photo not long after [illus. 132]. It then became the prototype of the Chairman’s painted image on the Tiananmen, hanging there until 1959.19 Regarding the technique used to make these two standard portraits, Chen Shilin gave the following description: In making the first portrait I used a blade to scrape off other figures and then retouched the background. I made this blade from a clock spring. This I haven’t told anyone before. A doctor’s surgical blade could also serve the purpose. I honed the spring to make it very thin and used it to scrape negatives. But I probably overdid it somewhat, so Chairman Mao’s hair looks a bit unnatural.20 He continued: The texture on the face relies on retouching. Mostly I focused on two aspects: to harmonize the reflective light and to reduce the shadow when it is too dense . . . In an era when there was no computer, we could only use transparent watercolour to paint on photographs – such colour could penetrate photo paper. . . . These two portraits were both retouched on prints and then reshot as new negatives. I used a photographic chemical reducing agent, but took care to apply just the right amount. Which place should be retouched? Which place should be left as is? An expertly retouched image should show subtle softness, with gentle shading to delineate the image. Which place should be darker or lighter? It all depends on the retoucher’s feeling about the image.21

132 Mao Zedong’s second ‘standard portrait’, 1953.

According to the reporter Luo Xuehui, some people asked Chen why Mao’s teeth appear so white in photographs, since Mao was a heavy smoker at the time and his teeth were quite dark. He answered that whenever a photo showed Mao exposing his teeth, 209

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their dark colour had to be removed through retouching. When asked about whether such correction violated reality, he said that it did not because the basic ‘image structure’ (yingxiang jiegou) was not altered; embellishment only enhanced the image’s truthfulness.22 (3) Mao Zedong in the field

Do you know that photo of Chairman Mao Zedong wearing a straw hat and standing in a field? In fact, there was another person in the original photo, but he was later erased in the darkroom. That was Liu Shaoqi, standing behind Chairman Mao. The photo was taken in 1957; it showed Liu with his head lowered. At the time we felt that the photo was unusable and just left it in the archive. Later, during the Cultural Revolution, we transformed it [by eliminating Liu’s image]. In his place I painted grain sprouts [illus. 133]. The photo was then used as a model to produce a great many propaganda posters.23 (4) Mao Zedong’s third standard portrait

133 Mao Zedong in a millet field, 1957.

In September 1959, with only a few days left before the National Day celebration, there still wasn’t an image of the Chairman. People in the central government were incredibly nervous and sent two photographers from the Xinhua Agency [to take pictures of Chairman Mao]. Two rolls of film were developed that evening. For one reason or another, the result was not good at all; some shots even showed the lampshade behind the Chairman. In the end we settled on one shot, but it had many flaws: heavy shadow, light reflected from the walls, many folds on the Chairman’s clothes and the exposed lampshade. It had to be repaired on the negative or on a copy of the negative – it was impossible to do it on a print. Only retouching on the negative could produce satisfactory prints. It was crucial to soften the intense contrast, the dark shadows and strong reflections.24 At that time I had developed a systematic retouching method. When repairing a photograph, it is crucial to decide in advance which places should be retouched and which places shouldn’t be. I found a way to get rid of strong reflections with a photographic reducing agent. This had to be done on the negative, not on a photo print. It was the only way to produce a good image that could be duplicated. At places in the negative that 210

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were too dense, I applied colour to lighten them up. I even embellished every button and smoothed out wrinkles on the Chairman’s jacket [illus. 134]. From 1950 to 1959, during those nine years when I worked at Xinhua, I received an excellent education and learned that since our political leaders embodied truth, goodness and beauty, the copying of the negatives [of their portraits] must be genuine (zhenshi) and the photos produced from such negatives must be genuine, too. Based on this principle, the Xinhua Agency reproduced all the important negatives in the China Photo Archives; the number must have exceeded one million.25 (5) Mao Zedong’s fourth standard portrait (illus. 135)

134 Mao Zedong’s third ‘standard portrait’, 1959.

In 1964, Zheng Jingkang [1904–1978, a famous official photographer] was going to photograph Chairman Mao. Before leaving he came over to discuss the best way to do it. I suggested that he should abandon the conventional method used in commercial studios and simply use two lights: a main light and an accessory light. I also suggested that he take a large picture. [But when the film was developed] there were two serious problems: the image of Chairman Mao was very small, only less than 2 centimetres on a negative of the 120 format; the picture was also underexposed and full of shadows.26 [In another interview he said: ‘After I saw the picture, I felt that Chairman Mao’s eyes had no spirit and he looked old. His clothes were covered with shadows of creases. The collar was untidy. Unrepaired, the picture was unusable.’27] That would have been disastrous! After all, the Chairman was a ‘god’! When Zheng Jingkang found out the result, he gave me the negative. He was very cautious and didn’t say a word when he handed it to me. Indeed, no one ought to make any comment under such circumstances, because it could be taken as badmouthing Chairman Mao. After he gave me the negative, I closed the door and worked on it for a whole week. Because there were too many places to be rectified, I didn’t use the reversal processing.28 Since the picture was underexposed, the shadow was very light. There wasn’t enough depth; even the Chairman’s pupils and eyelids were not clearly distinguished. The method I used this time was to make a transparency film from the negative, the same as [that] used in making a movie 213

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– the movie film is copied from negative film. I then made the reversal film into another negative and back again – a process which eventually produced a large positive. I used Type 2 Ilford film with a higher contrast coefficient value. Let me explain this with a comparison: when using normal photo paper to make a positive image, the highest contrast coefficient value is 100:1; but on a transparency film it can reach 1000:1. Only after the transparent positive had been enlarged many times did I start to rectify the image. My work still focused on the two aspects which I mentioned earlier: to bring down the parts that were too bright and to modify the shadowed sections and articulate the shape with photographic reducer.29 I worked on this image for more than a week, trying again and again. I made about twenty different versions and kept the best one. The others had to be burned because they shouldn’t be seen beyond the darkroom. When making the positive, I first tested the light sensitivity of the film and calculated the density, making sure that the minimum density was between 0.43 and 0.458 on Ilford Type 2 film. This would produce a correct, balanced tonal effect: the shadowed part could only come out well when the minimum density was around 0.4.30 From the more than twenty reversal films that I retouched, I selected the one I considered the best. Since rephotographing the positive image might generate an undesirable effect, I made a negative directly from the positive. This is called touzheng fanfu fa or touzheng kaofu fa [both mean ‘the method of copying a negative from a transparent positive’]. The quality of the copying process is crucial. The level of contrast on the negative and the density differential of the positive should agree with each other. During the process of reproduction, the photosensitivity of the negative film had to be tested to determine the contrast coefficient value and the minimum density. All of these had to be very precise; no error could be allowed.31

135 Mao Zedong’s fourth ‘standard portrait’, 1964.

When Chen Shilin was asked how he turned the ageing and emaciated Mao into a man full of life, he answered: ‘Mostly I softened and balanced the shadowed part and the part under strong light. The two sides of the nose were especially important, as well as the whites of the eyes.’32

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(6) Mao Zedong at Jinggangshan

In 1965 Mao Zedong returned to Jinggangshan (an early Communist base in Jiangxi province). Someone took an excellent photo of him there, showing him smiling and in a great mood. But next to him there were people looking around; the whole image felt discordant [illus. 136]. But if one simply cut all these people out, the picture would lose the atmosphere of the place. To solve this problem, I combined three negatives into a new composition and enlarged it. I erased the extra people in the original photo, replacing them with a landscape of the place. At the same time I emphasized Mao’s smile [illus. 137].33 From Chen’s point of view, the purpose of such an alteration was to make the picture ‘most like’ (zui xiang) Mao; the key to achieving this goal was to fully comprehend the Great Leader’s temperament and to highlight his ‘divine spiritual quality’. Thus light had to focus on Mao’s head because Mao had a ‘dragon bone’ (longgu) on his forehead and ‘wisdom wrinkles’ (zhihuiwen) were very fine.34 Putting some light on the forehead would produce a good result. Again according to Chen, Mao in his later years developed quite deep bags under his eyes, which had to be softened through retouching. When Mao was older his eyes looked a little muddy; it was necessary to add some light to the whites to rectify this problem.35 § Chen Shilin’s accounts reveal several basic kinds of logic in ‘perfecting’ images of Mao Zedong. The most fundamental one is a reconceptualization of ‘truthfulness’ (zhenshixing) in photography. In Chen’s thinking, the existence of a physical negative already guarantees the image’s realness; the editing of the image makes it even more real. Following this logic, the beautification of the Supreme Leader becomes a natural course of action that needs no justification. This logic implies a particular rhetoric of truthfulness. We realize that for Chen, what is ‘genuine’ and what is ‘imagined’ have become entirely entangled and inseparable. Mao’s white teeth and smooth skin are genuine to him, not because these are Mao’s actual physical features, but because these are part of an idealized Mao in the imagination of the revolutionary masses. In fact, Chen recognized in 2011 that he had never looked at Mao 216

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136 Mao Zedong in Jinggangshan, Jiangxi, with local cadres, 1965. 137 Mao Zedong in Jinggangshan, 1965.

close up.36 But this did not prevent him from turning an imperfect photograph into a ‘most true to life’ portrait of Mao. Such blind idealism goes hand in hand with fear: The ‘perfect’ images of Mao were created at a time when China was controlled by a revolutionary fever that resembled a religious mania. We can sense such fear when we hear about Zheng Jingkang not daring to utter a word when he gave his film of Mao to Chen Shilin. When recounting this episode, Chen explained that any comment on a bad photograph of Mao could be considered a vicious attack on the Great Leader himself. Without talking to Zheng Jingkang, Chen took the film and tried his best to beautify Mao in his darkroom. In their collective silence we come face to face with the Red Terror of the Cultural Revolution that penetrated the hearts of the whole population. coda: sublimation as an artistic ideal

After photography was invented in the mid-nineteenth century and utilized broadly in news reporting, advertisement, art and daily life, this visual technology surpassed all previous artistic means in mimicking reality. It even became a substitute for reality itself, using photographic images to construct the world as an object to be observed and recognized. Scholars of the history of photography 217

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constantly remind us about the artificiality and utilitarian purposes of such substitution and construction, but when one faces a photograph – especially a so-called ‘news photo’, ‘historical photo’ or ‘private photo’ – one’s direct response is still often: this is real; this is me. A photograph already embodies cultural specificity and the photographer’s gaze; the printing process further allows ample opportunities to interfere with and distort reality. Chen Shilin’s endeavour exemplifies many cases in modern world history, in which photographs have been doctored for political purposes. Zhang Dali’s investigation further suggests that rather than being isolated incidents, such distortions indicate an essential, internal mechanism of photographic production. Doctored subjects in his archive include old photos and leaders’ portraits, as well as news photos and snapshots of ordinary people. The doctored images not only help reconstruct historical events and images of state heroes, but also lay a foundation for comprehending the world surrounding us. Instead of recording what is real, these images advance a certain ‘spirit’ or ideology under the name of photo reportage. Zhang Dali’s project leads us to think about two broader issues connected to modern Chinese art and visual culture. The first is the relationship between doctored photographs and the theory of ‘revolutionary realism’. Based on Mao’s Talks in the Yan’an Seminars on Art and Literature, Guo Moruo (1892–1978) once argued that ‘genuine revolutionary art and literature is a symbolic world, created by pure spiritual factors through sublimating an extremely rich reality’.37 This principle justifies any doctored images, which all ‘come from life’ but are ‘higher than life’, and transform images from their ‘primitive state into something with higher spiritual or cultural value’.38 Second, we begin to realize that the distortion of photographs does not always serve political propaganda. In fact, it is accepted and employed by society at large, since everyone is attracted by ideal, ‘sublimated’ images of themselves. The negatives of old studio portraits always bear traces of xiuban – pencilled refinement of people’s features. As for recent digital images, they are even more prone to elaborate editing techniques, from beautifying people’s faces to elaborating background scenery. The distortion of photographs in political culture thus has an enormous cultural and psychological basis. As a result, it will never disappear in image-making, but will only adopt more advanced techniques and infiltrate people’s lives more deeply.

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7. THE ‘OLD PHOTO CRAZE’ AND CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART

the ‘old photo craze’ and the old photos serial

In visual culture, a ‘craze’ (re) is a state of heightened excitement and activity that develops around certain ‘fetish images’ – be they commercial icons of pop stars or private possessions of nostalgic value.1 A cultural craze differs from general fetishism, however, in that it generates emotional energy among a sizable populace during a particular period. In this sense a craze is close to a ‘movement’. But unlike a movement (yundong), it is typically unsystematic and unorganized. Instead of articulating any political ideology, it derives its substance from shared experience and longing. The ‘old photo craze’ (lao zhaopian re) in late-1990s China had all the symptoms of a cultural craze. Evidence for it was everywhere, from snapshots of old Beijing or Shanghai on the walls of trendy restaurants, to the migration of family pictures from private albums to the antique market. But it was the omnipresence of ‘old photo’ books, serials and postcards in bookstores that most convincingly confirmed the existence of a cultural fever. Among these publications, the sweeping success of a tiny serial called Old Photos (Lao zhaopian) in 1997 astonished everyone, and in effect announced the arrival of the ‘old photo craze’.2 Launched in late 1996 by a newly established provincial publishing house (Shandong Pictorial Press, founded in 1994), the first three issues of Old Photos were instant blockbusters in the mass book market (illus. 138). Each issue was subsequently reprinted six or seven times, the initial 10,000 copies growing to a total of 300,000. For the fourth issue, therefore, the publisher produced an astounding initial run of 240,000 copies. The serial’s founder and editor-in-chief Feng Keli told me that these four issues, published from December 1996 to October 1997, eventually sold more than 1.2 million copies 219

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138 Old Photos, no. 1, 1996.

making the serial one of the most popular publications in postCultural Revolution China.3 In physical form, an issue of Old Photos is a thin volume of about 14 × 20 cm (5½ × 8 in.) in a vertical layout, containing 70–80 small, low-quality photographic images scattered over 126–158 pages. The lack of technical refinement in these photo reproductions can certainly be attributed to the publication’s low budget and retail price. The first ten issues of the serial only cost 6.50 rmb each, or less than a dollar. (From No. 11, the price increased to 8.50 rmb, or about a dollar.) But an equally if not more important reason was the editors’ approach to these images, which were considered meaningful only as integral components of short entries. The general tendency of the serial was to contextualize images with historical narratives, not to elevate them to the rank of independent works of art. (This is especially clear in the first ten issues; from No. 11, a centrefold was added to display selected images of higher artistic quality.) In a sense, though reproduced en masse and sold throughout the country, the images retain their grassroots identity, and their ordinariness evoked familiarity in the serial’s millions of ‘ordinary’ readers.4 A less obvious but probably more important achievement of Old Photos is the number and variety of publications it inspired, starting in late 1997.5 The two earliest ‘copycats’ were Old Photo Album (Lao xiangce) (illus. 140), published by the Inner Mongolia People’s Press, and A Century of Old Photos (Bainian lao zhaopian) (illus. 139), published by Economy Daily Press. Both launched in November 1997 (that is, a month after the fourth issue of Old Photos came out), and even their cover designs closely imitated their shared prototype (compare illus. 138, 140 and 139).6 For Old Photos, Feng Keli had selected a yellowish paper that evoked the ‘mutability of time’ (cangsang);7 this feature was also imitated by the newcomers. It is perhaps no coincidence that these early ‘old photo’ serials, including the original Old Photos, were all published by relatively obscure, provincial publishing houses that were eager to break into the mass book market. Their success inspired many other ‘old photo’ books and serials over the next three years, from 1998 to 2000. Later publications began to specialize in particular types of historical photographs; their subjects included architecture and the city,8 lifestyle and costume,9 important figures and landmark events,10 famous universities and institutions,11 works by early photographers 221

zo om i n g i n 139 A Century of Old Photos, no. 1, 1997.

140 Old Photo Album, no. 1, 1997.

and groups or generations of people. Old Photos of Students Sent to the Countryside during the Cultural Revolution (Zhiqing lao zhaopian), by Tianjin’s Hundred Flowers Press, falls into this last category (illus. 141). Its first issue, published in February 1998, had an initial print run of 300,000 copies, which sold out almost immediately. The trend towards specialization was also reflected in the other products of Shandong Pictorial Press. Its 1998 publications included Historical Photos You Have Never Seen (Ni meiyou jianguo de lishi zhaopian), while its booklist for 2001 included Mutability of Time as Seen in the Changes of Things and Scenery (Fengwu liubian jian cangsang). Both focused on images of important historical figures and events, leaving photographs of a more private nature to the original Old Photos serial.12 The momentum of ‘old photo’ publications began to decline in the early 2000s. The first issue of Old Photos in the new millennium (No. 13, published in March 2000), for example, included a postscript 222

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by Wang Jiaming, editor-in-chief of Shandong Pictorial Press, in which he acknowledged that ‘the nostalgia trend that has prevailed for a time is weakening day by day’ (cheng yishi zhi sheng de huijiu zhi feng, erjian shiwei). He nevertheless confirmed his devotion to the Old Photos serial, although sales had dropped to one-tenth that of the first four issues.13 After 2001, this and other ‘old photo’ serials continued to be produced and could easily be found in bookstores, but no longer generated the kind of excitement they had in the late 1990s; their market was shrinking. By 2003, the craze for ‘old photo’ publications was clearly over. the invention of ‘photo/text’

141 Old Photos of Students Sent to the Countryside during the Cultural Revolution, no. 1, 1998.

As a cultural and social phenomenon, the ‘old photo craze’ can be analysed from multiple angles. For one thing, the compilation and popularity of ‘old photo’ books and serials were clearly related to changes in China’s publishing industry and commercial book market. Scholars have also linked these publications to nostalgia (huai jiu), which surfaced as a major theme in Chinese literature and film in the 1980s and ’90s.14 I suggest, however, that most ‘old photo’ publications were dominated by a desire to forge micro-histories, and not by a sentimental longing for the past or reminiscence about ‘the old’. We thus need to re-examine the purported connections between these publications and nostalgia. We get a third perspective from the history of ‘collecting’. From the 1980s, all sorts of Cultural Revolution memorabilia acquired commercial value; historical photographs joined such ‘collectables’ slightly later, in the mid- to late 1990s. In this context, ‘old photo’ publications were both a consequence of and stimulus for the cultural activity of collecting. There was, in fact, a persistent relationship between collecting and publishing in 1990s China: as soon as certain printed images – old posters, advertisements, postcards, cigarette cards and matchboxes – became objects of collecting, they also became subjects of reproductions, which in turn encouraged a general appreciation of these popular or commercial images. In this way, the ‘old photo’ books and serials of the late 1990s followed a pattern set by publications of other types of old prints, which had appeared earlier.15 Finally, numerous reproductions of old photographs of traditional architecture – an important component of ‘old photo’ publications – were clearly a response to the rapid transformation of the Chinese city in the 1990s: as thousands of 225

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old houses were demolished to make room for new residential and commercial buildings, their images alone could be preserved. These perspectives lead me to focus on two issues directly related to the re-presentation and permutation of photographic images in post-Cultural Revolution China. The first concerns the invention of an integrated visual-textual representation that I call a ‘photo/text’. The second is the role of ‘old photo’ images in contemporary Chinese art. These two forms reveal different intentions and techniques regarding the use of old photographs in cultural production and suggest a particular relationship between an elite art tradition and popular visual culture. The cover of the first issue of Old Photos showed an image of two girls wearing high-collared jackets and Western-style necklaces (see illus. 138). The two maple leaves that overlap with the photo’s thick frame allude to the passage of time: like the photograph of the anonymous girls, they are fragments of a vanished past.16 This group of images, however, is not a self-contained representation, because the portrait is actually cropped from a larger photo that accompanies an entry in the issue (illus. 142). Its role is to entice readers to read the text, which identifies the girls as fashionable young ladies in the early Republican period, as demonstrated by their short hair, unbound feet, clothes and ornaments.17 As this example shows, ‘old photo’ serials did not simply reproduce historical photographs, but contained photo/texts: short, informal literary compositions centred on one or more photographic images. Often writing in the first person, their authors assumed the role of storyteller or eyewitness, even when their subjects had nothing to do with personal experience. Photographic images in such compositions never simply illustrate the accompanying texts; nor do the texts merely explain the photographs. Rather, images provide stimuli, clues and sites for reconstructing history and offering recollections. The wide variety of images implies different possibilities for historical reconstruction. In fact, the true originality of Old Photos – and the paramount reason for its commercial success – lay precisely in its openness to such possibilities: instead of devoting the serial to a particular kind of biography or history (as many earlier and later ‘old photo’ publications did and still do), its editors envisioned it as an open space for professional and amateur writers to compose photo/texts of any kind, so long as they resonated with a broad readership. Feng Keli’s 1996 proposal for the serial demonstrates this clearly: 226

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As to the basic requirements for contributions to the serial, both photographs and texts should sustain prolonged interest. But let legendary ones be legendary, entertaining ones be entertaining, educational ones be serious and conceptual ones be conceptually sharp. In any case, a contribution should always dwell on facts. ‘Representing facts’ is the soul of the serial. Guided by the content of photographs, the genres and format of texts may shift from biography [zhuanji] to essay [sanwen] and jottings [suibi], to investigation [kaoju] and exposition [shuoming]. The longer pieces can run several thousand characters, the shorter ones, several hundred to several dozen characters. Form should always suit content, and there should be no fixed standards. Each issue should contain 40 to 50 contributions.18 A possible prototype of such versatile photo/texts was a group of illustrated essays by Liu Xinwu (b. 1942) that appeared in the influential literary journal Harvest (Shouhuo) between 1986 and 1987. Published in a special feature entitled ‘Private Photo Albums’ (‘Siren zhaoxiang bu’), these essays responded to a well-known proposal by veteran writer Ba Jin (1904–2005), then the journal’s editor-inchief. In his 1979 Random Reflections (Suixiang lu), Ba Jin called for ‘a museum of the Cultural Revolution’ to both preserve memories of the political calamity and prevent a similar tragedy from occurring in the future.19 Liu Xinwu opened his first essay in ‘Private Photo

142 Tao Ye, ‘New Dresses of Women in the Early Republican Period’, Old Photos, no. 1, 1996.

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Albums’ by meditating on photographs’ ‘information value’ (xinxi jiazhe) and ‘historicity’ (lishigan). The specific historicity of private photos in the post-Cultural Revolution era prompted him to write this series of ‘private histories’. As he explains: I think that although the fatal destruction of the Cultural Revolution must have greatly reduced the number of old photos in China, a considerable amount of photos must have fortunately survived. I believe that many individuals must still possess albums or boxes that contain innumerable precious ‘original images’ from twenty, thirty, forty or fifty years ago and even from more remote eras. Of course, many people may not want to publicize these images, and their rights should be honoured by society and protected by law. Still, many other people may want to share the ‘original images’ in their private photo albums with society at large, or may accept this idea after persuasion. Their private images can therefore contribute to today’s ‘information explosion’, enriching people’s emotional world and encouraging rational thinking.20 Liu Xinwu’s essays were not, however, a direct inspiration for the Old Photos serial; the two publications were separated by a decade and differ in significant ways.21 Liu wrote his essays as serious literary works of lasting value.22 By contrast, as Feng Keli proposed, the texts in Old Photos were meant to respond to images and be affiliated with them. In other words, photo/texts are self-consciously image-centric and image-driven. Not quite literature, they constitute a special genre of composite visual/textual representation. This identity of photo/texts was clearly stated in each issue’s call for contributions: The [submitted] photographs should be at least twenty years old and sufficiently legible. A photograph (or several photographs) should elucidate an event, a person, a scenic spot or a type of fashion. An entry should be composed around such images. The style of writing can be of any kind, ranging from biography, prose or notes to research or explanation. A photograph can be accompanied by an essay or by brief comments. It is also possible to submit writing alone, but in such a case the author should provide suggestions for finding relevant photographs.23 228

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Moreover, unlike Liu’s essays, which were the creations of a well-known author, an issue of Old Photos normally had at least forty contributors, many of whom had received only basic education; their writings are straightforward accounts of someone or something they know. Such authorship is implied in the call for contributions, which clearly encouraged amateur writers. The serial was therefore a ‘mass publication’ in both readership and authorship. Finally, although a number of Old Photos entries allude to personal tragedies in the 1960s and ’70s, the goal was not to establish a ‘museum of the Cultural Revolution’ in print form. Unlike Ba Jin’s vision, the editors rejected an explicit political or ideological agenda (as did the editors of other ‘old photo’ publications). The serial’s representation of historical ‘facts’ instead lent itself to various interests and pursuits, from personal reminiscence to political rhetoric, from anecdote to entertainment. The attraction of the publication quite possibly lay in the open space it provided for people of diverse backgrounds to write on different kinds of old images. In his original proposal, Feng Keli envisioned columns for the serial, including ‘Mingren yishun’ (Moments in the Lives of the Famous and Renowned); ‘Jiushi chongwen’ (Reminders of Bygone Things); ‘Gushi fengwu’ (Things and Scenes of the Old Days); ‘Xiri mingxing’ (Stars of Long Ago); ‘Siren xiangbu’ (Private Photo Albums); ‘Shijian xiezhen’ (Reports of Real Events); ‘Miwen pianying’ (Unknown Histories and Fleeting Images); ‘Ningwang ji’ (Gazing and Meditating on Images); and ‘Yi Qin E’ (Reminiscing about Old Friends). These subtitles did appear in various issues, but never evolved into conventional features. Rather, the editors developed an unusual strategy for mixing entries under these themes, while introducing new themes in each issue.24 The result is a spontaneous collection of images and texts, which favour randomness and chance effect and refuse stability and standardization. Looking through each volume, readers then and now feel that they continually stumble upon forgotten people and events, unexpectedly resurrected from unconscious memory. In contrast, Liu Xinwu’s Private Albums only changed the subject of an existing photo history in China, which had been devoted to Communist leaders and heroes such as Mao Zedong and Lei Feng. This series did not alter the basic format or logic of the older history, which focused on a single subject and had an explicit political purpose. By mixing a biographical mode with other subjects, however, ‘old photo’ publications made themselves 229

zo om i n g i n 143 Two publications from the Shandong Pictorial Press: A Century of Chinese History in Photographs (right) and the first issue of Old Photos (left).

into vehicles for reconstructing history as collage and chance result, as the synthetic voice of a multitude of amateur authors. I call such personalized, unsystematic historical accounts ‘micro-histories’. This historical reconstruction destabilizes the established visual and textual representations of official history. A mass-produced ‘old photo’ serial was typically low-budget and humble in appearance; its small and sometimes blurry black-and-white pictures hardly inspire serious artistic appreciation and its fragmentary entries denote few formal or structural concerns. For these reasons, such publications easily escape the attention of academic historians, whose interests are commonly guided by the definitive ‘works’ of art and literature of individual artists and authors. I suggest, however, that the lack of structural coherence and aesthetic appeal was an intentional feature of these publications and defined a particular kind of materiality that makes ‘chance’ an important factor in visual and literary production. The unsystematic, fragmentary quality of Old Photos is rooted in its history. The idea for the serial arose from considerations about how to utilize materials ‘left over’ from an official-style photo history called A Century of Chinese History in Photographs (Tupian Zhongguo bainian shi) (illus. 143). This expensive (1,500 yuan), multi-volume compilation was the single most important project of the Shandong Pictorial Press from 1993 to 1995 and absorbed nearly the entire budget of this newly established publishing house. More than 5,000 historical photographs were collected for the project, but only 2,700 were printed. The remaining 2,300 pictures, which were deemed not ‘significant’ enough for the monumental history book, became the materials for the initial issues of Old 230

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Photos.25 The serial was thus founded on fragments (more precisely, on fragments of fragments, because the 5,000 photographs gathered by the press were already historical fragments). This legacy was strengthened in later issues, which incorporated attributions randomly submitted to the publisher. old photos in contemporary chinese art

Five features distinguish ‘old photo’ images in contemporary Chinese art from those presented in ‘old photo’ publications. First, instead of mechanically reproducing extant photographs, artistic representations of ‘old photos’ result from imaginative re-presentation. Second, they are singular works of art created for an elite audience, not part of a mass-readership publication. Third, they demonstrate the originality of individual experimental artists,26 rather than foregrounding fragmentary memories of common people. Fourth, as paintings, installations and photographs, artistic representations are visual in intent, rather than part of a sustained image/text dialogue. Finally, created as they were for exhibition, artistic representations of ‘old photos’ lose their aura when turned into print forms for wider circulation. Despite these differences, both ‘old photo’ serials and contemporary ‘old photo’ art employ the same visual materials – old photographs – and developed in tandem. Artistic representations of ‘old photos’ began to emerge in the 1980s and came into vogue in the second half of the 1990s. As we have seen, this same period witnessed the emergence of post-Cultural Revolution ‘photo/texts’ and the ‘old photo craze’; the simultaneity of these trends suggests historical connections between them. Methodologically, I focus on the relationship between art and visual culture – two fields of visual production that, in this case, used the same materials for divergent purposes. The differences between artistic representations of ‘old photos’ and mass-produced ‘old photo’ publications, however, demand different analytical strategies. Whereas I examined the general characteristics of the serial Old Photos, my discussion of ‘old photos’ in contemporary art necessarily focuses on individual works as responses to common social issues. A survey of contemporary art reveals three approaches in using ‘old photos’ to construct visual narratives. In the first, works respond to major events in modern Chinese history and express the collective experiences of generations. The second approach adopts a 231

zo om i n g i n 144 Wang Chuan and He Duoling in front of their works, 1981.

145 Wang Chuan, Survivors, 1981, oil on canvas.

biographical mode, using ‘old photos’ to construct personal histories of ordinary Chinese people. The third represents faded or damaged photographic images as ‘ruins’, alluding to the instability of historical memory. On a deeper level, all three reflect the artist’s keen interest in China’s historical temporality, with ‘old photo’ images providing a means to reimagine the country’s past, present and future. By the early 1980s, young artists were already using images of stressed and damaged photos to allude to the Cultural Revolution. The earliest example I have found is a remarkable oil painting created by Sichuan artist Wang Chuan (b. 1967) in 1981 (illus. 144). Titled Survivors (Xingcun zhe) and over 1.8 metres (6 ft) tall, it monumentalizes an old photograph that had been burned at the edges and torn into pieces (illus. 145). The couple in the photograph is the artist’s parents, who took the picture when they were young and idealistic, serving the revolutionary cause in the Red Army. The story of the photograph and its destruction is absent in the painting. Instead, the artist tells the tragedy of a whole generation: many intellectuals were purged during the Cultural Revolution for their ‘bourgeois educational background’ or ‘bad’ class origins. Often they were thrown into prison or detention centres, their belongings confiscated and their photographs destroyed. Wang Chuan depicts one such destroyed image, whose fragments had somehow survived. But he deliberately gives the painting an ambiguous title: the spectator wonders whether the word ‘survivors’ refers to the photographic fragments (which have been pieced back together), or to the couple in the photograph. 232

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Yang Yiping’s (b. 1947) The Square (Guangchang, 1987–8) and Zhang Xiaogang’s (b. 1958) Genesis (Chuangshiji, 1992) also employ images of ‘old photos’ to reflect on the Communist revolution, but from different angles. A veteran avant-garde artist, Yang was a member of the Stars Painting Society – the first unofficial art group to emerge in post-Cultural Revolution China – and participated in the society’s early exhibitions in 1979 and 1980. The Square marked a new departure in his art, initiating a series of works that infused suprarealism (a style he previously favoured) with the imagery of ‘old photos’ (illus. 146). Though some art critics have called this painting a ‘realistic’ representation, I find this interpretation misleading. Yang’s subject is his personal vision of Tiananmen Square, which both unites and contrasts the past and the present. This reading explains many puzzling and seemingly contradictory features of the painting: the brownish, nearly monochromic coloration alludes to an aged photograph, but the clothes and hairstyles are all contemporary. The figures are portrayed naturalistically, as if in a snapshot, but the depiction of the place is deliberately unrealistic: the Tiananmen’s base is artificially shortened and the stone sculptures in front of the monument are eliminated. Yang’s goal must have been to create a spatial/temporal disjunction to contrast the Tiananmen with the surrounding people, who seem to have accidentally appeared there. While the Tiananmen’s physical prowess is emphasized – its heavy superstructure dominates the upper half of the painting – the masses in the lower half are scattered in a startling state of disunity; not one of them is paying the slightest attention to the Communist monument or Mao’s portrait on it. An even stronger symbolic overtone characterizes Zhang Xiaogang’s Genesis (illus. 147, 148). The paintings in this mini-series depict two newborn babies, each lying above a desk and placed next to an open book. One baby is reddish and raises his head to stare into the onlooker’s eyes. The other is yellowish and turns his head towards the book, reading the text under the guidance of a disembodied red hand. ‘Old photos’ painted in the background offer clues for understanding the meaning of each composition. The photos on the top row behind the first baby represent Communist pioneers, including the founders of the Chinese Communist Party. The baby here thus symbolizes the original inspiration of the Revolution and the awakening of the Chinese people – a symbolism that is reinforced by the baby’s alertness and ‘revolutionary’ colour. The photos in the other painting depict ‘revolutionary students’ 234

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146 Yang Yiping, The Square, 1987–8, oil on canvas.

overleaf: 147 Zhang Xiaogang, Genesis Number One, 1992, collage and oil on canvas. 148 Zhang Xiaogang, Genesis Number Two, 1992, collage and oil on canvas.

during the Cultural Revolution, either marching in mass rallies or being re-educated through labour in the countryside. The passive and obedient baby in front of these pictures seems to typify the experience of this generation, who received Communist ideology as dogma dictated by an impersonal, faceless power. These paintings evoke Ba Jin’s call for a ‘memory museum’ of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, although each work uses images of ‘old photos’ in a different way, they all signify memories: China’s historical memories in general and memories of the Cultural Revolution specifically. The artists share Ba Jin’s and Liu Xinwu’s belief that only by preserving such memories can the Chinese people prevent another such calamity in the future. This retrospective, politically charged perspective, however, lost its appeal to a new generation of experimental artists, who entered the field of contemporary art in the early and mid-1990s. To them, the 1960s and ’70s were history; they were finally able to bid farewell to the visual and mental baggage of the Cultural Revolution. Their work responded not to history and collective memory, but to China’s current transformation. Although ‘old photos’ continued to signify the past in their works, these images were used to confirm the artists’ attachment to the present. I call this a ‘domestic turn’ in 1990s Chinese art,27 which coincided with the introduction of new art forms – mainly 235

zo om i n g i n 149 Sui Jianguo, Zhan Wang and Yu Fan, Women/Here, photo installation, 1995, Contemporary Art Museum, Beijing. Photo shows the artists and their subjects; from right to left: Qu Shuyun (Yu Fan’s mother), Sui Jianguo, Li Aidong (Sui Jianguo’s wife), Zhan Wang, Yu Fan, Pu Shuping (Zhan Wang’s mother), Wu Yang (Zhan Wang’s wife).

150, 151, 152 Feng Mengbo, My Private Album, 1996, cd-rom.

installation, performance and multimedia works – from Western contemporary art. As the new forms gained currency among this group of artists, their works no longer converted ‘old photos’ into paintings, but featured real or digitized old photographs – images that brought about a heightened sense of immediacy and the real, and which encouraged artists to develop a ‘biographical’ mode in representing subjects, often their relatives and themselves. The unofficial installation Women/Here (Nüren/Xianchang) occupies a special place in this trend, as it was the first project in contemporary Chinese art that used family photos to forge private histories and to comment on current political affairs. Three young faculty members in the Central Academy of Fine Arts – Sui Jianguo (b. 1956), Zhan Wang (b. 1962) and Yu Fan (b. 1966) – staged this exhibition as a ‘counter-event’ during the Fourth International Women’s Congress held in Beijing in 1995 (illus. 149). Using photographs and memorabilia found among their mothers’ and wives’ private possessions, they presented ‘real Chinese women’ to contrast with the official representation of a staged ‘global womanhood’.28 In a different vein, Beijing artist Feng Mengbo (b. 1966) created an interactive computer installation in 1996 (illus. 150–52). Entitled My Private Album (Siren zhaoxiang bo), it consisted of several series of ‘old photos’ that restaged the lives and social environments of Feng’s grandparents, parents and himself. Pursuing a visual autobiography in a more succinct manner, Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963) created a photo installation in 1999 using her own photos 238

t h e ‘o l d p h oto c r a z e ’ a n d co n t e m p o r a r y c h i n e s e a r t 153 Yin Xiuzhen, Yin Xiuzhen, 1999, photo installation.

from different periods, which she cut into insoles and inserted into old-fashioned women’s shoes (which she had made with her mother) (illus. 153). For Yin, the interior of a woman’s shoe is the most intimate space of her body. By making personal photos into public art and emphasizing their intimacy, Yin’s work heightens the tension between private memory and public display. In contrast to these biographical representations, works created in 1999 and 2000 ‘frame’ a historical period by juxtaposing images of past and present, leaving the subjects’ experiences during these years to the viewer’s imagination. One such work is the performance Family History (Jiazu suiyue), conducted by Zheng Lianjie (b. 1962) in 2000 in Tiananmen Square (illus. 154). Displaying an enlarged black-andwhite family photo from 1957, Zheng and his son took another photo in the Square 43 years later. Framed within the present image of the same place, the historical photo acquires an acute past temporality. Similarly, Hai Bo (b. 1962) juxtaposes pairs of photographs taken several decades apart in a photo installation (illus. 155). One of the two, an old group photo, shows young men and women in Maoist or army uniforms, their faces aglow with unyielding belief in the Communist faith. The other picture, taken by Hai Bo himself, shows the same group of people – or at least the surviving members – several decades later. In an almost graphic manner, the two images register the passage of time and stir up viewers’ recollections of certain moments in their own lives. The passage of time comes into sharper focus in a third kind of image, in which dilapidated photographs become contemporary ‘ruins’.

154 Zheng Lianjie, Family History, performance, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 2000.

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155 Hai Bo, They No. 6, two photographs taken in 1973 and 1999, gelatin silver prints.

The representative artist in this group is Rong Rong (b. 1968), who moved to Beijing from rural Fujian in 1993. Among the many contemporary Chinese artists fascinated by the transformation of Chinese cities, Rong Rong’s photographs of demolished traditional houses best capture the anxiety and silence of these urban ‘black holes’. His photographs typically focus on torn posters of movie stars and fashion models: commercial prints that people had abandoned with their former homes (illus. 157). These pin-up images, which are too superficial to supply any individuality, highlight the absence of human subjects. As a result, Rong Rong’s photographs do not register a specific past or present. Instead, they represent transient time/space as a general condition of the transformation of Chinese cities in the 1990s. Going a step further, Rong Rong has made the vulnerability of photographic images a central theme of his work. One of his

156 Wang Youshen, News Paper, 2001, photo installation. opposite: 157 Rong Rong, 1996 No. 3(2), Beijing, 1996, gelatin silver print.

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158, 159 Wang Youshen, Washing: The Mass Grave at Datong in 1941, 1995, photo installation.

series studies the mortality of photographs by documenting photos displayed in public spaces. Faded and discoloured, each photowithin-a-photo is a ruin of its former self, an acute register of the traces left by time (illus. 207). For Wang Youshen (b. 1964) and Miu Xiaochun (b. 1964), however, the passage of time is not an abstract concept. The vulnerability of photographic images signifies above all the impermanence of historical memory. Wang has worked as an editor for the official newspaper Beijing Youth Daily since 1988. His 2001 installation News Paper displayed eroded historical photographs that he had discovered in the newspaper’s archives (illus. 156). In a 1995 installation entitled Washing: The Mass Grave at Datong in 1941, the newspaper pages on the wall report the discovery of a pit containing the remains of thousands of Chinese who were buried alive during the Second World War. Below the wall, photographic images of the unearthed human remains appear in two large basins under circulating water (illus. 158, 159). ‘The water washes the image away’, Wang commented, ‘just as time has washed people’s memories clear of this atrocity that occurred fifty years ago.’29 His view is echoed by Miao Xiaochun, who in one installation

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160, 161 Miao Xiaochun, Screen, 2001, slide installation.

projected a historical photo onto a white curtain (illus. 160, 161). The photo is familiar: taken by the wartime journalist Wang Xiaoting (1900–1981) in 1937, it shows a crying child at the Shanghai Railway Station after a Japanese bombing. Barely visible on the curtain, however, the ‘fading’ of the image alludes to the loss of memory of the event. conclusion

This chapter provides concrete examples for thinking through the relationship between photography and historical memory, and between art and visual culture. Above, I elaborated the differences between artistic ‘old photo’ images and mass-produced ‘old photo’ publications; by way of conclusion, I define the connections between them, as linked cultural practices in a shared historical context. On the most basic level, the two types of visual production shared the same materials: family and historical photos inspired amateur writers and avant-garde artists alike to create their photo/ 246

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texts and experimental works. Additional evidence suggests that some artists may also have been influenced by popular photo/texts. The format of Hai Bo’s ‘double portraiture’, of juxtaposing old and recent group portraits (illus. 155), was also seen in popular ‘old photo’ serials. For example, an entry called ‘Eight Sisters’ (‘Ba jiemei’) in No. 13 of Old Photos (published in March 2000) includes two photographs of eight women (illus. 162, 163). The first was taken in 1969 at the peak of the Cultural Revolution; the second, showing the same women in 1986, records their reunion seventeen years later. It is possible that Hai Bo derived inspiration from this or similar photo/ texts. Even if he did not, the striking similarity between his work and such ‘non-artistic’ images reveals a common mentality at work. Both artistic representations of ‘old photos’ and massproduced photo/texts first emerged in the 1980s in response to the Cultural Revolution; the value of ‘old photos’ as sites of personal and collective memory was foundational to Liu Xinwu’s writing, as well as to paintings by Wang Chuan, Yang Yiping and Zhang Xiaogang. The 1990s again witnessed parallel changes in artistic and popular representations of ‘old photos’. Most importantly, both types of representation turned away from grand history and ideology, and took as their mission the forging of ‘micro-histories’ that recounted the fragmentary experiences of ordinary people. ‘Representing facts’ became the guiding principle for both forms; the general tendency was to ‘return to the real’. This sense of realness also manifested in the materiality of both kinds of representation, albeit in different ways. Whereas popular ‘old photo’ publications filled a huge public space with mass-produced, low-budget reading materials, artistic representations employed ‘old photos’ as ready-made materials for installations and performances. This ‘return to the real’ also helps explain the popularity of documentary photography in China during the 1980s and ’90s. I have written elsewhere about the development of this photographic genre after the Cultural Revolution. Prompted by a collective effort to preserve memories of the 5 April demonstrations at the end of the Cultural Revolution,30 documentary photography evolved into an art movement, resulting in a huge corpus of images that recorded, among other things, people’s daily lives, social injustice and urban development.31 Many such photographs, especially those of traditional architecture and lifestyle made in the late 1990s, bear uncanny similarities to ‘old photos’.32 Some photographers consciously derived styles and compositions from historical photographs.33 Their 247

t h e ‘o l d p h oto c r a z e ’ a n d co n t e m p o r a r y c h i n e s e a r t 162, 163 From ‘Eight Sisters’, Old Photos, March 2000.

works, which internalized the temporality and even the materiality of ‘old photos’, were typically reproduced in volumes and sold in bookstores. In all these aspects, documentary photography allied itself with the popular ‘old photo craze’. On the other hand, documentary photography also had a strong relationship with experimental art. Installation and performance artists used both old and new documentary photos in their projects.34 Moreover, there was no rigid line separating a documentary photographer from an experimental artist; the former became the latter as soon as he made photography the subject of representation and interpretation. Documentary photography thus mediated popular and artistic representations of ‘old photos’, and became part of the negotiation between art and visual culture. As the Internet has grown into a unifying field of visual presentation since the early 2000s, it has provided a mechanism to connect popular and artistic representations of ‘old photos’. A Google search for laozhaopian (old photo) at the end of 2004 returned 537,000 entries, including many large websites on the subject. Some of these, such as Old Photos of Students Sent to the Countryside during the Cultural Revolution (Zhiqing lao zhaopian),35 originated from the ‘old photo’ serials in the late 1990s. At the same time, the Internet has become a window for showcasing artistic representations of ‘old photos’, as experimental artists like Rong Rong and Feng Mengbo do with their own websites, and as museums and art galleries circulate electronic images of works by these and other artists. It is interesting, however, that while such promotions have helped expand the market of contemporary art, computer technology has undercut publications of ‘old photos’ in printed form. To this end, the astonishing number of websites dedicated to preserving, collecting and disseminating historical photographs suggests that the ‘old photo craze’ never really dissipated, but has instead migrated from a print culture to a virtual world of image-making and representation.

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PART THREE LIVING IN TIME

8. MO YI: THE STORY OF AN URBAN ETHNOGRAPHER

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164 Mo Yi, Red Lamp Posts, No. 6, 1997, chromogenic print (detail of illus. 179).

Three broad changes in Chinese photography in the post-Mao era reinstalled photography within the canon of fine arts. These include a ‘documentary turn’ in the 1980s, the appearance and proliferation of independent photographers and the injection of conceptualism into documentary representation in the late 1980s and ’90s. When independent photographers re-emerged in China in the 1980s, their mission was to restore critical spirit and humanism to documentary photography. Their works constituted two main trends, both reacting against the Communist Party’s propaganda art during and after the Cultural Revolution. One trend emerged as a branch of Native Soil Art (Xiangtu meishu), an important artistic genre in the 1980s that advocated representations of ordinary people and what the photographers saw as the timeless spirit of Chinese civilization (illus. 165). Another trend echoed Scar Art (Shanghen meishu) and focused on human tragedies in Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution (illus. 166).1 These two trends developed in parallel and were featured abundantly in photography publications and exhibitions after 1985. Consequently there appeared intense searches for new documentary subjects by individual photographers; a specific subject often came to be associated with a particular photographer.2 These new kinds of documentary works appeared in sync with an important shift in their makers’ professional identity. From the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 until the mid-1980s, artistic photography developed within a self-contained field of ‘Chinese photography’ (Zhongguo sheying), which consisted of various art institutions, including schools and research institutes, publishers and galleries and various Associations of Chinese Photographers within the state’s administrative system (illus. 167).3 253

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Even though amateur and unofficial photographers played a leading role in the ‘documentary turn’ in the early and mid-1980s, in their effort to reinvent these institutions, they eventually joined them. This situation underwent a fundamental change in the late 1980s to mid-1990s, when a group of young photographers organized communities and activities outside the institutions of Chinese photography. Some of them were self-taught photographers who collaborated with experimental artists (shiyan yishujia) using different art mediums; others began their careers as avant-garde painters and graphic artists, but later abandoned brush and pen for the camera. In either case they had few ties with mainstream photography, but formed a strong alliance with avant-garde contemporary artists. Whereas the amateur photographers of the early and mid-1980s often ended their career in professional institutions, these independent photographers insisted on their outsider position even after they became well known. Conceptualism reached China in the 1980s and was embraced by many experimental photographers (shiyan sheyingjia) as a new foundation of artistic creativity in the 1990s. In a 1997 issue of New Photo (Xin sheying) (illus. 168), one of the earliest experimental photo journals in China, Liu Zheng and Rong Rong declared excitedly: When concept enters Chinese photography, it’s like a window suddenly opening in a room that has been sealed for years. We can now breathe comfortably and reach a new meaning of ‘new photography’.4

165 Hou Dengke, Untitled, 1985, gelatin silver print.

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166 Li Xiaobin, People Pleading for Justice from the Higher Authorities, 1977, colour photograph.

This statement conveys the sense of relief felt by independent photographers who had been struggling to come to terms with their artistic identity. Until then, these photographers had identified themselves mainly through negation – they established their alternative position by divorcing themselves from mainstream photography.5 But now they felt that they could define experimental photography on its own terms under the banner of conceptualism.6 Significantly, many photographers participating in this ‘conceptual turn’ came from the tradition of documentary photography. Their embrace of conceptualism did not mean a rejection of representation. Rather, the notion of a conceptdriven art steered them to pursue meaning beyond concrete images. Although many of them still insisted on documenting real-life events, they took ‘ideas’ (guannian or gainian) as the point of departure and began to interrogate the truthfulness of photography in representing reality. Mo Yi’s (b. 1958) artistic development is related to all these three changes. A decade older than Liu Zheng and Rong Rong (the subjects of the next two chapters), he conducted daring experiments outside the established system as early as the late 1980s, purposefully destabilizing conventional documentary photography and blurring the boundaries between photography and performance art. Several of his earlier photographic series from 1988 to 1997, including Expression of the Street (1988–9), A Swaying Bus, Landscape Outside a Public Bus (both 1990–95), Photos Taken through a Dog’s Eyes (1995), Red Lamp Posts (1997) and Urban Signs (1998), stemmed from a twofold engagement with the city on the one hand and with his own subjectivity on the other. Viewed together, these projects reflect a perpetual attraction to alienation in two senses. We notice that although his subject remained the city and he saw himself as an urban ethnographer, his experiments ultimately deconstructed the notion of an external, objective reality. Moreover, although he remained a documentary photographer generally, his works became increasingly conceptual, focusing on his interaction with the world surrounding him. This deconstructive tendency, however, disappeared from My Neighbourhood, an enormous documentary project which took Mo 255

mo yi 168 New Photo magazine, first issue, 1996.

Yi five years to accomplish, from 2001 to 2006. Representing a low-income housing complex in an encyclopedic manner, the nearly 3,000 pictures in this monumental work betray little sense of irony. Welcomed by the public and providing an invaluable visual archive of Chinese society, this work both concluded Mo Yi’s experimental phase and introduced a new chapter in his career as a ‘citizen intellectual’ committed to social representation.7 167 Zhongguo sheying (Chinese Photography), cover, June 1980.

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expression of the street

Mo Yi called himself ‘basically a Tibetan’ when I first interviewed him in 1997, although neither of his parents are Tibetan. During the Cultural Revolution his parents both worked in Lhasa. When his mother was about to give birth to him, she was travelling in a truck that fell into a gorge. Most of the passengers died but she (and he) survived. When he was fifteen, Mo Yi was recruited by the football (soccer) team of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. He played professional football on and off for twelve years from 1973 to 1985, first representing Tibet and then the city of Tianjin. In 1982 he became fascinated with photography and travelled around Tibet to take pictures with a simple automatic camera. Around the same time he also tried to enter university, but this goal proved to be a fantasy for a person who had never even finished junior high school. When he retired from professional football, he asked to work ‘anywhere which needed a photographer’. He was assigned a job in one of Tianjin’s children’s hospitals. The mid-1980s was the high time of the ‘documentary turn’, and many individual photographers set out with great energy to search for new documentary subjects.8 Wu Jialin (b. 1942) became known for his ethnographic images of the Wa people in Yunnan, Yu Deshui (b. 1953) won several prizes for recording lives along the Yellow River (see illus. 165) and Lü Nan (b. 1962) and Yuan Dongping (b. 1956) spent years photographing patients in psychiatric institutions around the country (see illus. 185, 186). Later, Lü discovered a new subject in underground, rural Catholic churches, while Yuan embarked on a large project entitled People of Poverty (Qiongren). Related to this search for documentary subjects but also to the rapid transformation of the Chinese city, an increasing number of photographers were attracted to urban scenes – the changing cityscape, the ruins of traditional buildings, the invasion of Western culture and the market economy and the new urban population and their occupations. Significantly, such representations of the new city, which often highlighted the transient nature of contemporary life and the photographers’ own involvement with urban space, immediately exposed the limitations of the conventional documentary style, which was supposed to be naturalistic and objective. Responding to this dilemma, Zhang Haier (b. 1957) and Mo Yi began to develop new approaches that could allow them not only to represent an external reality but also to respond to this reality. Combining flash with slow 258

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shutter speed, Zhang Haier’s images of Guangzhou’s street scenes seem both real and artificial; from the dark background his distorted and blurry face emerges, screaming towards the camera (illus. 169). His portraits of Guangzhou prostitutes were among the earliest images in post-Cultural Revolutionary Chinese photography that exposed the dark side of the society. Instead of detaching himself from his subjects as a typical documentary photographer would do, he made his communication with these young women the real point of representation. Looking at these images is to look into the prostitutes’ eyes; and there we find the photographer’s silent existence.9 Mo Yi’s photographs of urban spaces and their residents followed a different trajectory. His Expression of the Street is a large series of black-and-white photographs taken ‘blindly’ with a camera tied to his back. In a short essay published in 1990 entitled ‘A Report on an Experiment with the Camera’, he recounted the project as his reaction to criticism of his unadorned documentary photographs of people in Tianjin. According to him, Chinese art in the late 1980s was still heavily dominated by the rhetoric of Socialist Realism, and his bleak portraits of Tianjin’s residents clashed with the expected images of ‘the bright, progressive masses’. Discouraged by negative reactions and troubled by self-doubt, he designed an unconventional method to separate photographic images from the photographer’s eye: In a coterie exhibition in 1987 I showed a series of photos called City Dwellers [Chengshi ren]. Afterwards quite a few viewers wrote to me blaming me for photographing people only at ‘detached, lonely and suspicious’ moments. These comments made me wonder whether I had psychological problems – whether the world was actually fine and everyone was happy, but my ‘sick eyes’ selected only those ‘false and distressed’ scenes. I was scared by such thoughts and decided to undertake an experiment, separating the camera lens from my gaze and employing the camera only as a mechanical instrument for recording. My method was to tie the camera behind my neck or to hang it behind my waist. Using an extension cord, I took a picture every five steps when walking on the street. I wanted to see what people and their city look like when they were not selected by my eyes.10 The experiment restored Mo Yi’s confidence in himself: the majority of images captured by his camera, in his words, 259

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document an ‘expression’ of expressionlessness and apathy; people’s gazes are cold and detached; they seem to have no desire to be related to one another, and seem to be separated by invisible walls.11

169 Zhang Haier, Self-portrait, 1987, gelatin silver print.

Two images, both from this series, are taken from a low angle – possibly from behind or by his side. The pictures represent passersby in a busy commercial district in Tianjin, the second-largest city in north China. The space is crowded with pedestrians: in 1988 there were few private cars, and people were accustomed to strolling down the middle of a broad avenue on a sunny winter’s day. Yet the photographs show little interaction between them: packed with human figures, the pictures are nevertheless permeated with a strange silence. Men and women seem to be on guard. An old man, wearing a black coat and a Mao cap, watches the surroundings stealthily out of the corner of his eyes; deep hollows on his haggard face give him a sinister appearance (illus. 170). A young man seems equally unhappy. With knitted brows as a permanent feature on his face, he projects anxiety without seeming to realize it (illus. 171). Technically, these images constitute a group of auto-photographs, which intentionally disassociate an observer from the observed world. Used mainly in ethnographic fieldwork, the method of autophotography often involves giving cameras to indigenous people and asking them to photograph their living environment, so the researcher can ‘see the world through someone else’s eyes’.12 Images in Expression of the Street can be thought of as auto-photographs because they were made independently of Mo Yi’s gaze. But they differ from ethnographic auto-photography because the images do not embody anyone else’s perception either. What Mo Yi intended to record with the camera, in fact, is a world before being seen: the street scenes became subject to viewing only after he printed the images out as photographs. It is unclear how many images of Expression of the Street exist. Mo Yi wrote in 1991 that his sample photographs represented only 10 per cent of the negatives he had taken.13 He then wrote in 1996 that he ‘had more than 60 photographs printed out’.14 In any event, once these ‘auto-images’ were given a physical form, they took on the significance of a unique social record. It did not take long for Mo Yi to recognize that Expression of the Street unintentionally documented the collective psychology of Chinese people at an important historical moment, when Deng Xiaoping’s reformist policy was just beginning to transform socialist China into a capitalist economy. Commenting 261

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on this series in 1991, he attributed the unhappy, suspicious expressions on people’s faces to the social conditions of the time: 1988 was the time when a small number of citizens began to get rich but most people had little idea about what was happening. Facing rampant corruption and inflation, ordinary folks couldn’t adapt to the new social reality and lost their mental balance. Although the clothes they wore were no longer just blue and green [that is, the colours of the Mao suit and army uniforms popular during the Cultural Revolution], their hearts were heavy and clouded . . . It was just when China had begun to open its doors, but people were in a lousy mood and their faces showed their inward depression. Bad feelings and tempers spread like a disease. In a crowded city, people felt more isolated when they were pressed against each other. They easily picked fights for any trivial reason, cursing each other with rude words. This was 1988, an emotionally charged moment in China’s recent history. The situation would change in the 1990s.15 Mo Yi later grouped Expression of the Street and several other series under the title Urban Space (Chengshi kongjian). Taken between 1990 and 1996, however, these ‘other series’ attested to new modes that he invented to further problematize the relationship between external reality and his internal world. Meanwhile, he became increasingly fascinated with the performativity of photography. This fascination not only led him to reinterpret his earlier works, but also steered him to experiment with serial images as traces of his movement and shifting view. performing the city

170 Mo Yi, Expression of the Street, No. 18, 1988–90, gelatin silver print. 171 Mo Yi, Expression of the Street, No. 27, 1988–90, gelatin silver print.

Mo Yi’s next project was A Swaying Bus. Taking pictures of fellow passengers on a bumpy public bus, he created unstable images that register the jarring motion of the vehicle, the passengers and himself all at once (illus. 172). As in making Expression of the Street, he intentionally surrendered his control over the camera. But this time, the unbalanced compositions and blurry images signified the vulnerability of the photographer as well as his subjects, since they were all immersed in a perilous venture which they could neither resist nor manoeuvre. At the time, Mo Yi was deeply depressed by the failure of the 1989 pro-democracy movement. As a ‘documentary’ 263

zo om i n g i n 172 Mo Yi, A Swaying Bus No. 4, 1990–95, gelatin silver print.

project, A Swaying Bus reflected his precarious psychological state and his pessimistic view of Chinese society, metaphorically represented as a claustrophobic moving vehicle that permitted no individual mobility. He wrote: To continue to live, we must inhabit this crowded, narrow space which prevents any free movement. We look at one other in close proximity but conceal our wills and feelings. Most commonly we see only awkward, blank faces. A public bus is like an era or a nation. Fate determines where you should be at a given moment. Resistance can hardly change predestination. When the bus moves, you move; when it stops, you stop; when it swings, you swing. Whether you like it or not, you cannot decide for yourself.16 While A Swaying Bus focused on the interior of the vehicle, its sister project, Landscape Outside a Public Bus, turned the camera lens to the space beyond the bus window. Mo Yi has dated the first series to 1990 and the second series to 1995. But judging from their identical style and shared locations (some pictures in the two series were shot on the same bus), they must have been made during the same period from 1990 to 1995 and were divided into two groups by the photographer based on the binary concept of interiority versus exteriority. In Landscape Outside a Public Bus, photographs frequently feature windows with dark borders; the extra frame reinforces the 264

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feeling of confinement and suffocation. In some cases, a row of shadowy passengers adds yet another barrier, blocking the viewer’s gaze towards the outside (illus. 173). In other cases, a policeman is featured as the beholder of the external view, hence generating a strong sense of surveillance (illus. 174). In all the photos in this series, the external ‘landscape’ is devoid of a clear visual focus and looks monotonous and dirty. The implication seems to be that although the idea of ‘outside’ promises liberty and freedom, it is not at all clear what this promise means if the world outside is vacant and featureless. By rendering these images ‘empty’, Mo Yi subtly redefined their meaning as documentary photography. If in designing Expression of

173 Mo Yi, Landscape Outside a Public Bus No. 1, 1990–95, gelatin silver print. 174 Mo Yi, Landscape Outside a Public Bus No. 7, 1990–95, gelatin silver print.

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the Street he still hoped to obtain unbiased records of the external world, A Swaying Bus and Landscape Outside a Public Bus abandoned such hope. Instead, in these documentary works Mo Yi tried to capture the feeling of anxiety, uncertainty and instability. His 1995 project Photos Taken through a Dog’s Eyes intensified the sense of alienation even further by assuming the vantage point of a stray dog. Lowering the camera to near ground level and taking random shots, Mo Yi made aimless shots that contained only fragmented images of people’s legs and feet, bicycle wheels and a shabby platform of a traffic policeman (illus. 175, 176). For a while he was obsessed by such fragmentary

175 Mo Yi, Photos Taken Through a Dog’s Eyes No. 7, 1995, gelatin silver print. 176 Mo Yi, Photos Taken Through a Dog’s Eyes No. 1, 1995, gelatin silver print.

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mo yi 177 Mo Yi, Landscape Mixed with Red, unnumbered, 1999, chromogenic print.

images and made three more series in a similar vein.17 In a 1996 manuscript he described his experience in Shanghai earlier that year: I was like a wild dog crossing the street under the city’s highrises. If you look into its eyes, you will see yearning, fear and perplexity all at once.18 This statement signified a simultaneous change in Mo Yi’s interest from representing people to expressing himself. Not coincidentally, during this period, from 1990 to 1996, images of urban dwellers gradually disappeared from his photos, and he increasingly saw himself as a performance artist equipped with a camera. This new artistic persona even prompted him to rewrite his accounts for some of his earlier works, including Expression of the Street. We have learned from his 1990 self-statement that he undertook this project in order ‘to see what people and their city look like when they were not selected by my eyes’.19 Writing about this work again in 1995 or 1996, he saw only a performance in his mind’s eye: With shaggy hair and a long beard, the weird way I looked distinguished me in an era when everything was standardized. My appearance puzzled people even more when I tied my camera to the back of my neck. The camera was still rare in China in the 1980s; people hung it on their chests to show off their financial well-being and leisurely lifestyle. Everyone who saw me was bound to question if I was crazy: why did this man 267

zo om i n g i n 178 Mo Yi, Urban Signs No. 6, 1998, chromogenic print.

tie the camera behind him? The truth is that I transformed myself into a work of action art and put it on crowded streets. My camera was equipped with a motor. Holding a long extension cord, I took a picture every five steps. Carrying out this action given the distinctive way I looked, it was like conducting a ritual ceremony in disguise.20 A direct consequence of this ‘performance turn’ was the making of more than nine series of self-portraits from 1997 to 1999, including A Prisoner, Ten Thousand Prisoners, Front and Back, I’m in My Environment, I’m in My Landscape (all from 1997), In Memory of Tiananmen (1998), Diary: Landscape with Me in It (starting from 1998), Landscape Mixed with Red, These Are All Me (both from 1999) and others. As I have discussed elsewhere, some of these series (such as In Memory of Tiananmen) record actual performances, while others (such as A Prisoner, Ten Thousand Prisoners and Front and Back) simulate performances by collaging images of his front and back into large compositions.21 A third type of self-portrait situates him within a cityscape, often ordinary and chaotic street scenes. Mo Yi devised a new method of creating a strong visual effect in these pictures. As exemplified by Landscape Mixed with Red, his image 268

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in the foreground and the streets in the background are sharply distinguished by the contrasting colours of red and blue (illus. 177). To create this effect, Mo Yi covered his flash with a red filter. He also deliberately used a cheap point-and-shoot camera and made the prints at a low-budget photo stand. The result is a series of theatrical but crude, often blurry or overexposed images that record his random movement through the city. In addition to these self-portraits, Mo Yi’s ‘performance turn’ produced another group of photographs, in which his existence is simply suggested by changing street scenes. Red Lamp Posts (1997) and Urban Signs (1998) are two examples of this type. Both series contain works made of multiple 5 × 7-inch prints, mounted on a hard board in vertical and horizontal rows to form a grid. Take the largest composition in the Red Lamp Posts series: 25 prints all feature blood-red lamp posts in the middle; each lamp post displays a different assortment of advertisements, some freshly posted, others half-pulled off (illus. 179, see also illus. 164). The 25 separate lamp posts and their changing backgrounds allude to the movement of the photographer, who is walking from one location to another in the city to photograph the lamp posts. The idea of the photographer as an invisible performer is reinforced by other visual elements. The irregular widths and angles of the lamp posts, for example, constantly

179 Mo Yi, Red Lamp Posts No. 5, 1997, chromogenic print.

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readjust the distance between the camera and its target and between onlooker and the pictures. In Urban Signs, Mo Yi occasionally sticks his head or hand in front of the camera, reminding us that he is always there, even in pictures which feature only isolated traffic signs on empty streets (illus. 178). my neighbourhood

My Neighbourhood is the largest project that Mo Yi has attempted so far in representing Chinese urban lives. Encompassing close to 3,000 photographs in eight sections, it debuted at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in September 2006.22 The work was widely praised for its immense scale and ‘humanistic spirit’. Upon seeing it, the critic Xiao Chen commented: Mo Yi, who had made a name for himself in the field of photography with his avant-garde, conceptual and alternative works, unexpectedly appears in this important international photography festival with a realistic work that showcases a thoroughly naturalistic style.23 Whether this new work can be labelled ‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’ is debatable, but Xiao is correct in detecting a decisive reorientation in Mo Yi’s photography. The change is not so much in the work’s content as in its style and tenor. In terms of subject-matter, My Neighbourhood represents a low-income residential complex in Tianjin through documenting eight kinds of local spaces and objects: (1) entrances of apartment buildings, (2) communal hallways inside buildings, (3) protective metal frames outside windows, (4) various things placed inside these barred windows, (5) air conditioners protruding from individual apartments, (6) blackboards for public announcements, (7) the communal yard between apartment buildings and (8) cotton quilts being aired in the yard on sunny days. On the surface, these subjects continue and expand one of Mo Yi’s earlier interests, as he had begun to photograph spaces in his neighbourhood as early as the mid-1990s.24 The difference in visual effect and mood between his 1996 Hallways series and My Neighbourhood is shocking, however. Consisting of 24 bleak black-and-white pictures, the earlier Hallways series features dusty, decrepit communal spaces in a dilapidated apartment building (illus. 180). The pictures vary in shooting angle and tonality; some are so densely dark that they conceal their subjects 270

mo yi 180 Mo Yi, from the series Hallways, 1996, gelatin silver print.

rather than depicting them. Instead of documenting specific places or objects, the grim, chaotic images express the photographer’s depressed psychological state. Views of hallways and apartment doors also constitute one of the eight sections in My Neighbourhood. But these are bright, colourful images that impose no emotional impact on the viewer. In a standard layout of this section, featured in many introductions to My Neighbourhood, 324 images of hallways and apartment doors form a vast mosaic, displaying cheerful holiday decorations pasted on doors and walls (illus. 181). This quick comparison reveals some noticeable changes brought about by My Neighbourhood. Although the work’s title claims that it is about Mo Yi’s own living environment,25 this personal connection is seriously compromised, if not entirely erased, by the impersonal style of the work as a whole. Moreover, although My Neighbourhood derives many visual elements from Mo Yi’s earlier experimental photographs, such as composite imagery, the grid construction and the absence of human figures, these elements help present collectivity in My Neighbourhood, not the photographer’s individuality. Finally, 271

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181 Mo Yi, My Neighbourhood: Windows, Yibin Dongli 2, 2001–4, chromogenic print.

the series abandons the deliberately amateurish, rough style that had characterized Mo Yi’s earlier experimental works. Images in My Neighbourhood are sharply focused and have impeccable clarity (illus. 182). As such they can be made into different sizes for exhibition. When this work was shown in Chicago’s Walsh Gallery in 2007, a single picture of a red quilt was enlarged to the size of a mural yet still retained its sharpness (illus. 183). The eight sections were shown in composite forms, with ‘miniature’ transparencies placed on light tables to form eight grids. Whereas this compositional style recalls Red Lamp Posts and Urban Signs (see illus. 179, 178), in My Neighbourhood it does not generate any visual tension but instead constructs uniform two-dimensional surfaces. The endless images of doors, metal window frames, air conditioners, blackboards and building facades are all perfectly frontal and firmly attached to the pictorial plane. Our gaze travels smoothly on the surfaces of the photographs without penetrating them. This pronounced twodimensionality goes hand in hand with the work’s decorative quality. Beholding a pictorial construction composed of 324 screen windows or air conditioners, we see patterns before noticing individual objects. These new elements not only distinguish My Neighbourhood from Mo Yi’s earlier works but also indicate a different intentionality. In this chapter we have discussed how he rebelled against conventional documentary photography in making Expression of the Street and subsequent series from 1988 to 1995 (illus. 170–74), and how he internalized performativity with multiple yet alternating images in 1997 and 1998 (illus. 178, 179). These experimental projects reflected a perpetual tendency towards alienation: feeling rejected by society, he was also under an inward pressure to escape himself. These projects also revealed a profound mistrust of the representability of reality on the one hand, and a constant search for new ways of taking pictures on the other. As a result he could never develop a consistent documentary project from the late 1980s to 1990s, but kept testing whether the world could be documented objectively, and how it could be documented with or without the photographer’s subjective interference. The tenor of My Neighbourhood is entirely different: the photographer is invigorated by the desire to create a monumental work of public art (illus. 181). Although Mo Yi titled the work ‘my neighbourhood’, he made it clear that such low-income housing complexes ‘can be found in over 90 per cent of Chinese cities’.26 The work’s subject thus discreetly shifts from the state of his personal 273

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existence to that of Chinese people as a whole. This shift is most clearly manifested in the explanatory texts by Mo Yi that accompany the eight sections. He wrote these texts without any hint of emotional involvement, seemingly as summaries of a sociological investigation.27 What happened? What pacified Mo Yi’s inner demon and transformed his experimental art into what has been called ‘a model in Chinese photography that integrates life and art in a perfect manner’?28 While it is difficult to pin down any specific reason, some fundamental changes in the Chinese art world in the early 2000s will provide a general context for understanding his reorientation. Most important, contemporary Chinese art, including experimental photography, was ‘normalized’ during this period. China’s cultural authorities were known for their hostility towards contemporary art throughout the 1990s, but the government began to send large-scale contemporary art exhibitions abroad soon after the new millennium began. Inside the country, the Third Shanghai Biennale in 2000 introduced a host of officially sponsored biennials and triennials, testifying to the art establishment’s urgent need to join a popular trend in global art and economics. Facilitating this trend, art forms that had been forbidden started to crowd exhibition halls; paintings and photographs competed to impress the audience with increased visual spectacle and physical size. Many independent artists returned to art academies; their works assumed high prices in commercial galleries and auction houses. All these changes brought contemporary Chinese art into a new phase characterized by the absence of clear-cut selfpositioning and the incessant interpenetration of multiple systems.

182 Mo Yi, My Neighbourhood: Windows, 2001–4, chromogenic print (detail).

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183 Mo Yi, My Neighbourhood: A Sunny Day, 2001–4, chromogenic print (detail).

It was also in the early 2000s that the term ‘experimental art’ lost its original social and political meaning. If there were times when this term evoked ideas of avant-gardism and alternative identities, as demonstrated by Mo Yi’s works from the 1980s and ’90s, in the early 2000s it signified the non-confrontational coexistence of governmental, academic, commercial and independent undertakings, all claiming ownership of the contemporary as a marker of progressiveness, globalism and a general sense of experimentation. It is in this atmosphere that Mo Yi created My Neighbourhood, and it is in this environment that the critic Xiao Chen saw it as an embodiment of ‘ordinary people’s voices’.29 Examined from the perspective of the artist’s artistic development, My Neighbourhood is a meaningful public work that utilizes the visual language that Mo Yi had developed in previous years. It is now a representative work of Chinese documentary photography in the early 2000s which simultaneously indexes the disappearance of the experimental spirit of the 1990s.

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9. LIU ZHENG: MY COUNTRYMEN

here comes china’s diane arbus

184 Liu Zheng, Two Disabled Men on the Street, Tongxian, Beijing, from the series My Countrymen, 1996, gelatin silver print.

Emily Post’s Etiquette summarizes a basic rule for civilized behaviour: ‘Q: How do you behave around disabled individuals? A: Ideally, you behave just as you would around a person who has no visible handicap. Never stare . . .’ .1 But any photograph of a disabled person must ignore Post’s advice: the very act of photographing someone with a disability implies not only intense ‘staring’ but also the decision to record that person’s physical disability for posterity. Consequently, an effort is often made to legitimate this decision: either the photographer or an interpreter is expected to provide acceptable reasons for the image’s production and existence. These reasons can be and have been established on scientific or artistic grounds, as well as formulated as emotional or ideological motives. Thus R. Ollerenshaw opens the anthology Medical Photography in Practice with his warning against the illegitimate use of clinical photos.2 Diane Arbus’s (1923–1971) ‘freak’ portraits have been interpreted in many ways, including as social documentary and as reflections of the photographer’s ‘inner chaos’.3 But behind each of these opinions lies a similar compulsion: to justify the supposedly antisocial aspect of images of people with disabilities. Consistent with Post’s advice, there is an assumption that because a person with a disability cannot be stared at inoffensively – because his or her body apparently cannot be wholesomely visually enjoyed – the person with a disability cannot be innocently photographed. That is, pictures of disabled people cannot in good conscience be made without a rationalization based on factors beyond what is apparent in the images themselves. It is this assumption that much of the critical literature of disability studies seeks to overturn. 277

zo om i n g i n 185 Yuan Dongping, Sisters, Tianjin, 1989, gelatin silver print.

‘Artistic’ photographs of people living with a deformity, illness or disability – along with justifications for making and exhibiting these images – have appeared in China only since the 1980s. Before then, China had not produced its own Arbus or Stanley Burns.4 Rather, the government’s cultural policy discouraged any attempt to reveal ‘the dark side of society’. Under Mao’s direct patronage, a Socialist Realist art was developed over the 1950s and ’60s with a mandate to create idealistic images of workers, peasants and soldiers. The Cultural Revolution further eliminated any individual traits in these images, transforming them into symbolic representations of a healthy, revolutionary people uplifted by the Communist faith. The monopoly that this official art held from the 1960s to ’70s established the historical conditions from which developed two subsequent artistic movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Scar Art, which depicted human tragedies during the Cultural Revolution, and Native Soil Art, which advocated realistic portrayals of ordinary people (albeit still often in a romanticized manner). Both movements contributed to the emergence of documentary photography in the 1980s and ’90s as an important component of experimental art.5 When a group of young artists of that period exhibited their photographs of ‘human ruins’ – lunatics, cripples, prostitutes and children in extreme poverty – they broke radically from the Socialist Realist canon (illus. 185, 186).6 Not only did their subject-matter violate the taboo against representing the ‘dark side of society’; their journalistic style and snapshot aesthetics also sharply contrasted with the idealized and polished images ubiquitous in officially sponsored artwork.7 278

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186 Lü Nan, A Withdrawn Patient in a Psychiatric Hospital, Guzhou, 1990, gelatin silver print.

When this type of documentary photography crested in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Liu Zheng (b. 1969) was still a student at Beijing’s University of Science and Technology. Majoring in optics, he took an elementary photography class and became addicted to the camera. Unsatisfied with the school’s offerings on the subject (the course was the only one available), he sought knowledge of photography from any specialist he could find. Hearing that Ma Jinghua, a teacher at the Art Academy of the People’s Liberation Army, was good at taking portraits, Liu Zheng tracked him down and began to follow him everywhere. Ma found the obsessed young man unbearable and called him a lunatic when Liu Zheng insisted on tagging along after him in public. It was just after the 1989 student pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square that ended in bloodshed, and Beijing was filled with patrolling soldiers. Hearing Ma shout, the soldiers interrogated Liu Zheng, who, doubly wounded, answered their questions by repeating Ma’s accusation: ‘I am a lunatic.’8 This incident introduced a pattern in Liu Zheng’s life: his dedication to photographing the disabled is always coupled with a feeling of betrayal by his fellow human beings.

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After graduating from university in 1991, Liu Zheng worked for a year in Taiyuan’s Municipal Mining Bureau in Shanxi. One of his first assignments was to photograph coal miners in twenty small mines around the city. The physical conditions of the mines were horrifying and the miners were treated inhumanly as well. He worked for three months on the project and often spent days underground. But when he finally selected two hundred photos and handed them to his superior, the superior asked him where the other ten rolls of films were – the two hundred photos accounted for only seven of the seventeen rolls he had been given for the assignment. Humiliated and enraged, Liu Zheng refused to explain and told his superior that in fact he had stolen the film and was quitting the job. Similar situations occurred after he went to work in 1992 in the editorial department of the Worker’s Daily newspaper, first as a proofreader and later as a photojournalist. After recalling one such event during an interview, he lamented: ‘I can never have good relationships with people around me. I don’t know if this is because I don’t understand them or because they don’t understand me. It just seems so absurd!’9 Gradually he discovered that he felt safe and in control only around people with whom he did not have to interact on a daily basis – people who were considered marginal or had been rejected by society. These people, invisible in everyday life, eventually became the subjects of his photographic series My Countrymen. my countrymen

Distinguishing himself from the 1980s photographers of ‘human ruins’, Liu Zheng abandoned their spontaneous, journalistic approach in favour of technical perfection and visual monumentality. His photos of the physically and mentally disabled, patients in asylums and other marginal subjects, are large portraits with balanced composition and rich tonal contrast. Also, unlike the earlier photojournalists, who sought emotional responses over rationalization, Liu Zheng made his photos according to a preconceived master plan – an enormous tripartite visual epic he intends to devote his entire life to completing. Each of the three series in the epic, titled My Countrymen (Guoren), Three Realms (Sanjie) and Revolution (Geming), is to consist of sixty to a hundred photos.10 Together they will compose his personal understanding of China – its culture, history, mythology and ethics – and announce it to the world. 280

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Not long after he formulated this plan in 1997, Liu Zheng quit his job at the Worker’s Daily and started working full time on the project. My Countrymen – the first series in the epic – was completed in 2000.11 Before discussing this important work in contemporary Chinese photography, we need to correct a small but serious mistake in previous introductions to it. This set of photographs was exhibited in New York’s International Center for Photography in 2004 under the title The Chinese, and published in an exhibition catalogue of the same title.12 Afterwards, The Chinese became the standard name of this work in Western language publications. In truth, this is a mistranslation or misinterpretation of the original Chinese title, which conveys a quite different meaning. By calling the work Guoren or My Countrymen, Liu Zheng identifies himself with the subjects of his photographs. This self-positioning separates this work from those by Western photographers, which observe and represent Chinese people from an external position, as exemplified by John Thomson’s (1837–1921) Illustrations of China and Its People. The one hundred photos in My Countrymen portray a wide range of diverse subjects – not only living and dead human figures but also medical specimens and sculptured mannequins. The idiosyncratic selection of subjects results from a gradual accumulation of images reflecting the artist’s photographic experience from 1997 to 2000: these are the people and images Liu Zheng encountered, became fascinated by and photographed to his satisfaction. Although he never articulated a coherent typology for the series and has not deliberated on its sociological significance, the impressive number of images permits a statistical ordering. By mapping some recurrent themes it is possible to gain a context for understanding his portrayals of disabled bodies. What follows is my classification of the one hundred photographs based on the identities of their subjects; the number of photos in each category is given in parentheses: (1) Disability and illness (total 12) Developmentally disabled and mentally ill (5), physically disabled and impaired (4), old and sick (3). (2) Gender variance, transformation and disguise (total 29) Homosexual and transgender (4), men dressed as women (9), actors and actresses (16).

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(3) Social punishment and prejudice (total 20) Prisoners (6), beggars and wanderers (5), prostitutes and bar girls (7), coal miners (2). (4) Ethnic and religious minorities (total 12) Ethnic minorities (4), religious figures (8). (5) Death and posthumous mutilation (total 18) Corpses and funerals (8), medical specimens and dissected bodies (8), slaughterhouses (2). (6) Sculptural representations (total 9) Grotesque mannequins (7), funerary statues (2). Without a fixed order, these images testify to Liu Zheng’s unspoken perceptions of the transformations to which the human form is subject. Notably, many of the subjects fit the common notion of the stigmatized. Erving Goffman pointed out almost forty years ago that in modern society the ranks of the stigmatized are characterized by a high degree of eclecticism. As deviants from the normative order, the stigmatized include not only the mentally ill and the physically disabled but also ethnic and racial minorities, homosexuals, serious drug addicts and criminals and ex-convicts. Some are stigmatized by circumstances of birth or the caprices of fate; others are deliberate violators of the social and moral order.13 It is significant to note that from very early on, disabled people were represented among the ranks of the stigmatized in photography. Thus in late nineteenth-century Paris, the Salpâtrière Hospital produced journals full of pictures not only of medical patients but also of prostitutes, gypsies, Jews, Arabs and other individuals on the margins of society.14 A century later, the photo album Diane Arbus, published in 1972, featured not only dwarfs and developmentally disabled girls but also an albino acrobat, transvestites, drag queens, nudists, prostitutes, a topless dancer, masked men and women, a ‘Jewish giant’ and people identified simply as ‘freaks’.15 Knowing nothing of Goffman’s writing, Liu Zheng has photographed almost all of the stigmatized types that Goffman categorized. His eyes are fixed on people who are recipients of unwanted identities and who have been made objects of prejudice. But his pictures are not vehicles of social criticism. Liu Zheng has been quoted as saying: ‘I am not a humanist. I photograph these 282

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people to show the helpless absurdities of human existence.’16 In consequence, like their subjects in real life, his images frequently inspire revulsion and fear, not sympathy and pity. And a dispassionate spectator may well attribute his or her discomfort at viewing these photos to the subjects themselves, holding them responsible for their perceived flaws. Images of disabled and stigmatized subjects

This section uses five photographs from My Countrymen to exemplify a photographic style that Liu Zheng has developed to represent disabled and stigmatized people, and also cites Liu Zheng’s own words to describe the occasions on which the photographs were taken. These words are derived from several interviews I conducted with him over three years, from 1998 to 2000. In the interviews I invited him to describe the pictures in My Countrymen one by one and recorded his accounts. By interweaving these accounts with my readings of selected pictures, I hope to convey Liu Zheng’s personal voice in a way that reflects his positionality in making them. The subjects of the first two photographs in this group have physical and mental disabilities. One image portrays two mentally disabled men in Tongxian, Beijing (illus. 184), and the other, three deaf-mute girls in Shenyang, Liaoning (illus. 187). It is significant that when describing these and other works, Liu Zheng always talked about them as real people: their looks, demeanours and how he met them. On no occasion did he speak about the photographs as artificial images produced in a darkroom. Tongxian is in the eastern suburbs of Beijing. I met these two men in a small park at the centre of the town. They were from different families, but both appeared in the park every morning as part of their daily routine. When they saw me they always shook my hand, raised their arms to salute me and then went about their business, which was to direct the traffic in the park. Of course no one listened to them, but their seriousness never flagged. They were dressed in police uniforms. The older guy also wore a policeman’s cap, a tie and a pair of sunglasses. It took me several years to realize that most disabled people in Beijing love police uniforms. Policemen are probably the most powerful people in their minds, and wearing such clothes, they feel they are as powerful as policemen. One of them said 283

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to me one day: ‘I am a man of the government. You cannot touch me!’17 About the deaf and mute girls in Shenyang, Liu Zheng said: These girls belong to Shenyang’s Acrobatic Troupe of the Disabled [Canjiren zajituan]. Other actors and actresses in the troupe include dwarfs, giants, physically disabled people and boys and girls with severed limbs. The troupe is not an official institution. Several years ago a local businessman wanted to do something good for society and established it. But after a series of financial crises he abandoned the project. Now it’s run by its director, a good-looking woman who was disabled by polio when she was a child. This troupe has become rather famous in Shenyang. It’s often been mentioned in the local media and has even travelled abroad once. The actors and actresses seem innocent and happy when you first meet them, always running around and giggling. But when you get to know them better, you find that they’re extremely vulnerable and in a constant state of worry. An acrobat has a short professional life – none of them can hope to stay in the troupe after reaching 25 or 30. So they all try to save money, yet they earn so little – 10–20 yuan [about $1.25–2.50] for a night’s performance.

187 Liu Zheng, Three Deafmute Girls, Shenyang, Liaoning, from the series My Countrymen, 1999, gelatin silver print.

Neither photograph emphasizes the physical defect of the subjects. In fact, without noticing the characters on a banner under the girls’ feet, which reads ‘Acrobatic Troupe of the Disabled’, it is impossible to know that they have any physical problem. One girl holds her hands in a dancing gesture in front of her body while looking straight into the camera lens with a confident air. The other two girls are locked in an innocent embrace, their faces brightened by broad smiles. The two men in the other photograph likewise invite no pity. Standing erect in front of the camera, they look like a father and son who are taking a formal portrait together to commemorate a reunion. Only a second and longer look reveals some odd details as clues to the photos’ hidden meaning: Why does the old man wear a policeman’s hat but a patterned tie? Why are his trousers so short as to form a glaring contrast with the baggy pants of the younger men next to him? Why do the girls stand on a banner and what do the words on it say? The delayed answers to 284

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these questions suggest a special aspect of Liu Zheng’s portraits of the disabled: unlike many photographs in this genre, Liu’s images display, first of all, the normality of his subjects, and only guide the viewer to discover the subjects’ abnormity after the initial look. In other words, he self-consciously distances himself from a conventional practice in representing disabled people, which immediately identifies the subjects as anomalous in order to incite fascination and sympathy. This aspect of Liu Zheng’s photographs is likely related to the ‘kinship’ that he felt with the socially outcast men and women in his pictures, which we have discussed earlier in this chapter. The next three photographs in this group feature stigmatized people rather than physically disabled people. Stylistically, they more directly adhere to the genre of portrait photography, with each composition dominated by an individual human figure. The camera closely surveys a figure’s facial features and personality traits. The returning stare from the subject acknowledges the photographer’s existence and signifies their psychological distance. The man in the first photo is a silent, brooding drug addict in a rehab facility in Tongxin, Ningxia (illus. 188). Upon visiting the place, Liu Zheng detected deeper meaning in his silence than simply an anti-social attitude:

188 Liu Zheng, Drug Addict in a Rehab Centre, Tongxin, Ningxia, from the series My Countrymen, 1996, gelatin silver print.

Tongxin is the poorest place I’ve ever been to. It is also a Minority Autonomous County, with a population that is 95 per cent Muslim. The novelist Zhang Chengzhi has written about this place, which was conquered during the Qing dynasty but never lost its desire for independence. So its people became even more fervent about their religion and since then have also found refuge in drugs. Most people became drug addicts because they are too poor. They have to live with drugs because making and selling drugs provide their main livelihood. The rehab centre outside Tongxin combines a hospital, an asylum and a prison in one. It is a tightly guarded compound with 40–50 patients in it. Some of them are sent there by their families; others, by the local government. They sing and exercise according to a strict schedule. But everyone knows it is useless, because statistics show that 99 per cent of them resume their old habit as soon as they leave the centre. I met this guy during my visit. He was suspected of being a chief drug dealer in the region, and if the police could prove it, they would execute him 287

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the following week. But there simply isn’t enough evidence. In the centre, he was so silent but formidable that he got on everyone’s nerves. Even the guards did not dare offend him. When I asked him if I could photograph him, he looked straight into my eyes for a long time. He didn’t move a bit when I took pictures. There’s a tattoo on his arm. No one knows what it means, but to me, it echoes the pattern of the anti-drug slogan on the wall behind him. The other two photographs, taken in a single afternoon in Beijing, portray two men performing female roles in an underground space (illus. 189, 190). Here is Liu Zheng’s account of the occasion: One day in 1995, I ran into a strange team of performers in a subway station in Beijing. There were 40–50 of them, all dressed in colourful costumes and wearing heavy make-up. Most of them were quite old; only a few were middle-aged. They told me that they came from Qinhuangdao, in northern Hebei. Because the government had lowered the age of retirement to 60 or even 55, they now found themselves jobless and with nothing to do with their lives. So they formed a touring yangge [a folk dance genre popular in northern China] troupe to amuse themselves and to earn some money. Some low-budget clubs and hotels hire them, because the customers love to see old guys dancing in young girls’ outfits. I followed them to the place where they were going to perform that night – an underground theatre remodelled from an air-raid shelter built in the early seventies. I couldn’t bring myself to watch them perform. Several actors asked me to take their portraits. The one in this picture was actually 72 years old. A younger one, also dressed in feminine clothes, held my hand and saw me off at the entrance. Liu Zheng suspected that both men were homosexual, which would make them instant social outcasts in 1990s China. The old man in the first picture wears a wig and is dressed like a young girl. Kneeling cross-legged in a challenging pose, he looks into the camera lens with a half-teasing expression. A cigarette dangles from his lips. The other man must be the ‘younger one’ mentioned in Liu’s passage – the tiled wall behind him identifies the setting as the same underground space. His costume suggests that he is 288

189 Liu Zheng, Old Man Performing as a Girl, Beijing, from the series My Countrymen, 1995, gelatin silver print. 190 Liu Zheng, An Actor Playing a Female Role, Beijing, from the series My Countrymen, 1995, gelatin silver print.

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impersonating an empress or princess: the phoenix on the jewelled headdress is a conventional symbol of female royalty. But his heavy make-up stresses the angularity of his face, and his intense, piercing gaze would overpower any onlooker. Instead of displaying feminine beauty, the photograph is energized by the tension between the actor’s masculinity and the female role which he plays. Both performers have no job and no steady income, and their marginality in society is reinforced by their cross-dressed theatrical roles. In the photos they yearn to become fictional characters, but can never erase the gap between fantasy and reality. death unites

Living people are not the exclusive content of Liu Zheng’s My Countrymen. Two of its persistent focuses – those of death and grotesque figural representations – exceed the interpretive reach of the stigma framework and testify instead to the photographer’s fascination with the transformations of the degenerate body. In particular, the inclusion of these two types of images erases the boundary between reality and unreality. Liu Zheng returned repeatedly to this topic during my interviews with him: the more he worked on the project, the less convinced he was of the separation between life and death and between the observed world and artistic representation of it. A living person can in many ways be partially distorted and dead, while a dead body can continue to live through the pain its mutilation inflicts on an observer. A grotesque mannequin may be artificial in reality, but its artificiality can recede in a photograph, where representation and reproduction seem to command the power to imbue life. Following this line of argument, we find the key to understanding My Countrymen not in Goffman’s categories but in an open-ended series of transformations consisting of marginal or transitional stages. The notion of transformation, rather than categorization, better explains Liu Zheng’s photos because it allows us to see them as a representational whole. The series links the stigmatized to dying, death and posthumous mutilation on the one hand and to fantastic or macabre figurations of the body on the other. Because these connections are continuously established on shifting ontological levels, deformation is perceived as an ongoing process of physical deterioration: even a stone statue is subject to ruin. In Liu Zheng’s own words, whether a photo portrays a living person 290

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or a corpse, a human being or a sculpture, it is included in the series because the image is ‘simultaneously real and surreal, both here and not here’.18 In this sense, these images pertain to various liminal stages – transitional phases in a ‘rite of passage’.19 Some anthropologists have proposed that stigmatized people are liminal because ‘they are marginal to society – poised perhaps to enter, but still outside its boundaries’.20 But when understood in this expanded manner, liminality can be used to characterize other states of being, including those of the mutilated corpse or the mannequin, states that lie outside normality and point to transitional positions or transient moments. Among contemporary Chinese photographers, Liu Zheng has perhaps devoted the most time and energy to portraying people with disabilities. But what really distinguishes these portraits from works of similar content is not their quantity and artistry but the relationship between the photographer and his subjects. Historically speaking, many portraits of disabled people are humanistic in intent, offering sympathy for their subjects and demanding justice on their behalf. Other photographers are attracted by the transmuted body, which evokes in them mixed feelings of fascination, contempt and awe.21 In either case, these artists identify themselves with what sociologists call the hegemonic group of the able-bodied majority. Liu Zheng’s self-positioning in conducting his project is more complex and ambiguous. On the one hand, he is fascinated by physical impairment and transforms his disabled subjects into aesthetic objects. On the other hand, he finds himself deeply connected to these people because, as mentioned earlier, he sees his inability to relate to everyday society as proof of his own marginal identity. Liu Zheng told me that many photographers are amazed by his ability to communicate with people whose bodies or minds are disabled. He seems to know by instinct how to persuade them to pose for him. But while this ability gives him confidence, its apparent confirmation of a personal tie to his subjects also troubles him. Liu Zheng’s portraits of disabled people betray his complex self-identity, as David Hevey argued for Diane Arbus. The pictures seem to carry a personal importance for Liu, each photo being the result of a persistent effort over a prolonged period of time. Extremely patient, he spent days and even weeks winning the trust of his subjects, who were in most cases suspicious of outside attention. He took pictures only with a subject’s full consent, and so we find 291

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that the person in each portrait – even a brain tumour patient on his deathbed – always looks out and acknowledges the photographer’s existence. These portraits are not spontaneous snapshots captured in a moment of inspiration or opportunity. Liu Zheng’s subjects pose for him in self-conscious and often stiff gestures; in return he frequently employs a standard composition for a formal portrait, placing a sitter at the centre of the picture in a frontal view. He is also obsessed with the quality of the prints; his goal, he has told me, is to make each print ‘shimmer with beautiful tonal variations’. As a consequence, the photos in My Countrymen display their disturbing subjects in polished style with perfect technical control, generating a visual disharmony that further intensifies the inner drama of each image. It is not difficult to trace the source of this disharmony to the photographer’s split desire: while documenting his grotesque subjects he also discovers himself in them. Images of death, dying and beyond

Again using five photographs from My Countrymen, this section demonstrates the blurry boundaries between illness, death and ghostliness in Liu Zheng’s conception and representation; and again I cite Liu’s accounts in order to enliven the images with a sense of encounter. Among these photographs, the first three feature both real and simulated corpses to problematize the notion of death. One of them shows deformed foetuses in glass containers (illus. 191). As Liu Zheng’s account implies, the image represents not only the death of these stillborn children, but also their ‘second death’, when their corpses as medical specimens are deemed useless and abandoned: I have a friend who works in one of Beijing’s medical colleges. One day I went to visit him and saw rows of glass bottles containing medical specimens – dissected body parts, internal organs and embryos of various kinds – placed on the ground outside the college’s main building. The building was being renovated, and the college had decided to throw them away. The embryos included many deformed ones. I saw a foetus with a cleft lip and others with deformed limbs or genitals. Their symptoms were written on labels tied to their arms. I was taken aback by how large they were. It was a very cold winter day. The formaldehyde in the bottles was frozen. The naked foetuses looked like they were 292

liu zheng 191 Liu Zheng, Medical Specimens of Four Deformed Foetuses, Beijing, from the series My Countrymen, 1999, gelatin silver print.

sleeping in crystal. I used a glove to wipe off the dust covering the bottles and took a lot of pictures of the foetuses. I kept thinking about them during the next few days. I really wanted to keep them for myself. But when I went back to the college, all of them had been buried in a large pit. My friend blamed me for not telling him earlier; otherwise he could have saved some for me. The foetuses in the picture are quiet and gentle, as if they have fallen into an eternal sleep. But the subjects of the second photo, screaming ghosts rushing out of their hellish imprisonment, are ferocious and unstoppable (illus. 192). Liu Zheng found this group of clay statues in Fengdu, the ‘ghost town’ on the bank of the Yangzi River in Sichuan. He was astonished by the ghosts’ extraordinary energy. Could some of these images represent the buried foetuses so that they could express their fury, even only through the art of sculpture? There are two ‘ghost towns’ [guicheng] in China, and I have visited both. I spent more time in the one at Fengdu in Sichuan, 293

zo om i n g i n 192 Liu Zheng, Gate of Ghosts, Fengdu, Sichuan, from the series My Countrymen, 1999, gelatin silver print.

which is older and has better sculptures. I was fascinated by these sculptures, which depict all sorts of tortures and punishments in hell. Men and women are sawed and cut open; their broken limbs and twisted torsos are painted with gaudy colours. Not all these images are based on reality, of course. But the idea of making a hell on earth has prompted people to invent them. I found this group of miniatures in a small chamber next to the main hall. It shows a crowd rushing through the Gate of Ghosts [Guimenguan] to escape hell. Normally this gate only allows ghosts to go in, not to come out. So the sculpture actually represents an exceptional occurrence: some ancient craftsmen must have imagined the event for the ghosts’ sake. The ghosts are young and old. You can see them stretching their deformed bodies towards the outside, shouting and struggling. There’s an underground policeman who tries to stop them, but to no avail. The third photograph, also representing death, is a shockingly naturalistic image of the Nanjing Massacre during the SinoJapanese War (illus. 193). Mutilated bodies pile up. Bloodstains are everywhere. A half-naked young woman, raped and murdered, 294

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193 Liu Zheng, Nanjing Massacre, Nanjing, Jiangsu, from the series My Countrymen, 1999, gelatin silver print.

is watched over by her young son, who has miraculously survived the massacre. But the gruesome details and tear-jerking staging convey little feeling of real trauma. The historical tragedy has been brought back through double visual transformations, first by means of a wax sculpture and then by photography. The result, amazingly vivid in verisimilitude, erases the passage of time and the haziness of memory. If the miniature statues at Fengdu give life to imaginary ghosts, the victims in this photograph are truly dead because of the image’s utter artificiality. In his account Liu Zheng’s speaks of his repulsion at seeing such scenes manufactured for the sake of entertainment or propaganda: For several years, I’ve been travelling around China photographing the so-called visual marvels of human culture [renwen

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jingguan]. These are large sculptural complexes based on famous novels, myths or historical events; each has hundreds of life-size figures in several dozen tableaux. They became extremely popular in the eighties – thousands of them were set up throughout the country to attract tourists. But people soon lost interest in them. Nowadays, probably no more than a hundred are still in business. The sculptures in these visual marvels are so bad that they’re interesting. You find them in big cities as well as in suburbs and county towns, often housed in underground tunnels, caves or windowless halls constructed for private tours. They’re painstakingly made to look like real people. They seduce audiences by appealing to their darkest fantasies and curiosities. Sex is the hottest thing, of course. But instead of romance, you find adultery and rape. Other tableaux exhibit human bodies – bodies being dissected, butchered and skinned, all in gruesome detail. These scenes nauseate me. I only photograph the images that strike me as surreal – it’s as though they are projecting people’s unspeakable fantasies onto mirror images. I want to conclude this chapter with two final images from My Countrymen, featuring a brain tumour patient (illus. 194) and a stone statue in an ancient cemetery (illus. 195). Liu Zheng described the first photograph to me in these words: He was young, only in his early twenties. He had a brain tumour and only a few weeks to live. I met him in China’s first ‘hospital for dying people’ [linzhong yiyuan]. This institution was founded in 1992 near the Fragrant Hills in Beijing’s western suburbs, but since then it has relocated twice, first to Wukesong and then to Yutingqiao near Fangzhuang, both near Beijing. This is another place I visit regularly. Here you find people whose fate has been decided – their illnesses have been pronounced incurable, and the only future they face is death. Although it’s called a hospital, it’s no longer a place for healing; it’s simply a waiting place for the final moment. The doctors’ and nurses’ medical knowledge is now useless; they’re like keepers of a ‘death inn’ who watch their guests come and go without much emotional disturbance. Even 296

liu zheng 194 Liu Zheng, Brain Tumour Patient, Beijing, from the series My Countrymen, 1995, gelatin silver print.

family members tend to cut down on their visits once they send their dying relatives here. In that sense, the place is also a provisional tomb. I went to talk to this patient. He could still speak and smile. I heard him saying: ‘Big brother, you are the only one who’s nice to me.’ He told this to other people as well. About the mortuary statue Liu Zheng said: I have always been fascinated by tombs, which are the only places where silence achieves its full meaning. I was drawn to this particular statue probably because it looked so fresh. It must be at least a hundred years old, but all the patterns on the figure’s clothes are still so new, and its face is plump and even seems moist. But the face is totally blank; the smile has neither feeling nor meaning in it. He’s an annoyingly healthy figure in the desolate winter landscape, when the living things around him have all perished. 297

195 Liu Zheng, Statue Along the Spirit Road of a Royal Mausoleum, Yixian, Hebei, from the series My Countrymen, 1995, gelatin silver print.

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Liu Zheng ‘was drawn’ to these two places – the cemetery and the hospital for dying people – not because he had relatives housed or buried there but for what they were. Even before he photographed the brain tumour patient and the stone statue, his fascination with both places and his repeated visits to them already connected dying and death. This connection is given visual proof in the two photographs, in which the dying young man and the morbid stone statue show eerie similarities, both having plump round faces and smiling benignly at the viewer. The portrait of the tumour patient is more dramatic, however: light through a window casts deep shadows on his face that seem to be moving. Darkness will soon fall.

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10. RONG RONG: RUINS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

196 Rong Rong, East Village, Beijing No. 1, 1994, gelatin silver print.

Rong Rong arrived in Beijing in 1992 with wide-open eyes and a newly purchased camera. A farm boy from the southeastern province of Fujian, he had never left home before. He was skilled in the fields, but had failed almost every course in elementary and junior high school except for studio art. He had made three attempts to enter a local art school, but was not granted admission (mainly because of his poor performance in mathematics and other general exams). By chance, he discovered photography and developed a passion for it. First, he rented a double-lens camera, which he used to take portraits of his sisters and landscape shots. He then struck a bargain with his father, the manager of a small grocery shop, to work as his employee for three years in exchange for the freedom to leave home and a sum of money with which to start a new life. So this was how he got his own camera and went to Beijing, which by then had become a Mecca for young avant-garde artists throughout the country. In Beijing, Rong Rong attended photography classes and became quite good at making the kind of arty, sentimental pictures favoured by popular photography magazines. One of his pictures even found its way into a national photography exhibition. But life was hard, and the occasional public exposure of his pictures offered little financial return. When his savings were gone, he tried various odd jobs, including taking passport photos in a commercial studio. He changed addresses frequently, often guided by the cheapest housing on the market. In early 1993, he moved into a tumbledown village on the city’s eastern fringe. Later known as Beijing’s ‘East Village’ (Dong cun), it would become home to an artistic community that produced some of the most daring works (mainly performance and photography) in contemporary Chinese art before it was closed down by the police in June 1994. 301

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Looking back, Rong Rong can see that his life – both as an artist and as an individual – started in the East Village. His moving there was coupled with divorcing himself from the kind of popular photographic style that had earned him a place in magazines and official exhibitions. Besides the hard-to-beat monthly rent (60 yuan, or $12, for a shared room), the Village attracted him because of its ugliness and anonymity. He explored the secrets of its refuse-filled dirt roads and courtyards with his camera, his young face and bare torso occasionally reflected in broken windows in his pictures. As his friendship with other bohemian artists, musicians and writers in the Village deepened, he also began to photograph them: the poet-rock singer Wu Hongjin (b. 1970) who called himself Curse (Zuzhou); the tough-faced performance artist Zhang Huan (b. 1965); the unfailingly sympathetic painter Little Duan (Duan Yingmei, b. 1969); and the narcissistic cross-dresser Ma Liuming (b. 1969). In 1994, after Rong Rong had lived there for more than a year, there was a burst of collective creativity in the Village: without much planning, a number of performance artists and photographers staged joint projects from 31 May to 13 June 1994. The centrepieces of these activities – Ma Liuming’s Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch and Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Metres and 65 Kilograms, among others – have by now become ‘classics’ of avant-garde Chinese performance art of the 1990s. These performances became known to the outside world largely through Rong Rong and Xing Danwen’s (b. 1967) photos, which appeared in the same year in an untitled, underground publication known as Heipishu (Book with a Black Cover). Although the authorship of these photographs was sometimes acknowledged, the images served mainly to illustrate the performances. Even today, historians of contemporary Chinese art rarely speak about the independent importance of these photographs. These photographs are significant not just because they documented those powerful performances, but also because they signified a new kind of photography in China. After years of struggling, photographers like Rong Rong, Xing Danwen and Zhuang Hui (b. 1963) had finally broken away from the insulated world of ‘artistic photography’ (yishu sheying), making their art an intimate component of ongoing avant-garde experiments. Common to these young artists was an intimate relationship between photography and performance. This relationship, which was especially vital to Rong Rong, would underlie all his later works, but in different forms. 302

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Two blows, one external and the other internal, finally destroyed the East Village artistic community. First, after Ma Liuming’s performance on 13 June 1994, the police arrested some members of the community because of the performance’s alleged obscenity, and kicked out other Village artists from their rented farmhouses. Second, after this Chinese ‘East Village’ became known to the international art circle through photographs, the authorship as well as the ownership of these photographs became an issue of bitter dispute among some of the Village artists. They argued over whether these images simply recorded the creativity of performance artists or whether they should be considered the photographers’ own creative works. Intensified by the desire for status and financial gain, this dispute turned old friends and comrades into competitors and enemies. Disillusioned, Rong Rong eventually stopped collaborating with performance artists. But his interest in performance remained and developed into various autobiographical modes. After the East Village community dispersed, he returned to Fujian, tracing his childhood memories with new vision. He increasingly appeared before his camera, acting while recording his acts; the strong performative quality of these photos resonated with his personal life. Returning to Beijing, he discovered a bond with half-demolished houses, which provided the rapidly developing city with a major visual spectacle throughout the 1990s. He was especially attracted by the torn images of glamorous pin-ups left on the broken walls. Going one step further, he became fascinated with the fragility of printed images in general, which reminded him of his own vulnerability as a photographer. Several times I sat with Rong Rong in his studio in Liulitun, looking through the photographs he had produced over the seven or eight years from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. It then became clear to me that despite the disparate subjects of these images, they all included the master figure of ruins. Whether a destroyed house or a piece of abandoned furniture, a torn poster or a cut-up film negative, the incompleteness of these images declares loss and propels the viewer to imagine the photographer’s life and psyche. It is in this spirit that I have chosen five groups of photographs for this chapter. Derived from different series made during this particular period in his life, they testify to a consistent pursuit of a visual language to express what the photographer saw and felt. To these photographs I add my observations and Rong Rong’s 303

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own accounts, which most vividly reveal the autobiographical nature of the images. beijing’s east village

Rong Rong’s East Village, a set of forty photographs and a book published by New York’s Chamber Fine Arts in 2003, begins with an image which shows the entrance to the village (illus. 196). A roadside sign identifies the place in both Chinese and English; the ink is still fresh. The sign stands on a mound of rubbish behind a windowless house. Posters on the wall advertise secret cures for venereal diseases. A pick-up tricycle is passing by: a villager has collected some junk and is on his way to sell it for a few bucks. The Village’s official name is Dashan Zhuang – literally the Manor on a Big Hill, though there is neither a hill nor a manor. After some wandering artists from the provinces made this place their home they called it the East Village, obviously inspired by its namesake on the other side of the globe. Karen Smith, a writer and art critic based in Beijing, has described the environment of the place in the early 1990s as follows: In the shadow of the metropolis, many of the Village’s indigenous population scrape a living by collecting and sorting rubbish. Waste accumulates by the side of the small ponds. This pollutes the water, generating noxious fumes in the summer. Raw sewage flows directly into the water. Slothful, threadbare dogs roam the narrow lanes between houses. People stare with the blankness of the illiterate and benighted.1 Smith’s account qualifies the Village as a ‘place of death’, the kind of area I have termed wastelands: poisonous spaces filled with garbage, graveyards of dead objects that reject disintegration, ‘black holes’ in an urban landscape that absorb time and escape change. Differing from the ruins lamented in Romantic poetry and painting, a wasteland never inspires sentiment or stirs up memory. Instead, it is a contagious corpse, suffocating the living with its deadly excrement. Viewed from this perspective, Rong Rong’s moving into the Village did not just satisfy his need for cheap housing; his renewed creativity there must be considered the consequence of a voluntary self-exile. He and other Village artists were fully conscious of the ‘hellish’ qualities of the Village 304

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in contrast to the ‘heavenly’ downtown Beijing. As Rong Rong recalled in an interview: It was merely a fifteen-minute bicycle ride from the centre of the city to my place – from the light-illuminated Great Wall Hotel to the pitch-black East Village: the experience was like traveling from heaven to hell.2 This contrast energized him, however, for he and other Village artists saw themselves as fallen angels who had finally found freedom in this place of darkness. The ambivalence towards making hell a home was best articulated by the Village artist Zhang Huan, who, in his performances, consistently reduced himself to the surrounding waste. And Rong Rong’s photographs best capture Zhang’s masochism; the absence of the photographer in these images attests to his existence as an invisible gaze. When Zhang Huan performed 12 Square Metres – a project in which he stayed in a filthy public toilet for an hour with flies covering his naked body – Rong Rong was in the same toilet with his camera (illus. 197). The next day, he wrote excitedly to his younger sister, Yali: Dear Sis, What’s going on here is just unthinkable. Let me tell you why. We were planning a performance project. Zhang [Huan] chose to do this piece of work in a public toilet in the Village (the dirtiest and smelliest in the world). This is what he was going to do: he would place himself in the middle of the john, naked, with some foul-smelling substance and honey covering his body. As a result, a huge swarm of flies would stick to his body. He would sit still for an hour. At 11:30 a.m. yesterday, Zhang began this while Curse, Ma [Liuming], and Terror were witnessing the whole event. We even had a man with a video camera on the scene. Terror spread the stuff on Zhang’s body. In no time at all, flies were attracted. I had a rag to cover my mouth and nose (quite like a gas mask). You know how it stinks in the johns here, and the temperature then was 100° Fahrenheit. The bugs soon covered Zhang’s body, his face, penetrated his nostrils and ears. Everything was so still, one could only hear flies flapping their wings and my camera clicking. 305

zo om i n g i n 197 Rong Rong, East Village, Beijing No. 20, 1994, gelatin silver print. 198 Rong Rong, East Village, Beijing No. 2–1, 1994, gelatin silver print.

Then the news [of what we were doing] got out and led to a public outcry. After Zhang had finished, he stepped into a small pond behind the toilet. Lots of dead flies floated on the water, moving slightly with the smooth circular waves around Zhang’s straight body. Zhang called the whole thing 12 Square Metres, which is, of course, the size of the public toilet. He said that the squalid condition of the john and the army of flies in it gave him the inspiration. Some local villagers voiced their concerns by calling what we did yesterday pornographic.3 306

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So, to Rong Rong the event was a collaborative undertaking rather than a one-man show: it was ‘we’ who ‘did [it] yesterday’. This view seems to be confirmed by an early statement from Zhang Huan, published in Heipishu, in which he says he conceived the project only ‘to experience his essential existence’ in the toilet and did not mention the ‘bathing’ part at all. But Rong Rong’s camera followed Zhang after he emerged from the toilet and walked into the pond. The sequence of his photos, showing Zhang gradually disappearing in the water, gives the performance a poignant and unforgettable ending (illus. 198). escape

Rong Rong wrote to Yali on 15 June: Dear Sis, Things are so messed up now. I’m in hiding and can’t go back to the Village. It was totally unexpected when the police detained Ma [Liuming], Zhu Ming, and Little Duan. I can’t believe this! On June 11, around noon, Zhang [Huan] chained and hung himself from the ceiling. Two doctors from the Union Hospital arrived with medical equipment, letting blood drip from his neck onto a heated metal box on an electrical stove. The whole process lasted for an hour. The room was crowded with a viewing audience – foreigners, art critics, and photographers. The smell of fresh and burnt blood filled the room and made everyone feel death was approaching. You are lucky to have missed it – even now my hair and clothes still smell of blood. We had supper in a restaurant in the Village that evening. Seven or eight tables were lined up with people sitting on both sides. Everyone was drunk, still in awe of the spectacle of Zhang’s performance. No one knew that it was going to be our ‘last supper’ in the Village . . .4 Rong Rong recorded this performance by Zhang Huan, called 65 Kilograms (illus. 199). But he also did something more: making sure the police were not around, he returned to the Village and photographed the now empty room where Zhang had staged his performance (illus. 200). The stains of blood on the mattress seemed still moist. The chains Zhang had used to hang himself were coiled on the mattress, snake-like. Some broken dolls lay next to the chains; 307

rong rong 200 Rong Rong, East Village, Beijing No. 89, 1994, gelatin silver print. 201 Rong Rong, Self-portrait No. 3, Fujian, 1994, gelatin silver print.

199 Rong Rong, East Village, Beijing No. 35, 1994, gelatin silver print.

Zhang had collected and used them for an earlier performance, Weeping Angels.5 As Rong Rong had written, 65 Kilograms ‘made everyone feel death was approaching’. This photo of his shows the aftermath of death – the end of the East Village artistic community. Homeless, and with some of his closest friends in jail, Rong Rong left Beijing for Fujian. No joy brightened this homecoming trip. The family’s old house looked even older and shabbier, and so did his parents, relatives and neighbours. The smell of mildew, a natural element of this southern climate, now seemed too 309

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overwhelming and omnipresent. Rong Rong roamed around. The hills and ponds were the same, but no longer attracted him to climb up or jump in. The only thing that made his heart suddenly twitch was a piece of old furniture; it also became the only object that he photographed over and over on this trip (illus. 201). He saw it when he walked into an unused room on the second floor of his old home: an enormous, traditional-style bed with a canopy frame and screen-railings enclosing three sides. It was empty and dusty: his parents had long abandoned it for a more comfortable ‘Western-style’ bed. Stripped of curtains and bedding, its timber structure was exposed to full view. Certain parts of it – especially the bottom of the carved canopy posts – were shiny and dark from years of caresses. The screen-railings bore scratches, showing marks of tiny fingernails. Rong Rong recognized some scratches as coming from his own hands. He also remembered that he used to jump up and down on this bed while holding the canopy posts. He recalled that when he was a little boy he slept in this bed with his parents. His two younger sisters later joined him, all crawling in down at their parents’ feet. These instantaneous recollections identify this old bed as a yi wu – a Chinese term meaning ‘remnant from the past’. In traditional literature, yi wu refers to possessions left behind by a bygone subject, either a person, a family or a dynasty. But generally, a yi wu is always a surviving portion of a vanished whole; by accident it has broken away from its once existing body to become part of the alien world of the present. Thus, to Rong Rong, his rediscovery of the forgotten bed meant the resurrection of his childhood, with all its innocence. To reclaim the past, one must perform the past. So with his camera as his audience, he stripped, became an infant again and lay in the empty bed. returning to the present

After two months in Fujian, Rong Rong rejoined Beijing’s avantgarde scene. Ma Liuming and Zhu Ming had been released from jail. Members of the former East Village group, now scattered throughout the city, began to envision new collaborative projects. A significant change was that Rong Rong no longer remained invisible behind the camera: unknowingly, his solitary performance in Fujian had made him a self-conscious performer. In Premedical Sounds, a project carried out by more than ten artists in January 1995,6 Rong Rong 310

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appeared as a mock photojournalist: he was secretive about whether his camera was actually loaded, and the clicks of the shutter release did not automatically signify picture-taking. The implication was that when the photographer became a performer, the camera became a prop in the performance. Rong Rong took a now famous photograph during another performance, conducted by the Beijing-based artist Cang Xin (b. 1967) in November 1994 (illus. 202). For this performance, Cang made a thousand plaster casts of his own face. Each mask bore a white paper strip on the forehead, on which Cang wrote the year, month, day, hour and minutes of the cast’s manufacturing. He then laid the masks on the ground to fill the entire courtyard of his house, and also hung some masks on the walls as witnesses of the forthcoming events. During the performance, guests were invited to walk on the masks to destroy them, until all these artificial faces (of Cang Xin himself) were turned to shards. Rong Rong’s photograph records both this destructive process and his active participation. Numerous masks, many of them destroyed, lie on the ground behind the dominant figure. The figure holds up a mask to cover his face. The written date identifies the time of its production (‘26 November 1994, 2:21–2:36 p.m.’), but the mask is half-broken, with the left eye and a portion of the forehead missing. The figure behind the mask is not the performance artist Cang Xin but the photographer Rong Rong, recognizable from his shoulder-length hair and delicate hand. So in taking this picture,

202 Rong Rong, East Village, Beijing No. 70, 1994, gelatin silver print.

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203 Rong Rong, No. 1(1) (Ruin Pictures), Beijing, 1996, gelatin silver print.

Rong Rong assumed three roles at once: he designed and took the photograph; he conducted a performance-within-a-performance as the photographic subject; and this performance-within-aperformance complicated the original project, subjecting the photographer himself to the simulated destruction. Cang Xin’s installation/performance is about destruction, a theme which echoed with Rong Rong’s growing interest in architectural ruins. Among the many contemporary Chinese artists fascinated by the transformation of the city, Rong Rong, in his photos of demolished traditional houses, best captures the anxiety and silence adrift in these modern ruins. Such sensitivity to ruins also best attests to his contemporaneity: to artists of his generation – who emerged in the early to mid-1990s – the 1960s and ’70s had become history, and they were finally able to bid farewell to the Cultural Revolution and its visual and mental baggage. Rong Rong’s pictures of ruined houses respond to China’s current transformation, not to history and collective memory. The transformation of the Chinese city is both the context and content of these photographs. The image opposite, one of the earliest of Rong Rong’s works on this theme, shows a surviving wall seen from the inside of a non-existent room (illus. 203). Its exposed wooden skeleton (which curiously resembles a Christian cross) is accentuated by dilapidated commercial portraits. Looking at these portraits closely, one recognizes Marilyn Monroe and some wellknown Hong Kong movie stars (illus. 204). A more careful observer would also notice the various degrees of damage the images have suffered, as well as traces of absence: the pins on the wall indicate the former existence of other images, which are now gone. This pair of photos exemplifies three main characteristics of Rong Rong’s ruin images: the absence of a human subject; the lack of an apparent political or ideological agenda; and a skewed temporality and spatiality. While such representations of architectural ruins must testify to an attraction to shock and wound, it is by no means clear what is actually wounded besides the buildings themselves. The absence of a human subject is heightened by the surviving pin-ups, which are too superficial to help us recognize any individuality; this is probably exactly why they were left behind. As a consequence, these photographs do not register a specific past, nor do they point to a perceivable future. What they represent, instead, is a brutal breakdown between private and public spaces. Ruins in these photographs are places that belong 312

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to everyone and to no one. They belong to no one because the breakdown between private and public spaces does not generate a new kind of space with a specific function. The subject of these photographs is therefore a ‘non-space’ outside normal life. ruin pictures

In an interview, Rong Rong told me about a memory from his childhood: I remember I was in love with a picture in a calendar. That was a portrait of [the Taiwan popular singer] Deng Lijun [Teresa Teng, 1953–1995]. I was small, not yet ten years old. Her songs were forbidden at the time. People told me that her songs were obscene [huangse]. This calendar was given to my father by one of his friends from the south. It was hung upstairs in our shared bedroom. As a boy, I was rather timid and often scared of sleeping alone. But I felt safe when I saw the portrait. Everyone said she was beautiful, and I also thought so. Her eyes followed me around, and to me she was actually alive. I often asked myself why her songs were forbidden. Later, such feelings came back to me when I saw the torn pictures on those broken walls.7

204 Rong Rong, No. 1(2) (Ruin Pictures), Beijing, 1996, gelatin silver print.

This personal experience helps explain a puzzling contradiction in Rong Rong’s photographs: on the one hand, his pictures of demolished residences document a relentless invasion of private spaces; on the other, they convey little feeling of calamity. Although these photographs never feature human subjects, Rong Rong fills the vacancy with images – posters of glamorous stars like those that hung in his childhood bedroom. Torn and even missing large portions of the composition, these posters still exercise an alluring power over the spectator (illus. 205). They compensate for the missing human subject in these photographs because the photographer, in his fetishistic imagination, substitutes himself for the posters’ original owner. But this imagination must be threatened by external violence (symbolized by the very act of demolition). When such external destructive forces prevail, the fetishistic longing turns into mourning. In 1998, Rong Rong experienced one such defeat: on a photographic trip into an abandoned house, he found a discoloured envelope halfburied among broken bricks and tiles. Inside the envelope were film 315

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negatives cut into tiny pieces. The owner of the house had apparently destroyed the negatives before leaving the place. Judging from the deterioration of the film, the envelope must have been there for months or even years. The surviving fragments, as Rong Rong found out later, show portions of a young woman posing nude in a poorly decorated room – probably the very room where the negatives were destroyed and found. It was not until two years later that Rong Rong made prints from these cut-up negatives (illus. 206). During those two years, he was haunted by the seemingly dismembered female body preserved in the envelope. He also debated with himself whether he should make prints from these found negatives and treat them as his own work. But as time passed by and the negatives stayed longer in his possession, a kind of intimacy grew between him and the anonymous girl: having rescued her from total destruction, he felt that he was probably entitled to bring her back to life again – even though just in bits and pieces – through artistic circulation. In a deeper sense, the prints Rong Rong made from the severed negatives have nothing to do with the girl or himself, but are about the materiality – especially the fragility and vulnerability – of photographs. In this sense, these prints can be called ‘metaphotographs’. Paraphrasing what W.J.T. Mitchell says, in his book Picture Theory, about metapictures, the purpose of a metaphotograph is to explain what photographs are – ‘to stage, as it were, the “selfknowledge” of pictures’.8

205 Rong Rong, No. 10(1) (Ruin Pictures), Beijing, 1996, gelatin silver print.

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rong rong 206 Rong Rong, Fragments No. 14, Beijing, 1998, handcoloured gelatin silver print.

In retrospect, we realize that almost all Rong Rong’s photographs, even the relatively conventional ones, consistently make printed images their focus and point of reference. This interest becomes explicit in a number of miniseries, each consisting of two photographs of the same scene but taken at different distances (for example, illus. 203 and 204): the first composition shows a larger architectural setting, while the second composition is a close-up of some printed material in this setting. The perceptual change from the former to the latter represents a conceptual shift from architecture to image, context to content and a photograph to a photograph-within-a-photograph. ‘To explain what photographs are’ is also the purpose of another group of photographs by Rong Rong. A study of the mortality of public photographs in Beijing, works in this group 317

zo om i n g i n 207 Rong Rong, No. 2(2) (Ruin Pictures), Beijing, 1996, hand-coloured gelatin silver print.

document the dying process of commercial and propaganda photographs displayed in various public spaces – on the street, in parks and in exhibition windows. Faded and discoloured, these are ruins of the former selves of exemplary photographs (illus. 207). ‘Photos are such vulnerable things’, Rong Rong murmured while looking at these photos with me in 1998;9 it is unclear whether he was commenting on his own photos or on the ruined images within them. wedding gown

Rong Rong created three groups of photographs from 1997 to 2000 that feature the recurrent image of a white, Western-style wedding gown. In one picture, selected from the earliest series, a barely visible young man – Rong Rong himself – is embracing a young women dressed in this gown (illus. 208). Tightly locked in each other’s arms, the couple stands at a corner inside a ruined house. Next to them, and at the exact centre of the composition, is a large, windowless opening through which one sees dead branches and crumbling buildings. Images within this internal frame are crisp but pointless, guiding the spectator back to the interior view. The contrast between the shining satin gown and the debrisfilled room, the suggestion of a secret romance in a haunted house and what seems like a voyeuristic gaze into a discarded space all seem to suggest that the image is straight out of a melodramatic 318

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208 Rong Rong, No. 2(2), Beijing (Wedding Gown), 1997, hand-coloured gelatin silver print.

movie. But the picture nevertheless escapes parody, for there is raw emotion that animates the scene, refilling clichés with their lost meaning. Rong Rong told me that the girl was his lover at the time. She was from Japan, and they lived together for two years. The scene had nothing to do with any emotional disturbance in their relationship. It was just a performance. But why the wedding gown and the ruined house? To the question I asked during an interview in 2001, Rong Rong did not give a direct answer, but only offered some fragmentary sources of inspiration:

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You know that before moving into the East Village I worked in commercial photo studios as a temporary worker. There was this craze of taking wedding pictures – a fashion probably coming from Japan via Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Everyone – not just newlyweds, but also older couples – wanted to have wedding pictures taken. The photographs were quite expensive. To take a whole set was a full-day ordeal: the couple had to spend hours and hours changing dresses and putting on makeup, transforming themselves into fake movie stars or silly traditional drama characters. Of all the costumes, I only liked the white wedding gown, which never failed to make an ordinary girl look pretty and pure. As for the ruined house, I really cannot say what made me choose it to stage my Wedding Gown pictures. Probably I was just intrigued by transporting the scene from a photo studio to somewhere radically different. It is ironic that the studio seems more real because it is part of the city and people’s lives. You know I am always attracted by ruins. I cannot bring

209 Rong Rong, No. 1(4), Beijing (Wedding Gown), 2000, hand-coloured gelatin silver print.

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myself to pass a half-destroyed house without entering it: I feel that I can always find something – no matter what – inside.10 The second and third of the Wedding Gown series became increasingly narrative and cartoon-like. Both were shot at a site in the Western Hills, some 40 miles from downtown Beijing. Local people call the place a ‘ghost village’. It is said that the whole village was burned down during the Sino-Japanese War by Japanese troops, who finally took the place after much local resistance. Today, no one lives there. Some broken walls and gateways still stand amid dead trees with grotesque branches stretching into the sky. The satin wedding gown is again the central prop of both series, and both end with the burning of the gown. In the first series, the wedding gown, unused, hangs on a ruined wall. Rong Rong is the only figure in the pictures. Naked, he emerges from behind the wall, watching a fire gradually envelop the gown and finally turn it into ashes. In the last series, Rong Rong is accompanied by two girls dressed in similar wedding gowns. The first of the four pictures in the series shows Rong Rong, again naked, holding hands with one girl while both face a ruined house in silent contemplation; the other girl lies behind them on the ground, either having fainted or dead. In the second picture, Rong Rong has joined the girl on the ground; the other girl stands alone staring at the ruined house. This girl vanishes from the third composition; Rong Rong now moves to the edge of the ruined house and looks at the mountain gorge beyond. The final picture – the one reproduced here – represents a cremation scene (illus. 209). A razing fire is swallowing the girl (or her wedding gown) on the ground. Blurred by flames and smoke, Rong Rong is moving towards her (or her burning wedding gown) with open arms. It is perhaps counter-productive to spell out the allegory or symbolism of these visual narratives. The only thing I can say – and I assume that it is obvious to any viewer – is that these photos perform death, and that it is therefore apt for Rong Rong to stage the performance in a ‘ghost village’.

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11. MIAO XIAOCHUN: JOURNEYING THROUGH SPACE AND TIME

Phantasmagoria is the English title of one of Miao Xiaochun’s (b. 1969) photographs (illus. 211). Eight metres (26 ft) long, the image shows a panorama of Wuxi from the top of Huishan, a famous hill in this ancient city in southeast China. The viewer can spot some traditional buildings here and there, but a sea of skeleton-like high-rises, most of which have emerged only in the past few years, dominates the image. It is this abrupt transformation of the city that has inspired Miao Xiaochun to title the photograph Haishi shenlou in Chinese, literally ‘a city in the ocean with pavilions made of seashells’. As he explained in a conversation: It seems that all those modern buildings you see from the hilltop shouldn’t be there, but they’ve suddenly emerged before your eyes, like a mirage in the ocean or desert. I use the phrase haishi shenlou to indicate the seemingly surreal feeling of such modern architecture in the East.1

210 Miao Xiaochun, On Herkules, 1999, gelatin silver print.

To Miao, a native of Wuxi who spent his childhood in the neighbourhoods at the foot of Huishan, such a ‘surreal feeling’ is acute and personal. He told me in the interview that I conducted in 2004 that he painted Wuxi from the same hilltop, even when he was in elementary school, and many places around Huishan are fused with his memories of the city. Indeed, a considerable number of his photographs focus on these places, including the municipal zoo (Fly), a statue of Confucius (Another Time) and a huge smokestack left from the Maoist era (Towering). These places became landmarks and acquired their identities at different historical moments. As these places coexist with one another and also with the newly emerging high-rises in Haishi shenlou, the photographs represent a city that is profoundly 323

211 Miao Xiaochun, Phantasmagoria, 2004, chromogenic print.

heterogeneous – a spectacle composed of fragmentary elements and characterized by constant historical discontinuity. Fantastic yet disturbing, this cityscape can indeed be called a ‘phantasmagoria’, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines in three interrelated senses: (1) a fantastic sequence of haphazardly associative imagery, as seen in dreams or fever; (2) a constantly changing scene composed of numerous elements; and (3) fantastic imagery as represented in art. All these meanings are pertinent to Miao’s photographs created over a decade from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s. journeys of a traditional chinese gentleman

During these years, Miao Xiaochun created a large body of work associated with two periods; each period in turn consists of several phases. Works from the first period mainly focus on cultural identity, social environment and the relationship between photography and traditional Chinese painting, whereas those from the second period actively interact with art history through refashioning famous paintings from the past. From East to West and Back Again

The first period began from Miao’s inaugural exhibition at Gallery Stellwerk in Kassel in 1999, consisting of his graduation project at Kunsthochschule Kassel. This is a series of black-and-white photographs, each with a life-size mannequin as its central 324

character. Dressed as an ancient Chinese gentleman, the figure has Miao Xiaochun’s face and is clearly the artist’s alter ego. Several photographs represent him as a mysterious traveller to the West from an unidentified time/place in China’s past: he is arriving in a desolate subway station (Arrival, illus. 212) or watching other travellers in a crowded airport. The figure then appears in various social contexts in his new foreign home – at the dinner table with an ordinary German family or in a factory shop, classroom or political gathering. On all these occasions he remains dignified but distant. Rigid and with an unchanging expression, his enduring silence amounts to an inability to communicate. Thus when he does act, he takes the role of a detached watcher of other people (On Herkules, illus. 210). These photographs are clearly autobiographical in nature, as they embody Miao’s personal experience while he was an international student in Germany. But they are not self-indulgent because the images problematize his self-identity. As he states in the interview, the mannequin is not just a substitute for himself but also transforms him because it symbolizes Chinese culture at its prime moment in the past. Such voluntary substitution is not without cost, however: the artist as an individual has to disappear from these autobiographical representations; and the figure, while remaining lofty and selfpossessed, can never become part of real life. This dilemma continues and deepens in a second group of photographs, which Miao created after he returned to China in 1999 and exhibited in a 2001 solo show at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Gallery. The exhibition’s title, From East to West and Back Again, defines 325

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it as a sequel to the previous exhibition. This significance is once again established by the mannequin, which appears in each photograph, as well as in a sculptural form in an installation. Placed in the Chinese environment, however, the meaning of the ancient gentleman is further complicated. On the one hand, he is resurrected from the past and is a stranger to modern life. On the other hand, he has returned to China by way of a foreign land. The contrast between this figure and his surroundings thus reflects the conflict between China’s tradition and modernization, and also signifies Miao’s culture shock upon returning to his country after five years, a time during which China underwent rapid globalization and commercialization. Some photographs in this group show the figure in a Western-style clothing shop, a fast-food restaurant, a barren new housing development or among omnipresent commercial advertisements (Propaganda and Advertisement, illus. 213). Miao provided this explanation for these images: Actually, the relationship between this figure and contemporary China seems even more ‘disharmonious’ than in my German pictures – its appearance in a Chinese city seems even more

212 Miao Xiaochun, Arrival, 1999, gelatin silver print.

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213 Miao Xiaochun, Propaganda and Advertisement, 2001, chromogenic print. 214 Miao Xiaochun, No Hostility, No Resistance, 2001, chromogenic print.

abrupt and illogical. I think this is because China’s changes in recent years have been extremely abrupt and sudden.2 This also explains some other photographs in this group, which are characterized by a nostalgic longing. In one of these images, the ancient figure looks at the monkey enclosure in the Wuxi zoo, a place which Miao knew well from childhood. Another picture was taken from the top of Huishan, where Miao painted Wuxi when he was a boy. Several other photographs represent the figure on the Great Wall. While this last series seems to reinstall the figure in his original cultural environment, one photograph represents him as having fainted on the Wall (No Hostility, No Resistance). One woman has stopped to rescue him, while some tourists walk by him with puzzled expressions on their faces (illus. 214). Re-engaging with tradition and society

Starting from 2002, Miao Xiaochun began to create large, colourful photographs with the help of digital technology. While these works constantly evoke earlier themes and images – the deepening commercialization of Chinese society, the solitude of the ancient 327

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215 Miao Xiaochun, Transmission, 2002, chromogenic print.

gentleman and the contrast between traditional and contemporary culture – their increasingly complex compositions reflect the artist’s heightened attraction to stylistic and technical innovations. His tendency to frame a picture in an overly long composition was already evident in the previous period, but he now self-consciously started to connect this compositional style with traditional Chinese painting. He frequently talked about this connection in the 2004 interview. Generally, he considers a traditional Chinese painting, either a horizontal handscroll or a vertical hanging scroll, to be fundamentally different from a Western painting in its inherent temporality. Unlike a Western painting (or photograph) composed according to the linear perspective system, a scroll painting often has multiple scenes and corresponding vanishing points. The multiple appearances of a single figure further guides the viewer to read the painting as a narrative. Digital technology allows him to realize in photography this artistic vision derived from traditional painting, as he can weave numerous images into a single composition, creating subtle tensions and transitions which would be unattainable with a conventional camera. Take his 2002 Transmission, for example, with a horizontal composition that consists roughly of three sections (illus. 215). To the left, a quiet river flows by a cluster of traditional-style houses; Miao’s ancient gentleman stands facing inwards, contemplating the dark water. The middle section is dominated by a stone pathway leading

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up to a bridge; its exaggerated foreshortening is further enhanced by the much-reduced sizes of two passengers. A narrow lane appears next to the path and cuts deeply into the picture plane; two boys are running towards us with toy guns in their hands. To the right of this lane is the third section of the picture, showing a terrace house at a sharp angle. We are suddenly pushed towards the white wall of the houses, in front of which a young girl is pressing numbers on a mobile phone. Fusing reality and fiction in a constructed pictorial space, the photograph is deliberately incoherent and even absurd. But because the artist has skilfully manoeuvred the transitions between the sections and images, the picture’s absurdity becomes evidence for his rationality and technical sophistication. This phase is terminated by Phantasmagoria, the photograph with which I began this chapter (illus. 211). Significantly, in this picture the mannequin makes his last appearance, while Miao Xiaochun’s own image appears for the first time. Sitting in two separate cable cars, they pass each other going in opposite directions. It is as if the artist is saying goodbye to the figure, who will disappear from his art and life. From this moment on Miao enters a transitional phase, represented by a group of photographs focusing on the rapid transformation of the Chinese urban landscape. An earlier example, Celebration, records the grand opening ceremony of a large housing complex in Beijing. While its grand composition and precise imagery

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216 Miao Xiaochun, Orbit, 2005, chromogenic print.

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recalls Andreas Gursky’s (b. 1955) work, Miao’s major inspiration again comes from the inherent temporality he finds in traditional painting: Instead of showing the statue, it represents real people reappearing multiple times here and there – the idea is that these people were moving around during the event. It’s usually considered a taboo to repeat the same figure in a photograph. How can a person appear two or three times in the same picture? But this is exactly what I hope to represent. For example, there is a journalist who photographs the inauguration from different spots; and an organizer of the ceremony is at one time on the stage and at other times below the stage. When I combined these moments in the photograph, it’s as though this organizer is watching himself direct the program on the stage. This photograph thus conveys a different sense of reality because it represents the whole process of the event. I no longer need the ancient figure because the connection between the photograph and traditional culture is now found in the style of the photograph. In an ancient painting, such as those depicting Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring or his Homecoming, a figure often appears multiple times in representing a sequence of events. This is a particular pictorial language or style, which I have absorbed into my photographs.3 Miao’s interest in urban transformation becomes even more explicit in two large horizontal compositions, Jump and Orbit. Both works take the life (and death) of a city as the main subject of representation. The main subject of Jump is a huge ‘demolition/construction site’ in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. Orbit shows an exuberant view of Beijing’s street life (illus. 216). There is a subtle difference between these works and previous ones. Whereas Miao’s earlier works often feature some dramatic, dominating images and thus have an iconic quality, his new works eliminate such visual focuses or defuse them into multiple ones. The result is an intense interest in details. It seems that the artist has come to realize that it is the details of a photograph, not the overall composition, that can most effectively bring a still image to life, because they can guide the viewer’s eyes through a large scene and thus generate movement within a representation: I’ve discovered that I can use photography – a modern visual technology and medium – to represent traditional Chinese art 332

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ideals. Although I’m not using traditional brush and paper, I can certainly employ traditional concepts and aesthetic principles. Traditional viewing focuses on details. When a viewer unrolls a scroll painting, he examines it section by section, detail by detail, synthesizing fragmentary mental images into a continuous viewing experience.4 It is interesting to ask why, in making these two photographs, Miao did not continue his earlier strategy of an overtly long and narrow scroll format, but instead adopted a rectangular composition with relatively normal proportions. A possible explanation is that in order to test the power of details in creating visual dynamism, he needed to make this aspect of a photograph the exclusive subject of experimentation. I find the result of his experiment quite astonishing. With their abundant details, these two works pull our eyes in different directions. The multilinear, horizontal movement of people and vehicles in Orbit is contrasted with the vertical gravity of Jump, which seems to absorb everything, including our gaze, into a bottomless hole. At the same time, we feel that our ability as viewers is greatly enhanced: suddenly, we are able to comprehend an entire universe and all its elements at once. Miao’s direction of experimentation took a decisive turn in 2005, when he re-represented Michelangelo’s (1475–1564) Last Judgement with the help of a computer. Since then he has created multiple series of striking works, including both printed images and digital animation, which appropriate masterpieces in art history. Because his Last Judgement in Cyberspace started the newest stage and arguably remains the most powerful one, I will focus on this work for the rest of this chapter.5 the last judgement in cyberspace

In praising Michelangelo’s Night in the Medici Chapel, Giovanni Strozzi (1504–1571) – a contemporary of Michelangelo – imagined the stone statue as a ‘living image’ of a sleeping woman conjured up by divine power. As if talking to a fellow visitor to the chapel, he promised that the statue would awake upon a light touch and speak: Night, which you see sleeping in such sweet attitudes, was carved in this stone by an angel; and because she sleeps, she has life. Wake her, if you don’t believe it, and she will speak to you.6 333

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To these clever (but rather conventional) verses Michelangelo responded with a blunt epigram. He indeed let the statue speak, but only to reject any disturbance from an intrusive visitor: My sleep is dear to me, and more dear this being of stone, as long as the agony and shame last. Not to see, not to hear is for me the best fortune. So do not wake me. Speak softly!7 Michelangelo’s lines provoke an interesting question: What would a sculpted figure like Night see, hear and feel if she were not sleeping? This question becomes more tantalizing if the figure belongs to a large composition charged with strong emotion and dramatic intensity. The significance of the question lies in its redefinition of a painting from an external object of viewing to an organic body of internal visions, actions and feelings. Once we accept the logic of this question, we begin to combine our seeing with active imagination. It is at this point that we can turn to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement (illus. 217), which has inspired Miao Xiaochun to create several large-format photographs and a video work.8 Commonly upheld as the most ambitious and turbulent pictorial work from the Renaissance, Michelangelo’s fresco has been skilfully described by S. J. Freedberg: In place of the actionless and hieratic scene of earlier Last Judgement illustrations, Michelangelo conceived an exalted drama, moved in every part, which is enacted by a multitude of beings in their essential nudity, still more superhuman in their breadth and muscularity of form than in the last stages of the ceiling [in the Sistine Chapel] and as exaggerated in their grandeur as the figures of the Medicean tombs. A youthful beardless Christ, compounded from antique conceptions of Hercules, Apollo and Jupiter Fulminator, turns sinister toward the Damned and makes the awesome gesture of their condemnation. Gathered tensile against His side beneath the gesturing arm, the Virgin averts her gaze and looks down on the Blessed. She cannot intercede for those whom Christ damns, nor can the surrounding agitated assembly of Saints. Christ’s gesture generates their complex responses, which are those of giant powers here made powerless, bound by racking spiritual anxiety. The force and meaning of His gesture pass through the Saints and through the tangled Damned, who fall 334

miao xiaoch u n 217 Michelangelo, The Last Judgement, 1535–41, mural in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.

towards the crowded nightmare bark of Charon just below. Underneath the Christ, but in some immeasurable distance, angels summon the dead with trumpets, and they emerge and take on form as if from the very earth. Opposite the falling Damned, the Blessed levitate towards Heaven, most of them still numbed or half in sleep. In places wingless angels help them rise, and on the fringe of the ascending group one weightful, negroid pair are lifted by an angel on a rosary that denotes prayer. Christ’s gesture sets in motion – not by its physical value but by its meaning – a gigantic slow rotation on the wall: descending, turning and rising up to Him again. It is a motion subdivided almost endlessly into the convolutions of the densely grouped forms, but absolutely ineluctable: the 335

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great bodies are moved by and with it. The pattern of the whole movement and the way in which it functions in its parts appear to make a cosmic simile. Christ is seated in the heavens like a sun; the heavenly host around Him seem dense clouds made of human forms. Below, in a luminous aether, bodies fall to one side towards the water like clouds dissolving into rain; on the other they rise from the earth like moisture gathering again into clouds.9 Interestingly, Freedberg describes the figures in the fresco as though they were living, sentient beings and the whole painting were in motion. This passage from a standard art historical book thus legitimates the question, what does a painted figure see? Looking from within

What do the figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement – not only Christ and the Virgin but also the angels, the saints, the Damned and the Blessed – see at this fatal moment? What do they behold within the vast, mythical space in the fresco amid a cosmic movement that is simultaneously orderly and chaotic? To Miao Xiaochun, to answer these questions means to enter the painting and assume the varied gazes of the painted figures. Two pictures in his fivecomposition series result from this adventure, as they embody the internal positions of two figures and re-represent Michelangelo’s masterpiece from their viewpoint. The picture entitled The Last Judgement in Cyberspace: The Upward View (illus. 218) is supposedly beheld by Figure I.35 (according to the numbering system in the publication The Vatican Museums: The Last Judgement) (illus. 219).10 In the original painting, the figure, a naked man lying on the ground, is looking up at the divinities while raising his left hand to cover his face. In Miao’s composition, a large hand protrudes into the pictorial space from the lower edge, blocking the multitude of figures that recede into great distance. He explains:

218 Miao Xiaochun, The Last Judgement in Cyberspace: The Upward View, 2006, chromogenic print.

This man seems to be tormented with a great apprehension of the approaching final judgement, not knowing whether he will enter heaven or be thrown into hell. From his position he would first see his own hand and then a scene of salvation – a group of angels are rescuing suffering souls from the possession of hellish monsters. More angels appear further away, blowing 337

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their trumpets. Christ can be seen only at the edge of the sky in a greatly diminished size.11 The other picture, entitled The Last Judgement in Cyberspace: The Downward View, is composed from a similar internal position (illus. 220), as Miao describes: Figure C.1 shows an old woman holding open her hooded mantle with both hands [illus. 221]. She occupies the upper left-hand corner of the picture. I suspect that Michelangelo placed her at this corner, holding open her hood, as a way of allowing her to witness the entire process of the Last Judgement as he imagined it. From the back, the old woman’s position resembles a contemporary person holding up a camera and taking photographs. Thus, I would very much like to look down at the entire Last

219 Michelangelo, The Last Judgement (The Vatican Museums: The Last Judgement, fig. i.35). 220 Miao Xiaochun, The Last Judgement in Cyberspace: The Downward View, 2006, chromogenic print.

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221 Michelangelo, The Last Judgement (The Vatican Museums: The Last Judgement, fig. c.1).

Judgement scene from her point of view, an angel from heaven looking down into hell through a billowy human tide. In a split second of judgement, one could either fly into heaven or crash into hell. If a contemporary person came upon such a scene, he would certainly, either subconsciously or consciously, look for a tool with which to record it. This is like when the first moments of September 11 were subconsciously recorded by an amateur photographer and when the Gulf War was consciously recorded by a professional journalist. Such pictures have been presented over and over again before humanity.12 These and other photographs in Miao’s series resulted from a complex process of image translation and manipulation. The first step in this process was to create a three-dimensional digital 339

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model of a figure based on his own image: he photographed himself from various angles and assembled the fragmentary shots into a three-dimensional image on the computer. The next step was to use this avatar to copy all the figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, from Christ to a sinful soul. Using the 3d Max software, Miao was able to manipulate the avatar into different gestures and movements. The third step was to integrate these three-dimensional figures into a virtual space according to the composition of The Last Judgement. Once Miao had achieved this three-dimensional spatial construct, he could traverse it at will. (In his words, ‘I feel I can now move inside this space, selecting angles and taking pictures.’13) He or, more specifically, a built-in camera lens controlled by him, could not only view the composition from numerous internal positions, but also assume vantage points outside the constructed pictorial space. Looking from without

Unlike ‘The Upward View’ and ‘The Downward View’, which are supposedly seen by specific figures in the painting, the remaining three pictures in the series are composed from positions outside the painting. We may compare these two types of viewing/representation to our relationship with the Milky Way: we are inside this enormous heavenly body but we can also see its objective existence in the sky. In Miao’s case, the desire to see Michelangelo’s painting from alternative external positions may have been the first motivation for the project. Only later did he discover the potential of his threedimensional model in re-representing the painting from internal positions. His initial proposal thus started with a passage in which he imagines seeing The Last Judgement from behind:

222 Miao Xiaochun, The Last Judgement in Cyberspace: The Front View, 2006, chromogenic print.

A sculpture can be looked at from multiple sides, whereas a painting can only be viewed from the front. Imagine what would happen if we looked at a painting from the back? How would Michelangelo’s Last Judgement appear from behind? I think the figures considered important in the original work would become less conspicuous, while the secondary figures situated on the edges of the picture plane would assume principal roles. The original meaning of the fresco would be dramatically transformed. Perhaps Michelangelo himself never imagined viewing his fresco using this method of looking.14 340

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The attempt to re-represent the painting from this and other external positions led to the creation of three of the five compositions in the series, including The Last Judgement in Cyberspace: The Front View (illus. 222), The Last Judgement in Cyberspace: The Rear View (illus. 223) and The Last Judgement in Cyberspace: The Side View (illus. 224). Among these, ‘The Front View’ is special because its composition largely coincides with the original fresco. It can thus be considered a translation of Michelangelo’s work from a two-dimensional painting to a three-dimensional digital image. This image is particularly important because it provided the basis for composing other pictures in the series: as a translation, this digital image replaced the original fresco to become the subject of subsequent external and internal viewing. The next composition Miao created was ‘The Side View’. He made this composition before ‘The Rear View’ because when he rotated the three-dimensional image of The Last Judgement on the computer, a ‘side view’ caught his eye. He wrote to me saying he was struck by similarities between what he saw and a traditional Chinese landscape painting. He imagined that if one were looking diagonally at Michelangelo’s fresco from the balcony of the Sistine Chapel, it would be ‘like looking at landscape from an open pavilion halfway up a mountain peak’ and one would see something similar to this photograph. Technically, ‘The Rear View’ could be achieved by rotating ‘The Front View’ 180 degrees (illus. 225). But one such experiment only showed the backs of figures and created an incoherent composition. To make the photograph aesthetically appealing, Miao selected a slightly off-centre vantage point to the right. From this angle, images become concentrated on one side, leaving the other side relatively empty. This compositional imbalance generates visual tension and stimulates imagination. Like a hole suddenly opening up in the sky, the empty space seems to reveal hidden dimensions in the original painting. It prompted Miao to ask: ‘What exists beyond the space of The Last Judgement? What will happen after the moment of the Last Judgement?’ Instead of seeking answers in religion or metaphysics, his response to these questions is strikingly historical:

223 Miao Xiaochun, The Last Judgement in Cyberspace: The Rear View, 2006, chromogenic print.

I recall that when Giotto designed a version of the Last Judgement before Michelangelo, he painted the sun and the moon in the sky in the background. Even today, we modern people still wish to ‘behold’ and ‘touch’ remote cosmic entities. 343

miao xiaoch u n 225 Assumed front and back viewing stations for The Last Judgement.

After Michelangelo, artists like Rodin and Delacroix all painted scenes of hell, such as Rodin’s The Gates of Hell and Delacroix’s Dante’s Boat. Following their precedents, in this composition [‘The Rear View’] I added three flying figures that are absent in Michelangelo’s original composition – they could have been there but were concealed by the painting’s frontal image. Like the three figures standing atop Rodin’s Gates of Hell, they point to the calamities happening on earth. I also filled the lower part of my picture with a huge flood; some men and women clutch onto a wooden board in the water, struggling for survival. People who are familiar with art history should be able to connect this scene with Delacroix’s Dante’s Boat.15 Thus the external position that Miao adopted in composing this scene is not simply perceptual, but also historical and intellectual. Whereas the digital technology allows him to see Michelangelo’s work from an unexpected angle, it also implies a historical distance, across which he can reflect upon the Renaissance masterpiece critically. This critical position makes him a modern-day interpreter/translator of The Last Judgement. Unlike an art historian or art critic, however, he conveys his observation/interpretation through images.

224 Miao Xiaochun, The Last Judgement in Cyberspace: The Side View, 2006, chromogenic print.

Visual translation as performance

If art has always reflected a desire to see and represent things beyond common visuality, contemporary digital and video technology 345

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226 Eve Sussman, 89 Seconds at Alcazar, 2006, video.

provides new possibilities for creating images with seemingly autonomous power. When used to re-represent existing images, this new technology allows contemporary artists to reflect upon and respond to earlier art forms, transforming paintings and sculptures into animated images with enhanced visual immediacy. As works of this kind proliferate and are produced by artists from different countries and art traditions, they begin to constitute a transnational 346

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subcategory of new media art aimed at forging a dynamic dialogue between the past and present. Several such works were featured in the exhibition Visual Performance, which Julie Walsh and I co-curated in 2004.16 Among them, Nalini Malani’s (b. 1946) video Unity in Diversity, recontextualizes a painting by Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) exhibited in Chicago at the 1893 World Congress of Religions. Shown within the golden frame of a traditional painting, the video juxtaposes the harmonious performance of eleven Indian women with an account of the 2002 genocide in Gujarat. Jongbum Choi’s (b. 1978) video, Sikaku, is an odyssey into the world of Salvador Dalí’s (1904–1989) fantasies. Famous images of the Surrealist master, now animated, are recomposed into a dream sequence with exaggerated temporal/spatial disjunctures. In the same exhibition, Wang Gongxin’s (b. 1960) video Always Welcome shows a pair of stone lions greeting the visitors at the gallery’s entrance, in the same manner that such statues guarded traditional temples and palaces (and now also adorn modern hotels, museums and libraries). As the visitors to the exhibition enter the gallery door and watch the lions, the sculptures begin to move and talk. The video thus takes the idea of miraculous images in Buddhist and Taoist legends literally, as the subjects of a visual representation. Deriving inspiration from another type of Buddhist legend, Zhou Xiaohu (b. 1960) created multiple frames of representation in his video, The Gooey Gentleman, in which a man draws a cartoon woman on his naked torso with a traditional brush. She comes alive and rebels against her creator, then enters the man’s torso and turns him into an image on her own body. The video ends with a duel between the two figures and the erasure of both. In a deeper sense, this work comments on both the collaboration and tension between art mediums. Among contemporary works that re-represent traditional images, Eve Sussman’s (b. 1961) 2003 video, 89 Seconds at Alcazar, is an important landmark piece because of its mature negotiation between different mediums and spaces of representation. Like works by Malani, Wang Gongxin and Jongbum Choi in the Visual Performance exhibition, the basic concept of Sussman’s work is translation; what emerges from such a translation is a visual performance in a temporal sequence. Restaging Diego Velázquez’s (1599–1660) Las Meninas (illus. 71, 72), 89 Seconds at Alcazar unpacks the 1656 masterpiece painting into a series of actions leading up to, and immediately following, its creation (illus. 226). The camera 347

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explores the imagined actions taking place beyond the canvas as well as the image in the painting. The viewer travels inside the Palace of the Habsburgs, not only encountering King Philip iv, his wife Mariana of Austria, Velázquez and other figures, but also seeing things through their eyes. The Last Judgement in Cyberspace adds another important example to such contemporary negotiations with art history. Instead of simply converting Michelangelo’s fresco into an illusionistic threedimensional presentation, Miao Xiaochun’s re-creation of the historical painting emphasizes the individuality of a contemporary artist. As he has explained: The digital technology that I employ in making this work has been used in architectural design and Hollywood film-making. . . . But my purpose is entirely different. This work consists of individualized images imbued with subjective experience. (The different angles all emphasize such experiences.) What I hope to achieve is not a more realistic representation of the original work, but a visual and intellectual re-creation of a different order (in which a painting is transformed into something resembling a sculpted complex, a two-dimensional representation is translated into a three-dimensional representation, a standard religious theme becomes the subject of personal speculation, a conclusion is turned into a question, a still canvas is made into active images, and an ancient work is taken as the site of a contemporary discourse). Thus technically I have also avoided illusionistic effects, but have tried to preserve the ‘rough’ flavour of a digital reconstruction, such as the geometrical shapes and harsh surfaces of the figures.17 Miao has also created a video version of The Last Judgement in Cyberspace. While the five photographs refashion Michelangelo’s fresco into a new type of two-dimensional image, the video leads the viewer into cyberspace: he feels that he is traversing a vast, shapeless space within The Last Judgement. Constantly stumbling into various figures and encountering different scenes, he nevertheless remains ignorant of the larger event beyond such fragmentary experiences. Probably this feeling of vulnerability, frustration and suspension is close to the heart of Miao’s rethinking of The Last Judgement, as the video ends with the question he has continued to ask, what lies beyond and after The Last Judgement? 348

REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION 1 Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of Sir Harry Parkes (1894), vol. i, p. 31. Cited in Terry Bennett, History of Photography in China, 1842–1860 (London, 2009), p. 1. 2 Bennett mistakenly identified this ship as hms Queen, which was built later, in 1913. 3 For the image, see Bennett, History of Photography in China, fig. 1. 4 For images, see ibid., figs 15, 53, 54. 5 For a discussion of this pictorial tradition in painting and photography, see Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton, nj, 2012), pp. 95–120. 6 Bennett, History of Photography in China, History of Photography in China: Western Photographers, 1861–1879 (London, 2010) and History of Photography in China: Chinese Photographers, 1844–1879 (London, 2010). 7 Chen Shen and Xu Xijing, Zhongguo sheying yishu shi (A History of Chinese Photographic Art) (Beijing, 2011). 8 Claire Roberts, Photography and China (London, 2013). 9 Two examples of such works are Wang Tianping’s Shanghai sheying shi (A History of Photography in Shanghai) (Shanghai, 2012) and Minguo sheying wenlun (Writings on Photography from the Republican Period) (Beijing, 2014) compiled by Zhu Shuai and Yang Jianru. 10 Jeffrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak, eds, Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China (Los Angeles, ca, 2011). See H. Tiffany Lee’s review of the catalogue in Trans-Asia Photography Review, ii/1 (Fall 2011), www.tapreview.org. 11 Sun Zhongshan, ‘Linshi zhengfu gongbao 29 hao’ (The Provisional Government Gazette No. 27), 5 March 1925. See Huang Yan, ed., Sun Wen xuanji (Selected Writings by Sun Wen [Sun Zhongshan]), vol. ii (Guangzhou, 2006), p. 262. 12 For an introduction to this movement, see Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: A History, 1970s–2000s (London, 2014), pp. 72–97.

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13 For a more detailed discussion of these changes in Chinese photography, see Wu Hung, ‘Between Past and Future: A Short History of Contemporary Chinese Photography’, in Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips, eds, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (New York and Chicago, il, 2004), pp. 11–36. 14 For the notion of conceptual art (guannian yishu or gainian yishu) in China, see Peggy Wang, ‘Making and Remaking History: Categorizing “Conceptual Art” in Contemporary Chinese Art’, Journal of Art Historiography, 10: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art: Historiographic Reflections, ed. Wenny Teo (June 2014), www.arthistoriography.wordpress.com. 1 INVENTING A ‘CHINESE’ PORTRAIT STYLE IN EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY: THE CASE OF MILTON MILLER A version of this chapter was published as ‘Inventing a “Chinese” Portrait Style in Early Photography’, in Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China, ed. J. W. Cody and F. Terpak (Los Angeles, CA, 2011), pp. 69–90. 1 Thanks to Terry Bennett’s archival research, we now know that Milton Miller, also known as Marshall M. Miller, was born in Dummerston, Vermont, in 1830. After he died in 1899, an obituary in the Vermont Phoenix provided information about his life before and after his commercial adventure in China from 1860 to 1863. See Terry Bennett, History of Photography in China, 1842–1860 (London, 2009), pp. 169–79. 2 An 1856 San Francisco directory listed Miller as a photographer in the gallery of William Vance at the corner of Montgomery and Sacramento Streets. But because this location was actually that of Robert H. Vance, who had a documented association with Miller, Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn have argued that the record is probably a mistake and that Miller started to work for Vance from at least 1856. See Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840–1865 (Stanford, ca, 2000), p. 401. 3 For Weed, see Peter E. Palmquist, ‘California’s Peripatetic Photographer: Charles Leander Weed’, California History, 58 (Fall 1979), pp. 205–7; Palmquist and Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers, pp. 585–8; Bennett, History of Photography in China, pp. 163–9. 4 Weed arrived in Hong Kong on 19 January 1860. Miller arrived six months later, on 19 July of the same year. 5 The entire advertisement is cited in Bennett, History of Photography in China, p. 163. 6 The name of Miller’s business is mentioned in a notice posted by S. W. Halsey in the Hong Kong Daily Press on 5 January 1864, after Halsey acquired the firm and Miller’s negatives.

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7 See Palmquist and Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers, p. 401. Miller reported the burglary in Friend of China and Hongkong Gazette, 21 September 1861. The report is cited in Bennett, History of Photography in China, p. 174. 8 See Bennett, History of Photography in China, pp. 177–8. 9 Report of the Medical Missionary Society in China for the Year 1861, p. 13. Cited in Larissa N. Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West (Durham, nc, 2008), pp. 78–9. 10 Palmquist and Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers, p. 401. 11 Bennett, History of Photography in China, p. 178. 12 For example, Terry Bennett recently stated: ‘Milton Miller was arguably the best portrait photographer in nineteenth-century China. His subjects are never stilted and he tried to tease out the personality of each sitter – often succeeding with such intense immediacy that for a moment or two the intervening 150 years melt away, leaving us feeling wholly engaged, but slightly unnerved.’ Ibid., p. 169. 13 According to Richard Brilliant, a portrait is an image that registers a person’s ‘physiognomic likeness’. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London, 1991), p. 9. 14 Palmquist and Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers, p. 401. 15 Titled ‘Photography of China: Ti and Yong, Essence and Innovation’, this workshop took place at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 11–12 December 2006. The workshop’s chief focus was to examine actual examples of early photographs of China housed in the Getty Research Institute. 16 This group almost certainly includes other pictures. For example, one of a set of stereoviews published by E. & H. T. Anthony in 1862 is entitled ‘Mandarin and Family, Canton, China’ (no. 8). It portrays the same group of figures in illus. 12 in the present chapter but in a different way. For a reproduction of this stereoview, see Bennett, History of Photography in China, fig. 163, lower left. 17 Note that the tail of the bird differs from the one in illus. 3 and that the two badges also have different patterned borders. 18 This is the opinion of Yuhang Li of the University of Chicago, an expert in traditional Chinese textiles and costumes. 19 Conversation with the author, early 2007. 20 This studio was very possibly located at the North Parade Ground in the Old City of Guangzhou. See Palmquist and Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers, p. 401. 21 For example, Régine Thiriez opens her essay ‘Photography and Portraits in Nineteenth-century China’ with these sentences: ‘A major source of frustration for the amateur of early photographs, especially portraits, is anonymity. Their origins are usually shrouded under a series of questions: who made the photographs, who collected them, and how they reached their present location, are often mysteries. Likewise, who

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23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

the subject was, when and where he or she was photographed, for what occasion, to what end, and who received and kept copies, is a matter usually left to conjecture.’ East Asian History, 17–18 (1999), p. 77. L. Carrington Goodrich and Nigel Cameron, The Face of China as Seen by Photographers and Travelers, 1860–1912, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art (New York, 1978), p. 52; Clark Worswick and Jonathan D. Spence, Imperial China: Photographs, 1850–1912, exh. cat., Asia House Gallery, New York (New York, 1978); and Bennett, History of Photography in China, caption for fig. 138. See Bennett, History of Photography in China, pp. 177–8. Chinese officials had their portraits taken soon after photography was introduced to China. But according to available records, the occasions included formal audiences and meetings, signing of treaties and other special activities. There is no definitive evidence for their frequent visits to commercial photo studios at this early stage. Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 2nd edn (London, 2006), p. 121. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York, 1989), p. 27. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, ct, 1982), pp. 33–55. Quoted in Rudolf Winkes, ed., The Classical Spirit in American Portraiture (Providence, ri, 1976), p. 84. Bennett, History of Photography in China, pp. 169–72. Palmquist and Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers, p. 564. Cited in Palmquist and Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers, p. 562. San Francisco Daily Globe, 10 September 1857. Cited ibid., p. 563. Evidently Miller considered himself an artist, not a mere technician. When he married in 1866, for example, he identified his occupation as ‘artist’. After he died, his obituary recounted that, accompanied by Ira G. French, Miller went to San Francisco in 1856 and became a professional photographer there: ‘the art of photography was not far advanced at that time, nevertheless Mr. Miller and Mr. French made some photographs which have not been surpassed in this country’, Vermont Phoenix, 14 January 1899. The whole obituary is cited in Bennett, History of Photography in China, pp. 178–9. The incident is reported in the Hong Kong Crime Mail, 5 October 1980. Here is a summary provided by Palmquist and Kailbourn: ‘In Canton in early October, Miller hired fourteen coolies to move some goods. When the laborers balked at his offer of a dollar for their collective work, he fired a warning shot at them, striking a coolie in the thigh. Miller surrendered himself to the authorities and was released on a four-hundred-dollar bond. Fortunately, the coolie’s wound proved to be slight, and Miller’s only penalty was a seventy-five-dollar fine.’ Palmquist and Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers, p. 401.

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35 Johannes Nieuhof, An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperor of China, trans. John Ogilby (London, 1669). 36 William Alexander published a set of his China images with the first systematic account of the embassy by George Staunton (An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China) in 1797. These illustrations were then partially duplicated with the publication of the book in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States within three years. Also in 1797, he began to publish his own pictorial account of the expedition, first in small groups of four images at three-monthly intervals. These images were finally compiled into a single volume entitled The Costume of China in 1805. 37 Because of the lack of surviving photographs by Chinese studios in the early years, it is still difficult to reconstruct their activities and evaluate their achievements. But the existence of such studios in Hong Kong in the late 1850s and early 1860s seems beyond doubt. See Su Zhigang et al., Zhongguo sheyingshi lue (A Brief History of Chinese Photography) (Beijing, 2009), p. 6. For introductions to early photography in Hong Kong, see Roberta Wue, ed., Picturing Hong Kong: Photography, 1855–1910 (New York, 1997), pp. 15–57; Bennett, History of Photography in China, pp. 9–28. 38 See Jeffrey Cody and Frances Terpak, ‘Through a Foreign Glass: The Art and Science of Photography in Late Qing China’, in Cody and Terpak, eds, Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China (Los Angeles, ca, 2011), pp. 33–68. 39 For example, Edwin K. Lai, ‘The Beginnings of Hong Kong Photography’, in Wue, Picturing Hong Kong, pp. 48–57; Bennett, History of Photography in China, pp. 9–28. 40 Cody and Terpak, ‘Through a Foreign Glass’, p. 36. 41 For an informative analysis of these accounts, see Roberta Wue, ‘Essentially Chinese: The Chinese Portrait Subject in Nineteenthcentury Photography’, in Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, eds, Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture (Cambridge, ma, 2005), pp. 264–6. 42 John Thomson, ‘Hong-kong Photographers’, British Journal of Photography, xix/656 (29 November 1872), p. 569. 43 Wue, ‘Essentially Chinese’, p. 266. 44 Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, p. 26. 45 W. S. Haley, The Daguerreotype Operator (New York, 1854), p. 45. 46 A good example of this scholarly pursuit is evident in Roberta Wue’s essay; there, she substantiates Thomson’s view with works by Afong. Wue, ‘Essentially Chinese’, pp. 266–72. 47 This view is expressed strongly by Régine Thiriez. She writes: ‘It might have been expected that Chinese and Western photographers would use different props, techniques or styles. But if one has to look at the back of a card to know who made it, the evidence is against this cultural

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48

49

50 51

52 53 54

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distinction.’ Thiriez, ‘Photography and Portraits in Nineteenth-century China’, p. 82. Focusing on genre scenes of the ‘native types’, Fraser summarizes her findings in these words: ‘In general, from the 1860s to 1890s there are few distinct differences between the panoramas and genre studies shot by many of these Hong Kong and mainland photographers and works produced by western cameramen.’ See Sarah E. Fraser, ‘Chinese as Subject: Photographic Genres in the Nineteenth Century’, in Cody and Terpak, eds, Brush and Shutter, pp. 91–110. Although some Qing ancestor portraits include a chaji next to the sitter, this furniture usually appears in informal portraits of living people. For an example of the former kind, see Jan Stuart and Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits (Washington, dc, 2001), p. 29, fig. 9. See Jan Stuart, ‘The Face in Life and Death: Mimesis and Chinese Ancestor Portraits’, in Wu and Tsiang, eds, Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, pp. 215 and 402 n. 51. Another early example is a portrait of Zou Boqi (1819–1869), who produced China’s first homemade opera in 1844. Like the portrait of the Mongol general Senggelinqin by Lai Chong, it does not represent the sitter’s entire body and rejects the frontal pose and direct eye contact. For a reproduction of the image, see Bennett, History of Photography in China, fig. 4. See Edwin K. Lai, ‘The History of the “Camera Obscura” and Early Photography in China’, in Cody and Terpak, eds, Brush and Shutter, pp. 19–32. For an insightful discussion on this point, see Fraser, ‘Chinese as Subject’. ‘Great are the preparations for the sitting. Their number one (best) clothes are dispatched by a coolie; they are put on in the studio with much care and more talk; the victim seats himself, spreading his robe out to the best advantage; he will have a small snuff-bottle in one hand, and a fan in the other. A direct front face must be taken, so as to show both his ears, and each side of his face of the same proportions; both feet must be so arranged that they are of equal length, perspective being no reasoning power with a China-man. The hands are blessed with a fancy long-nail or two, great is their delight to see them well brought out in the portrait. They will to a certainty have some flowers with them, and a small vase to be placed on a table, or in some cases a French clock is the pride of their hearts, and is to be placed close beside them.’ D. K. Griffith, ‘A Celestial Studio’, Photographic News (London), 28 May 1875, p. 260. Cited in Wue, ‘Essentially Chinese’, p. 265. For the concept of ‘fixity’ in a colonist discourse, see Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Other Questions: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), p. 66.

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56 In her discussion of the ‘super-sign’, Lydia Liu notes that as a ‘heterocultural signifying chain that crisscrosses the semantic fields of two or more languages’, a super-sign also camouflages its foreignness ‘by adopting the unchanging face of an indigenous word’. Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 13–14. Indeed, there are similar features between the Chinese portrait style discussed in this chapter and a super-sign in Liu’s theoretical formulation, but some fundamental differences between linguistic and visual constructs also resist a direct application of her theory to this style. 57 Thomson, ‘Hong-kong Photographers’, p. 569. 58 Bhabha, ‘The Other Questions’, p. 66. 59 Ibid. 2 PHOTOGRAPHY’S SUBJUGATION OF CHINA: A ‘MAGNIFICENT COLLECTION’ OF SECOND OPIUM WAR IMAGES 1 This chapter has benefitted greatly from a number of focused studies on Felice Beato, including Isobel Crombie, ‘China, 1860: A Photographic Album by Felice Beato’, History of Photography, xi/11 (January–March 1987), pp. 25–37; David Harris, Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato’s Photographs of China (Santa Barbara, ca, 1999); John Clark, John Fraser and Colin Osman, ‘A Revised Chronology of Felice (Felix) Beato (1825/34?–1908?)’, Japanese Exchange in Art, 1850s–1930s (Sydney, 2001), pp. 89–120; Luke Gartlan, ‘Felice Beato’, in Encyclopedia of Nineteenthcentury Photography, vol. i, ed. John Hannavy (New York, 2008), pp. 128–31; Terry Bennett, History of Photography in China, 1842–1860, pp. 141–62; and Anne Lacoste, Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road (Los Angeles, 2010). Among them, Harris’s Of Battle and Beauty provides the most comprehensive treatment of Beato’s China photographs and remains the scholarly foundation for studying these images. 2 The issue of The Times on 18 October 1861, reported that Beato had ‘just arrived from China’ (p. 1). A similar report appeared in the November 1861 issue of Photographic News, no. 155, p. 526. 3 The Photographic Journal, vi/136 [1863], p. 335. For Hering’s career, see Hannavy, ed., Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-century Photography, pp. 652–3. 4 See Lacoste, Felice Beato, p. 12. 5 Letter from Greathed to Canning dated 15 November 1860, National Army Museum Library, 6711-1-8. Cited in Harris, Of Battle and Beauty, p. 26. 6 Beato and Crealock probably knew each other before the Second Opium War. Crealock had served in the Crimean War as a soldier,

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7 8

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11 12

13 14 15 16

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and Beato photographed the aftermath of this war. Both documented the India Mutiny and portrayed Ye Mingchen (Yeh Ming-ch’en), the Viceroy of Liangguang, who was imprisoned by the British in Calcutta from 1860 to 1861. See Crombie, ‘China, 1860’, pp. 27–8. These are numbered as ph2.1–86. But ph2.81 is not by Beato and does not belong to this set. See Harris’s note in Of Battle and Beauty, pp. 132–3, based on information provided by the Peabody Essex Museum. Additional information comes from ‘Heard Family. Heard Family Business Records, 1734–1901: A Finding Aid’, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Mss: 766 1754–1898. See http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/ deliver/~bak00162, accessed 2 March 2016. The provenance is based on a handwritten note in the Beato folder at moma: ‘Beato album provenance: John Hendricks (sic)/Rev John G. Currier, St Bellows Falls, Putney, vt./Mrs. Welks (daughter of Hetty Green)/Hetty Green/ Col. E. H. Green.’ I want to thank Tasha Lutek for bringing my attention to this piece of evidence. Harris has carefully examined these sets in Of Battle and Beauty, pp. 132–4. Although the volume itself only reproduces a set of Hering’s reproductions, he provides extremely useful information about the other sixteen sets of Beato’s China photographs in different collections around the world. This author has personally studied twelve of these sets, and can confirm Harris’s records in most cases. For example, he assigned the six earliest panoramas, which he took in Hong Kong and Beitang, with the letters A to F. For the pictures he took in Guangzhou, however, he used a numeral system. One such set, formerly in the Michael and Jane Wilson collection and now at the Getty Museum, is reproduced in its entirety in Harris, Of Battle and Beauty. For a description of this set, see p. 132 of the same book. The Times, 18 October 1961, p. 1 (italics added by author). British Journal of Photography, 1 July 1862, p. 257. A detail of this set proves that Hering was actively engaged in the creation of this final collection: he substituted his own portrait of Sir James Grant for Beato’s. A common assumption is that Beato himself made these reproductions. But it is important to note that Hering certainly had the technical facility and expertise required to reproduce two-dimensional works of art. In an advertisement in Athenaeum on 8 January 1859, he claimed that ‘From its long-existing artistic pre-eminence, this establishment offers unique advantages to the nobility and gentry who are desirous of having portraits taken, or oil or water-coloured painting and drawings copied.’ These are nos 1, 3–12 listed under Appendix A in Of Battle and Beauty, pp. 159–62. It should be noted that there are still quite a few other ‘Beato’ photos that are not listed in Hering’s catalogue; the Getty Museum

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18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

alone possesses eight of them (2007.26.99–111, 2007.26.209.2–6). But their authenticity as Beato’s work still remains open to question. Harris has proposed a simpler explanation: ‘Beato apparently did not bring prints corresponding to numbers 9 (appendix catalogue 4), 79 (appendix catalogue 7), 82 (appendix catalogue 8), 90 (appendix catalogue 9), and 91 (appendix catalogue 10) with him to England, and, consequently, these numbers either do not appear in Hering’s list or, in the cases of numbers 90 and 91, were assigned new subjects.’ Of Battle and Beauty, p. 41, n. 76. But if we accept this assumption, we must still ask why he didn’t bring these images to London. Perhaps he had decided to exclude them from his ‘collection’ for reasons still to be identified. This image is in the moma set (1331.74) and the set in the Peabody Essex Museum (ph69). Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, ph1986:0901:003: 001–005. For example, after the expedition army captured Beitang (Pehtung), Beato photographed British officers posing before the temporary headquarters. The collection retains only one of them (Hering 8). In other cases, an omitted photograph repeats certain architectural images found in the collection. A pair of wooden pavilions in ‘Bridge in the Confucius Temple, Canton’ (moma 82), for instance, reappears in two images in the collection (Hering 63 and 72), photographed from the same angle but from different distances. ‘Porcelain Temple’, ‘Magazine Hill’, ‘Charge of the Dragoon’s Guard at Palichian, September 21, 1860’ and ‘View from South Taku Fort Looking Seaward from the Peiho River’ are poorer in print quality and/or weaker in composition if compared with the images selected for the collection. The eight-part ‘Panorama of Tangkoo, August 10th 1860’ may have been rejected on the same grounds: although laboriously constructed, this long, narrow picture filled with gabled roofs of townhouses may have appeared too undramatic. Judging from the relative rarity of these eleven photographs in various collections, Beato made few prints after taking them, and eventually eliminated them from the final collection. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, ph1986:0901:004: 001–007. On some occasions they were joined by Felice’s older brother Antonio Beato (c. 1830–1903), who had also learned photography from Robertson. For the ‘pedagogical’ roles of this war, see James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-century China (Durham, nc, 2003), pp. 29–118. G. W. Cooke, China: Being ‘The Times’ Special Correspondent from China in the Years 1857–58 (London, 1858), note on p. 399. Clark Worswick and Jonathan Spence, Imperial China: Photographs, 1850–1912, exh. cat., Asia House Gallery, New York (New York, 1978), p. 66. For the last days of Ye Mingshen’s life, see J. Y. Wong, Yeh Ming-ch’en: Viceroy of Liang Kuang 1852–8 (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 193–7.

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28 Henry Knollys, Incidents in the China War of 1860, Compiled from the Private Journals of General Sir Hope Grant G.C.B. (Edinburgh and London, 1875), p. 121. 29 Clark et al., ‘A Revised Chronology of Felice (Felix) Beato’, p. 93. 30 For Beato’s photographic techniques, see Lacoste, Felice Beato, pp. 24–5. 31 Hope Grant’s Letter Book, British Library, Manuscript Department, Add. ms 52414. Cited in Bennett, History of Photography in China, p. 212, n. 165. 32 Crombie, ‘China, 1860’, p. 29. 33 For an introduction to Beato’s activities before he reached China, see David Harris, ‘Imperial Ideology and Felice Beato’s Photographs of the Second Opium War in China’, in Harris, Of Battle and Beauty, pp. 19–24. 34 For a discussion of this fascination, see Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton, nj, 2012), pp. 94–112. 35 Crombie, ‘China, 1860’, p. 29. 36 Having commissioned photographers such as M. Rossier to take stereoscopic photographs in Guangzhou in 1858, this British company issued a new series of some 200 titles in 1860 called Views in China and included Beato’s works in it. William C. Darrah, The World of Stereographs (Gettysburg, pa, 1977), p. 136, figs 46 and 207. 37 Harris, Of Battle and Beauty, p. 158, notes on Catalogue 76. 38 In addition to the 27 images listed in Hering’s sale catalogue, five more images have been identified by Harris in Of Battle and Beauty, Appendix Catalogue 1, 3–6. It is worth noting that in Hering’s catalogue, there is a gap between numbers 57 and 64. A photograph in the moma set, titled ‘Charge of the Dragoon’s Guard at Palichian, September 21, 1860’, has the number 58 written on the mount. As Harris has suggested, it is possible that the other pictures in this missing group are also related to the battle at Baliqiao. Ibid., p. 160, notes on Catalogue 6. 39 Grant’s Letter Book, nos 58–9. 40 This photograph, not listed in Hering’s catalogue, is in the collection of the National Army Museum, London (7703–17). For a reproduction, see George Allgood, China War, 1860: Letters and Journal (London, 1901), p. 1. 41 This photo is preserved in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (82.1287.41). 42 Robert Swinhoe, Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860: Containing Personal Experiences of Chinese Character, and of the Moral and Social Condition of the Country; together with a Description of the Interior of Peking (London, 1861), p. 32. 43 Allgood, China War, p. 39. 44 Letter from G. F. Mann to M. Mann, 9 September 1860. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Department of Western Manuscripts, mss, eng left, d. 305. Cited in Harris, Of Battle and Beauty, pp. 26–7, 40 (n. 55). 45 Cited ibid., p. 33. 46 These descriptions are cited ibid., p. 33.

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47 Ibid. 48 For Harris’s discussion of this sequence, see Of Battle and Beauty, pp. 30–31. My dating of some of the images differs from his. 49 Harris suggests that Beato made these four photographs on the same day. In my view, the first three were photographed in the early afternoon of 21 August, right after the battle ended. We know that a heavy storm raged for four hours in the afternoon of that day (Allgood, China War, p. 76; David Rennie, British Arms in Northern China and Japan: Pekin 1860; Kagoshima 1862 [London, 1864], pp. 119–20). These three views of the interior of the inner north fort do not show any water on the ground. The fourth picture, however, does show large pools of water on the ground; this photograph should thus have been taken on 22 August or slightly later. 50 The relatively late date of this most complicated image is indicated by the absence of corpses. Unlike photographs taken right after the heavy storm on the 21st, it also shows no water on the ground. 51 Allgood, China War, p. 45. 52 This sequence of Beato’s photographs at the Tanggu Fort has been carefully established by Harris in Of Battle and Beauty, pp. 28–31. 53 Rennie, British Arms in Northern China, p. 112; cited ibid., p. 29. 54 Crombie, ‘China, 1860’, p. 31. 55 It is numbered 58 in the moma set. For a reproduction, see Harris, Of Battle and Beauty, p. 172, Appendix Catalogue 6. 56 Knollys, Incidents in the China War of 1860, pp. 120–21. 57 ‘The Franco-British Expedition to China, 1860’, www.napoleon.org. 58 Harris claims that Beato’s description is erroneous because in the picture, the Chinese guns point towards the interior of the city. Of Battle and Beauty, p. 145, notes on Catalogue 29. 59 In the words of Lord Elgin, the destruction of the palace was ‘a solemn act of retribution’. See Hevia, English Lessons, p. 107. 60 It is true that the dates that Beato assigned to his photographs are not always reliable. But in this case, we should not simply ignore the date and should consider the possibility that he took the before-and-after photos of Qingyi Yuan close to the garden’s destruction. 61 Originally this photograph was a two-part panorama, whose existing versions can be found in the collections of moma (49.1986) and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (ph1986:0901:020:001-001). The single view in the Hering edition comprises the right half of the original composition. 62 Knollys, Incidents in the China War of 1860, pp. 209–10. 63 James Bruce, Earl of Elgin, Extracts from the Letters of James, Earl of Elgin, to Mary Louisa, Countess of Elgin, 1847–1862 (Edinburgh, 1864), p. 223. 64 Swinhoe, Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860, p. 352. 65 It is difficult to imagine that he could have taken five or six pictures at different locations, including a very long panorama from the southern city wall, on a single day, so these dates should not be taken too literally.

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66 Clark et al., ‘A Revised Chronology of Felice (Felix) Beato’, p. 94. 67 Bennett, History of Photography in China, p. 154. 68 Evidence for this practice can be found in the communications between G. F. Mann and his wife. While Mann selected certain Beato photos to send to her, she also made her own suggestions. She wrote in a letter dated 20 November 1860: ‘Certainly your collection of photographs is now most valuable. I suppose a few more of Pekin will be required to complete the set? And thus form a record of your eventful career in China.’ Cited in Harris, Of Battle and Beauty, pp. 40–41, n. 74. 69 Letter from Greathed to Canning dated 15 November 1860. National Army Museum Library, 6711-1-8. 70 See above note 8. Harris only mentions that the firm was based in Guangzhou. But according to information provided by the Baker Library, Harvard University: ‘the first office [of the company] was in Canton but in November or December 1856 the records were moved to Hong Kong for safety and the main office was established there in the fall of 1857.’ 71 It is possible that he was guided by his brother George Farley Heard (1837–1875), who was the private secretary to John E. Ward, the American diplomat in China from 1858 to 1859, and later succeeded Albert as the manager of the family firm. 72 In the moma set, two of the Guangzhou images, ‘East Street from Yamun, Canton, April 1860’ and ‘The Heights of Canton, April 1860’, are inscribed with numbers 90 and 92. They are replaced in Hering’s catalogue by portraits of Grant and Lord Elgin. 73 Charles Merewether, ‘Trace of Loss’, in Michael S. Roth with Claire Lyons and Charles Merewether, eds, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los Angeles, ca, 1997), p. 28. 74 Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (New York, 1989), p. 69. 3 BIRTH OF THE SELF AND THE NATION: CUTTING THE QUEUE 1 Xiao jing (Classic of Filial Piety), in Ruan Yuan Shisan jing zhushu (Annotated Thirteen Classics) (Beijing, 1979), Chapter One. 2 Kang Youwei, ‘Qing duanfa yifu gaiyuan zhe’ (An Appeal to Abandon the Queue, Change the Manner of Clothing, and Change the Reign Period), Association of Chinese History (Zhongguo shi xuehui), in The Hundred Day Reform 2 (Wuxu bianfa 2), Data of Modern Chinese History (Zhongguo jindaishi ziliao congkan) (Beijing, 1953), pp. 263–4. 3 Sun Zhongshan, ‘Linshi zhengfu gongbao 29 hao’ (The Provisional Government Gazette no. 27), 5 March 1925. See Huang Yan, ed., Sun Wen Xuanji (Selected Writings by Sun Wen [Sun Zhongshan]), vol. ii (Guangzhou, 2006), p. 262.

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4 Given how often the policy was reissued over the following years, it is clear that the government did not achieve the lofty goal set out in this initial document. 5 Henrietta Harrison, The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village, 1857–1942 (Stanford, ca, 2005), p. 94. For a related discussion, see Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911– 1929 (Oxford, 2000). 6 For example: Wang Dongfang, Maixiang jindai: jianbian yu fangzu (Striding Towards Modernity: Cutting Queues and Unbinding Feet) (Shenyang, 1997); Wang Ermin, ‘Duanfa yifu gaiyuan: bianfa lunzhi xiangwei zhiqu’ (Cutting Hair, Changing Dress and the Calendar: Symbolic Intentions of Reform), in Zhongguo jindaide weixin yundong: bianfa yu lixian taojihui (Research Conference on the Modern Chinese Reform Movement: Reform and the Establishment of the Constitution) (Taipei, 1981); Michael R. Godley, ‘The End of the Queue: Hair as Symbol in Chinese History’, China Heritage Quarterly, 27 (September 2011), www.chinaheritagequarterly.org. 7 Cited in Zhang Yan, 1908 diguo wangshi (The Empire’s Past Events in 1908) (Chongqing, 2007), available at http://book.mihua.net/ book/5/5144. 8 The Graphic, 6 April 1912, p. 469. 9 The Illustrated London News, 2 March 1912, cover. 10 Paul French, Carl Crow, A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Time and Adventures of an American in Shanghai (Hong Kong, 2006), p. 42. 11 The Graphic, 6 April 1912, p. 468. 12 Edwin J. Dingle, China’s Revolution: 1911–1912 (Shanghai, 1912). 13 Hanchao Lu, The Birth of A Republic: Francis Stafford’s Photographs of China’s 1911 Revolution and Beyond (Seattle, wa, 2010), p. 139. 14 The photograph is published in Lao zhaopian (Old Photos), 12 (December 1999), centrefold. The inscription is also transcribed in Feng Keli, ‘Rang “lishi chengjian” ganga de zhaopian’ (Photos that Challenge Conventional Historical Views). See www.lzp1996.com/ bzgy/20110402/522.html, accessed 2 March 2016. 15 Wang Wenjie, ‘Jianbian liunian’ (Commemorating Cutting the Queue), Lao zhaopian, 12 (December 1999), centrefold. 16 This inscription is transcribed in Ding Yizhuang, ‘Qiantan Beijing cheng de koushu shu’ (A Preliminary Discussion of the Oral History of Beijing), in École Française d’Extrême-Orient, Centre de Pékin, Lishi, kaogu yu shehui: Zhong Fa xueshu xilie jiangzuo (History, Archaeology and Society: Sino-French Academic Lecture Series), 14 (June 2011). 17 Ding Yizhuan, Lao Beijing ren de koushu lishi (Oral History of Old Beijingers), 2 vols (Beijing, 2009), pp. 596–637. For the life of Li Hongchun, also see Luo Junjun, Li Delun zhuan (A Biography of Li Delun) (Beijing, 2001).

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18 ‘Double exposure’ means exposing twice or more on film, resulting in two or more images of the same subject in a single picture. 19 Another example is in the collection of David Bellis, published online under the title ‘1912: Farewell to the Queue’, at http://gwulo.com/ atom/19394, accessed 2 March 2016. 20 See Virginia Dodier, Clementina, Lady Hawarden: Studies from Life, 1857–1864 (Denville, nj, 1999), especially pp. 49–50. 21 Leslie Woodhouse, ‘Concubines with Cameras: Royal Siamese Consorts Picturing Femininity and Ethnic Difference in Early 20th Century Siam’, Trans-Asia Photography Review, ii/2 (Spring 2012): Women’s Camera Work: Asia, www.tapreview.org. 22 An image of this painting, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, can be found in Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, eds, Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500–1800 (London, 2004), pl. 23.10, p. 305. 23 An inscription on the back of this photograph, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, records this occasion. 24 One such example is in Liu Beisi and Xu Qixian, Gugong zhencang renwu xiezhen xuan (A Selection of Portrait Photographs in the Collection of the Palace Museum) (Beijing, 1995), pl. 26. Another example can be found in the ‘Travel Albums from Paul Fleury’s Trips to Asia’ in the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 25 Wang Dongfang gives about a dozen examples of famous historical figures who voluntarily cut their queues. Maixiang jindai: jianbian yu fangzu, pp. 47–89. 26 Qianshuo huabao (Easy Pictorial), cited in ‘“Jianbianzi” Qing mo Min chu Beijing ren de huaxiang’ (‘Cutting the Queue’: Portraits of Beijingers from the End of the Qing to the Early Republic Era), http://ourbj.blog.hexun.com/48011379_d.html, accessed 2 March 2016. Catherine Yeh has discussed Mei Lanfang’s cutting his queue as a way of publicly displaying his ‘modern image’: ‘From Male “Flower” to National Star: Choreographing Mei Lanfang’s Rise to Stardom’, in Performativität und Ereignis, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Christian Horn, Sandra Umathum and Matthias Warstat (Tübingen and Basel, 2003), pp. 259–76. 27 Lu Xun, ‘Yin Taiyan xiansheng er xiangqi de ersan shi’ (Two or Three Things Brought to Mind by Mr Zhang Taiyan), in Lu Xun quanji (Complete Writings by Lu Xun) (Beijing, 1981), vol. vi, p. 579. 28 Zhou Zuoren, Zhou Zuoren riji (Zhou Zuoren Diary), 3 vols (Zhengzhou, 1996), pp. 384, 389, twelfth and twenty-ninth days of the third month (9 and 26 April). 29 Tai Jingnong, Guanyu Lu Xun jiqi zhuzuo (On Lu Xun and his Works) (Peking, 1926). 30 For a reproduction of the photograph and a detail showing Lu Xun’s head, see Eva Shan Chou, Memory, Violence, Queues: Lu Xun Interprets China (Ann Arbor, mi, 2012), figs 2.9–10, p. 70.

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31 Zhou Qiming (Zhou Zuoren), Lu Xun de qingnian shidai (Lu Xun’s Youth) (Beijing, 1957; reprint, Shijiazhuang, 2001), p. 33. 32 For images, see Chou, Memory, Violence, Queues, p. 175, figs 4.4, 4.5. 33 Xu Shoutang, Wo suo renshi de Lu Xun (The Lu Xun I Knew) (Beijing, 1952), p. 4. 34 Ibid., p. 24. 35 For a detailed analysis of these accounts, see Chou, Memory, Violence, Queues, p. 234. 36 Based on Eva Shan Chou’s translation in Memory, Violence, Queues, p. 57. After copying the poem in the calligraphic pieces, Lu Xun noted: ‘I composed it when I was twenty-one, and now, as I write it out, I’m fifty-one years old.’ 37 Lyon Sharman, Sun Yat-sen; His Life and Its Meaning: A Critical Biography (Stanford, ca, 1934), p. 41. 38 See Zouxiang Gonghe: Sun Zhongshan jian bianzi (Towards the Republic: Sun Zhongshan Cut his Queue), http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_ XMzY1MzIxODAw.html, accessed 22 January 2016. 39 Feng Ziyou, Geming yishi (Reminiscences of the Revolution) (Taipei, 1966), p. 2. 40 Sun Yat-sen, ‘My Reminiscences’, The Strand Magazine (London, March 1912), no. 43. 41 Henry Pu Yi, The Last Manchu: The Autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China, trans. Kuo Ying Paul Tsai (New York, 1967), p. 54. 42 Ibid., pp. 52–3. 43 According to Qi Ling’s Diary from the Ciyan Studio (Ciyanzhai riji), ‘The emperor cut off his queue on the first day [of the month]. Our duties [as ministers] should have prompted us to argue with him. But since we failed in stopping him, we should follow him to cut off our own queues.’ Cited in Mingdao, ‘Wenhua daguanyuan – Fu Yi jianbian quwen’ (A Cultural Garden of Grand Views: Interesting Records of Pu Yi’s Cutting of his Queues). See www.merit-times.com.tw/NewsPage. aspx?unid=27538, accessed 2 March 2016. 44 Gugong zhoukan (Palace Museum weekly), 65 (3 December 1931). This event is also recorded in Sun Xitao, Qing gong miwen (Secret Hearings in the Qing Palace) (Beijing, 2001), p. 2083. 4 SELF AS ART: JIN SHISHENG AND HIS INTERIOR SPACE A version of this chapter was published as ‘Immortal Mountains in Chinese Art’, in Wang Wusheng, Celestial Realm: The Yellow Mountains of China (New York, 2005), pp. 17–39. 1 Liu Bannong, Bannong tan ying (Liu Bannong on Photography) (Beijing, 1927; reprint, Beijing, 2000). 2 I should gratefully acknowledge that here and elsewhere in this chapter

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3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14

research materials were provided by Mr Jin Hua. I also want to thank Theora Kvitka, who translated an early version of this essay from Chinese to English. For example, the several articles gathered in a recent volume about Jin Shisheng all focus on this type of photography. Shanghai Association of Photographers, Jin Shisheng (Shanghai, 2012). In another photograph Jin took in his Tongji University dormitory, the hanging portrait is in a different location, showing that its placement here is intentional. This painting was originally dated to the Song Dynasty, but due to the style of mounting, it must have been created after the Song, possibly at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. See James Cahill, An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings (Berkeley and Los Angeles, ca, 1980), p. 221. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London, 1970). Jin Shisheng, ‘Sheying yu wo bujieyuan’ (My Indissoluble Bond with Photography), Xinmin wanbao (Xinmin Evening News), 2 March 1988. Reprinted in Tongji University School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Jin Jingchang jinian wenji (A Collection of Papers in Memory of Jin Jingchang) (Shanghai, 2002), p. 153. January 2012, personal communication (email). Jin Shisheng, ‘Sheying yu “yishu xibao”’ (Photography and ‘Artistic Genes’), Xinmin wanbao, 4 April 1988. Reprinted in Jin Jingchang jinian wenji, pp. 154–5. Zhonghua sheying zazhi (Chinese Journal of Photography), 8 (1933), p. 326. Ding Binxuan, ‘Fang Jin Shisheng jiaoshou’ (Visiting Professor Jin Shisheng), Zhongguo sheying (Chinese Photography), 2 (1984). Reprinted in Jin Jingchang jinian wenji, p. 130. For Jin Shisheng’s connection with Flying Eagle, see Jin Shisheng, ‘Cong Feiying tan 30 niandai Shanghai de sheying zhuangkuang’ (An account of 1930s photography in Shanghai based on Flying Eagle magazine), Dazhong sheying (Popular Photography), June 1991. Reprinted in Tongji University School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Jin Jingchang jinian wenji, pp. 117–19. Jin Shisheng, ‘Huiyi Feiying’ (Remember Flying Eagle), Zhongguo sheying (Chinese Photography), February 1958. Reprinted in Tongji University School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Jin Jingchang jinian wenji, pp. 110–12. The Shanghai Photographer’s Association, Shanghai University Literature Department, ed., Shanghai sheying shi (A History of Shanghai Photography) (Shanghai, 1992), pp. 73–4. Jin Hua, ‘Jin Shisheng de sheying shenghuo’ (Jin Shisheng’s Photographic Career), Zhongguo sheying, January 2010, pp. 26–31. My thanks to Mr Jin Hua, who provided much of the information required to analyse the photographs in this paragraph. Jin Shisheng, ‘Sheying suotan – kan du xie zuo’ (Trivial Talks about Photography: Looking, Reading and Writing about It), Flying Eagle, January 1936.

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15 Zhang Tingwei, ‘Yi Jin Jingchang xiansheng’ (Remembering Mr Jin Jingchang), Chengshi guihua huikan (Journal of Urban Planning Forum), 3 (2000). Reprinted in Jin Jingchang jinian wenji, pp. 193–5. 5 SEARCHING FOR IMMORTAL MOUNTAINS: THE ORIGINS AND AESTHETICS OF CHINESE LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY 1 David Hawkes, trans., The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets (New York, 1985), pp. 74–5. Romanization of Chinese characters modified. 2 George Rowley, Principles of Chinese Painting, revd edn (Princeton, nj, 1974), p. 27. 3 For a discussion of these early forms of immortal mountains, see Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art (Stanford, ca, 1989), pp. 118–26. 4 Shizhou ji (Records of the Ten Districts), quoted in Li Daoyuan, Shuijing zhu (Annotated Canon of Waterways), Basic Sinological Series (Shanghai, 1937), pp. 1.9–10. The immortal mountain Kunlun should not be confused with the real geographic Kunlun Mountains. During the Warring States period (475–221 bce) and the Western Han (206 bce–24 ce), myths developed in China about this immortal mountain, where the goddess Queen Mother of the West controlled the secret of deathlessness. 5 See Michael Sullivan, The Birth of Landscape Painting in China (London, 1962), pl. 21. 6 For example, it is recorded in Sima Qian’s Historical Records (Shi ji) that Emperor Wu (r. 187–141 bce) of the Western Han sent necromancers to the East China Sea to seek the immortal Penglai Island. Upon their return, they reported that they had failed to reach the island because no immortal qi was spotted. Emperor Wu was so impressed with this report that he established an official post, Deputy Qi Watcher, who was to stay on the seashore and peer out at the ocean day after day, waiting for this island’s qi to appear. Sima Qian, Shi ji (Historical Records) (Beijing, 1959), p. 1393. 7 This type of censer is traditionally called a boshanlu, or ‘incense burner in the shape of Mount Bo’. But this name is from a later text. Because the lower part of a censer often represents the ocean, and because many texts document the contemporaneous fantasy about Penglai Island, these censers may in fact represent Penglai. 8 For an excellent discussion of Zong Bing’s approaches to landscape and landscape art, see Susan Bush, ‘Tsung Ping’s Essay on Painting Landscape and the “Landscape Buddhist’’ Mount Lu’, in S. Bush and C. Murck, Theories of the Arts in China (Princeton, nj, 1983), pp. 132–64. 9 Translated by Susan Bush, ibid., p. 146. Slightly modified.

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10 Translated by Alexander Soper, in Textual Evidence for the Secular Arts of China in the Period from Liu Sung through Sui (Ascona, 1967), p. 16. 11 Lothar Ledderose, ‘The Earthly Paradise: Religious Elements in Chinese Landscape Art’, in Bush and Murck, Theories of the Arts in China, pp. 165–83; quotation from p. 165. 12 Among the numerous discussions related to these topics, three works most closely focus on representations of the Yellow Mountains. These are Joseph McDermott, ‘The Making of a Chinese Mountain, Huangshan: Politics and Wealth in Chinese Art’, Asian Cultural Studies (Tokyo), 17 (March 1989); James Cahill, ed., Shadows of Mt. Huang: Chinese Painting and Printing of the Anhui School (Berkeley, ca, 1981); and James Cahill, ‘Huang Shan Paintings as Pilgrimage Pictures’, in Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü, eds, Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, pp. 246–92 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, ca, 1992). 13 A turning point in the mountain’s history was the construction of the temple by the monk Pumen in 1606; afterwards the mountain became increasingly accessible. By the third quarter of the seventeenth century, the vicinity of the mountains was well explored, and the number of designated points of interest increased rapidly. 14 Although texts record that murals and paintings of the Yellow Mountains were made from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, none of these works have survived. See McDermott, ‘The Making of a Chinese Mountain’, p. 154; and Cahill, ‘Huang Shan Paintings’, p. 273. The earliest extant painted work of the Yellow Mountains may be an album dating to 1534 by Lu Zhi, who recorded in it a trip to Boyue, a peak of the Yellow Mountains. Pictures of the mountains did not become common until the seventeenth century. 15 This painting bears a signature of Xu Pen (d. c. 1378) and a date corresponding to 1376. Based on a stylistic analysis, however, Cahill has dated it to the first half of the sixteenth century; Cahill, ‘Huang Shan Paintings’, p. 273. 16 See ibid., pp. 274–5. 17 Hongren’s original name is Jiang Tao. He is also known as Jianjiang. 18 Ginger Hsü, ‘Hongren’, in Cahill, Shadows of Mt. Huang, p. 80. 19 Translation from Liu Yang, Fantastic Mountains: Chinese Landscape Painting from the Shanghai Museum (Sydney, 2004), p. 158. 20 For a description of the eight scenes, see Richard Edwards, The Painting of Tao-chi (Ann Arbor, mi, 1967), pp. 30–32. 21 Chen Shen, ‘Lang Jingshan he jijin sheying’ (Lang Jingshan and Composite Photography), in Sheying dashi Lang Jingshan (Lang Jingshan, Master of Photography) (Beijing, 2003), pp. 96–102. 22 Lang Jingshan, ‘Composite Pictures and Chinese Art’, in Techniques in Composite Picture-making, revd edn (Taipei, 1958), n.p. 23 Ibid., translated from the Chinese text in the same publication. 24 William R. B. Acker, trans., Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts on Chinese Painting (Leiden, 1954), p. 185. 25 Ibid.

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26 ‘Postscript to Huangshan xieyi’ (Portraying the Spirit of the Yellow Mountain), manuscript provided by the artist. 27 Wang Wusheng’s letter to Susan Costello, 20 April 2004; manuscript provided by the artist. 28 Ibid. 29 Introduction to ‘The First Nature, Society, Man Exhibition’, cited in Yongyuan de siyue (Eternal April) (Beijing, 1999), pp. 88–9. 30 For an introduction to the development of Chinese photography from 1960s to the present, see Wu Hung, ‘Between Past and Future: A Short History of Contemporary Chinese Photography’, in Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (New York and Chicago, IL, 2004), pp. 11–36. 31 Wang Wusheng, ‘Huangshan, wo yongyuan juanlian ni’ (Yellow Mountain, I Will Love You Forever), Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), 12 November 1994. 32 Cahill, ‘Huang Shan Paintings’, p. 278. 6 A SECOND HISTORY: AN ARCHIVE OF MANIPULATED PHOTOGRAPHS A version of this chapter was published as ‘The “Old Photo Craze” and Contemporary Chinese Art’, in Wu Hung, Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Chinese Art and Art Exhibition (Hong Kong, 2008), pp. 119–34. 1 Entitled Sublimation: A New Art Project by Zhang Dali, this exhibition was curated by Wu Hung and held at the Beijing Commune Gallery from 22 October to 25 November 2005. 2 The Sixth Kwangju Biennale, Fever, Kwangju, Korea; The First Chapter: Tracing Roots: Unfolding Asian Stories, 8 September–11 November 2006, curator: Wu Hung. 3 These exhibitions include: A Second History, Walsh Gallery, Chicago, 9 June–11 July 2006, curator: Wu Hung; Zhang Dali: Image and Revision in New Chinese Photography, Macalester College Art Gallery, St Paul, Minnesota, 4 November–10 December 2006; Re-imagining Asia, House of World Cultures, Berlin, 14 March–18 May 2008; and The New Art Gallery, Birmingham, 13 February–4 May, curators: Wu Hung and Shaheen Merali. 4 A Second History, Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou, 27 March– 28 April, 2010, curator: Wu Hung. 5 This is the definition of ‘manipulated photography’ given in Mia Fineman, Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York, 2012), p. 7. 6 For a technical explanation of various methods used in photographic manipulation, see ibid., pp. 270–73.

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7 See ibid, pp. 270–71. 8 Mao Zedong zhuxi zhaopian xuanji (Mao Zedong: A Selection of Photographs) (Beijing, 1998). 9 For examples, see Fineman, Faking It, pp. 89–93. 10 The meaning of this passage is not entirely clear. It is possible that Jing Xixiang is the owner of a financial organization called Cunshan Tang or the Hall of Preserving Goodness. The photograph was taken by Zhong Huantian (alias Gao Liang, d. 2006). 11 Zhang Dali, ‘Guanyu wode “Dier lishi’’’ (About my Work A Second History), in Dangdai meishujia (Contemporary Artist Magazine), 5 (2006), p. 45. 12 Definition in Oxford Dictionary, www.oxforddictionaries.com. 13 Zhang Dali, ‘Guanyu wode “Dier lishi’’’, p. 45. 14 Ibid. 15 Zhan Yan and Zeng Huang, ‘Chen Shilin: Mao Zedong biaozhunxiang de xiubanshi’ (Chen Shilin: The Retoucher of Mao Zedong’s Standard Portraits), Renwu (People), May 2008. See http://rewu.qikan.com. Zheng Huang’s webpage, http://zenghuang.blshe.com/ArticleView. aspx?titleid=rewu20080513, accessed 22 January 2016. 16 ‘Wogei Mao Zhuxi xiu zhaopian: Chen Shilin’ (We Retouched Pictures for Chairman Mao: Chen Shilin), Koushu (Oral History), 89. See www.letv.com. 17 Zhan Yan and Zeng Huang, ‘Chen Shilin: Mao Zedong biaozhunxiang de xiubanshi, http://cpc.people.com.cn/BIG5/85037/85038/7465296.html, accessed 22 January 2016. 18 Fu Liwen, ‘Chen Shilin yu Mao Zedong de sifu biaozhunxiang’ (Chen Shilin and Four Standard Portraits of Mao Zedong). See www.bjzqw.com. 19 Zhan Yan and Zeng Huang, ‘Chen Shilin: Mao Zedong biaozhunxiang de xiubanshi’. 20 Zeng Huang, ‘Biaozhunzhao hou: Fang Chen Shilin’ (Behind Standard Portraits: Interviewing Chen Shilin), July 2007, http://home.blshe.com/ space.php?uid=70&do=blog&guidang=200712&view=me, accessed 22 January 2016. 21 Ibid. 22 Luo Xuehui, ‘Chen Shilin: Lingxiu “biaozhunxiang” zhizuo diyiren’ (Chen Shilin: The No. 1 Producer of Leaders’ Standard Portraits), Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan (Chinese Newsweek), 34 (September 2008). See http://news.xinhuanet.com/theory/2008-10/10/content_10173010. htm, accessed 2 March 2016. 23 Zhan Yan and Zeng Huang, ‘Chen Shilin: Mao Zedong biaozhunxiang de xiubanshi’. 24 Ibid. 25 Zeng Huang, ‘Biaozhunzhao hou: Fang Chen Shilin’. 26 Ibid. 27 Luo Xuehui, ‘Chen Shilin: Lingxiu “biaozhunxiang” zhizuo diyiren’. 28 According to the Ilford Photo website, this method ‘starts with conventional exposure of the film and development of the negative

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29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

image as usual. At this stage, the residual unexposed and undeveloped silver halide in the film represents the positive image that is the desired end point: therefore the remaining stages in the process involve removal (bleaching) of the original negative image, fogging the film to expose the remaining silver halide, and conventional development and fixing of this second, reversal, image.’ See ‘Applications’ / ‘Developing Black and White Films’, at www.ilfordphoto.com. A chemical solution used to lessen the density of a processed negative or print by oxidizing some of the blackened silver to soluble silver compounds. Zeng Huang, ‘Biaozhunzhao hou: Fang Chen Shilin’. Ibid. Ibid. Luo Xuehui, ‘Chen Shilin: Lingxiu “biaozhunxiang” zhizuo diyiren’. In traditional China, the emperor is often called ‘True Dragon the Son of Heaven’ (Zhenlong Tianzi), and it is believed that the shape of his forehead resembles that of a dragon. Zeng Huang, ‘Biaozhunzhao hou: Fang Chen Shilin’. He said this in ‘Wogei Mao Zhuxi xiu zhaopian – Chen Shilin’. Guo Moruo, ‘Piping yu meng’ (Criticism and Dreams), in Guo Moruo quanji: wenxuebian (The Complete Works of Guo Moruo: Literature), 20 vols (Beijing, 1986), vol. xv, p. 236. Ibid. 7 THE ‘OLD PHOTO CRAZE’ AND CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART

1 William Pietz, ‘Fetish’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds, Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago, il, 1992), pp. 197–207, 203. 2 Although this publication is a quarterly, it is not defined as a magazine or journal, which, according to Chinese publishing regulations, need special permission and a ‘journal code’ (kan hao). Rather, it is defined as a serial (congshu) and can therefore use a ‘book code’ (shu hao). 3 Personal communication (email), 2002. 4 The publisher defines the readership of the serial as ‘people with a high school and above educational background’. See Feng Keli, ‘Lao zhaopian (congkan) chuban gouxiang’ (A Proposal for Publishing the Old Photos Serial), manuscript: I want to thank Feng Keli for providing me with this text. This text has been integrated into Feng’s published essay ‘Lao zhaopian de dansheng’ (The Birth of the Old Photo Series), in Feng Keli, Ganyan Lao zhaopian (Talking about Lao zhaopian with Emotion) (Ji’nan, 2006), pp. 2–19. 5 Some of these publications are discussed in Edward S. Krebs, ‘Old in the Newest New China: Publications on Private Memories as Sources

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

of Individual Views of History’, paper presented at a conference on Chinese historiography, Heidelberg University, May 2001. Another related 1997 publication is Lao zhaopian: Xilie tuji (Old Photos: A Series of Picture Albums) by the Jiangsu meishu chubanshe (Jiangsu Art Publishing). It differs from Old Photos and the two other 1997 publications in that it classifies ‘old photos’ without framing the reproduced images with written texts. Feng Keli, ‘Lao zhaopian de dansheng’ (The Birth of Old Photos), in Ganyan Lao zhaopian (Talking about Old Photos with Emotion) (Ji’nan, 2006), pp. 16–17. An example is Lao chengshi (Old Cities) series (Nanjing, 1998–2000). One volume of Old Photos: A Series of Picture Albums, for example, focused on ‘customs and scenery’ (minsu fengguang), another on ‘costumes and fashion’ (fushi shishang). An example is Lao Xinwen (Old News) (Tianjin, 1998). An example is Beida laozhaopian (Old Photos of Peking University) (Beijing, date unknown). Feng Keli confirmed this phenomenon, clearly reflected in the serial itself, in a personal communication (email). From the eleventh issue, published in September 1999, about 30,000 copies have been sold for each issue of Old Photos; personal communication with Feng Keli. See Krebs, ‘Old in the Newest New China’. Other related discussions include: Geremie Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York, 1999); Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, nc, 2000); David Der-wei Wang, ‘Imaginary Nostalgia: Shen Congwen, Song Zelai, Mo Yan and Li Yongping’, in Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang, eds, From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-century China (Cambridge, ma, 1993); and Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism (Bloomington, in, 1998), pp. 133–48. For example, Lao Shanghai guanggao (Advertisements of Old Shanghai) was published by the Shanghai Pictorial Press in 1995. This cover is designed by Cai Liguo, but the idea of including the maple leaves was supplied by Feng Keli. See Feng Keli, ‘Lao zhaopian de dansheng’, pp. 15–16. Tao Ye, ‘Minchu funü de xinzhuang’ (‘New Dresses of Women in the Early Republican Period), Lao zhaopian (Old Photos), 1 (1996), pp. 104–5. Feng Keli, ‘“Lao zhaopian” (congkan) chuban gouxiang’. A slightly different version is published in his ‘Lao zhaopian de dansheng’, p. 6. Ba Jin, Suixiang lu (Random Reflections) (Beijing, 5th printing, 1996), pp. 819–23. Here I follow the suggestion made by Krebs in ‘Old in the Newest New China’. Liu Xinwu, ‘Yingzi dashu’ (Shadow Uncle), reprinted in Siren zhaoxiang bu (Private Photo Album) (Shanghai, 1997), pp. 16–17.

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21 When I asked whether the Old Photos serial was inspired by Liu’s work, Feng Keli replied: ‘Before the appearance of Old Photos, Liu Xinwu had begun the feature “Private Photo Albums” in Harvest magazine, and the Jiangsu Fine Arts Press had published the multivolume Old Houses (Lao fangzi). Although I cannot say that these publications had absolutely no impact on Old Photos, in truth we were not directly inspired by them.’ Personal communication (email), 8 May 2003. 22 When these ten essays were published as a book in 1997, Liu Xinwu wrote in the preface that they were among the most serious works he wrote after 1977, and encouraged literary scholars to pay more attention to them. Liu Xinwu, Siren zhaoxiang bu, p. 3. 23 Lao zhaopian 1, ‘Zhenggao’ (Soliciting Submissions). 24 New themes include, for example, ‘Shihongpianyu’ (Fragments from a Vanished Past); ‘Yiyu shiqu’ (Anecdotes from Foreign Lands); and ‘Sheying shihua’ (Conversation on the History of Photography). 25 See Feng Keli, ‘Lao zhaopian de dansheng’, pp. 2–3. 26 For a definition of ‘experimental’ art and artists in post-Cultural Revolution China, see Wu Hung, ‘Introduction: A Decade of Chinese Experimental Art (1990–2000)’, in The First Guangzhou Triennial – Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, ed. Wu Hung (Guangzhou, 2002), pp. 11–12. 27 For a discussion of this artistic trend, see Wu Hung, ‘A “Domestic Turn”: Chinese Experimental Art in the 1990s’, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, i/3 (November 2002), pp. 3–17. 28 For a detailed discussion of this project, see Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the 20th Century (Chicago, il, 1999), pp. 72–8. 29 ‘Everyday Sightings: Melissa Chiu interviews the Chinese artist Wang Youshen’, Art AsiaPacific, iii/2 (1996), p. 54. 30 This 1976 movement started from a mass mourning for Premier Zhou Enlai, who died in January that year. For many people, Zhou had been the last hope for rationality amid the madness of the Cultural Revolution. But he was attacked by the extreme leftist Gang of Four, led by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qiang. 31 Wu Hung, ‘Between Past and Future: A Short History of Contemporary Chinese Photography’, in Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips, eds, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (New York and Chicago, il, 2004). 32 For example, many photographs made in the 1990s document the surviving ‘courtyard’ houses in Beijing and the activities associated with them. The pictures, typically black-and-white, are sometimes mistaken for historical photographs. 33 One such artist is Han Lei (b. 1967–). Some of his works look stressed, like old photos; for examples, see Han Lei, Mosheng (Strange) (Aura Gallery, Shanghai, 2003). For a discussion of his work, see Wu Hung, ‘Intersection:

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An Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Photography and Oil Painting’, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Fall 2004), pp. 5–14. 34 The artist Yin Xiuzhen, for example, documented traditional houses before they were demolished and their residents relocated, and then used the pictures in installations. 35 See Zhiqing lao zhaopian (Old Photos of Students Sent to the Countryside during the Cultural Revolution), http://v.youku.com/v_ show/id_XMzgzOTQyNjg=.html, accessed 22 January 2016. 8 MO YI: THE STORY OF AN URBAN ETHNOGRAPHER 1 For an introduction to these two trends in Chinese art, see Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: A History, 1970s–2000s (London, 2014), pp. 39–45. 2 For an introduction to twelve leading documentary photographers and their subjects, see Gong Zhiming, Zhongguo dangdai sheyingjia jiedu (Interpreting Contemporary Chinese Photographers) (Hangzhou, 2002). 3 For this definition of ‘Chinese photography’, see Gu Zheng, ‘Guannian sheying yu Zhongguo de sheying’ (Conceptual Photography and ‘Chinese Photography’), in Lo Qi and Guan Yuda, eds, Zhongguo xingwei sheying (Performance Photography of China) (Hangzhou, 2001), pp. 5–10. 4 New Photo (Xin sheying), 3 (1997), preface, n.p. Italics are boldface in original. 5 This attitude is clearly demonstrated in the introduction to the first issue of New Photo. 6 For the notion of conceptual art (guannian yishu or gainian yishu) in China, see Peggy Wang, ‘Making and Remaking History: Categorizing “Conceptual Art” in Contemporary Chinese Art’, in Journal of Art Historiography, 10: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art: Historiographic Reflections, ed. Wenny Teo (June 2014), www. arthistoriography.wordpress.com. 7 For the notion of ‘citizen intellectual’, see William A. Callahan, ‘Citizen Ai: Warrior, Jester, and Middleman’, The Journal of Asian Studies, lxxiii/4 (November 2014), pp. 899–920, especially pp. 914–16. 8 See Gong Zhiming, Zhongguo dangdai sheyingjia jiedu. 9 For a discussion of Zhang Haier’s photographs on this subject, see Yang Xiaoyan, ‘Jingtou yu nűxing: kan yu beikan de mingyun’ (Camera and Women: The Fate of Seeing and Being Seen), Dushu, 279 (June 2002), pp. 3–12. 10 Mo Yi, ‘Yong zhaoxiangji zuo shiyan de baogao’ (A Report on an Experiment with the Camera), unpublished essay (1990). Cited in Du Jianfeng, ‘Zoujin Mo Yi’ (Entering Mo Yi), Renmin sheying (People’s Photography), 558 (28 June 1995), p. 1. 11 Ibid.

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12 M. E. Thomas, ‘Auto-Photography’, http://booksite.elsevier.com/ brochures/hugy/SampleContent/Auto-photography.pdf, Ohio State University, Columbus, oh, and 2009 Elsevier Inc. For ‘autophotography’ as a research technique, also see D. Dodman, ‘Shooting in the City: An Autophotographic Exploration of the Urban Environment in Kingston, Jamaica’, Area, 35 (2003), pp. 293–304; M. Ball and G. Smith, ‘Technologies of Realism? Ethnographic Uses of Photography and Film’, in P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland and L. Lofland, eds, Handbook of Ethnography (London, 2001), pp. 302–19. 13 Mo Yi, ‘Yong zhaoxiangji zuo shiyan de baogao’. 14 Mo Yi, ‘Notes’, unpublished manuscript provided by the artist, n.d. 15 Mo Yi, ‘Guanyu “Chengshi kongjian” zhiyi, Kiedao de biaoqing. 1988’ (About Urban Space no. 1, Expression of the Street, 1988), typeset manuscript provided by the artist, n.d. 16 Ibid. 17 These are: Photos Taken through a Dog’s Eyes: The Nanjing Road, Dancing Streets and Dancing Streets: Tripartite. 18 Mo Yi, ‘Guanyu “gou yan” de zhaoxiang’ (About Photos Taken through a Dog’s Eyes), manuscript, February 1996. 19 Mo Yi, ‘Yong zhaoxiangji zuo shiyan de baogao’. 20 He continues: ‘No one has dictated that one can only hold the camera against the eye. It is nothing but an instrument invented by men and one can use it for any purpose. The difference is that a person who uses a camera to break a walnut may be a lunatic, but a person who ties it behind his neck to make a scene can be fully intentional. Indeed, the camera was an excellent prop in my performance, and it also produced many images with unknown content. What are these images? This question prolonged the game.’ 21 For discussions of these two types of self-portrait, see Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (Chicago, il, 2005), pp. 219–21; Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the 20th Century (Chicago, il, 1999), pp. 60–62. 22 Mo Yi once claimed that it took seven years to make this work, but did not offer any evidence. As in other cases, it is difficult to decide how many photographs comprise this work, which has been shown in different forms and combinations. Based on samples of this work and their explanations that Mo Yi has posted on the website, it can be estimated that My Neighbourhood contains over 2,900 images. See http://big5.china.com.cn/gate/big5/art.china.cn/huodong/2014-12/03/ content_7417150.htm, accessed 22 January 2016. 23 Xiao Chen, ‘Yi xianshi zhuyi de mingyi: Tan Mo Yi “Wo juzhudi de fengjing” xilie shying zuopin’ (In the Name of Realism: On Mo Yi’s Photographic Series My Neighbourhood). See www.g4photos.com. 24 One example of these works is the Hallways series (1996).

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25 The Chinese title of the work, Wo juzhudi de fengjing (Landscape of the Place Where I Live), conveys the same meaning. 26 Cited in Xiao Chen, ‘Yi xianshi zhuyi de mingyi’. 27 These texts are translated in Wu Hung, Mo Yi: My Neighbourhood (Chicago, il, 2007). 28 Xiao Chen, ‘Yi xianshi zhuyi de mingyi’. 29 Ibid. 9 LIU ZHENG: MY COUNTRYMEN A version of this chapter was published as ‘Photographing Deformity: Liu Zheng and His Photographic Series My Countrymen’, Public Culture, XIII/3, pp. 399–428. 1 Emily L. Post, Emily Post on Etiquette (New York, 1987), p. 54. 2 R. Ollerenshaw, ‘Medical Illustration in the Past’, in Medical Photography in Practice, a Symposium, ed. E. F. Linssen (London, 1961), pp. 1–17, especially p. 17. 3 For conflicting interpretations of Arbus’s work, see Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York, 1984); Susan Sontag, On Photography (London, 1978); and especially David Hevey, ‘The Enfreakment of Photography’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York, 1997), pp. 332–47. 4 Burns is a New York doctor who has published books from his large collection of historical medical photographs, which includes many images of physically disabled and diseased bodies. See Joel-Peter Witkin and Stanley B. Burns, Masterpieces of Medical Photography: Selections from the Burns Archive (Pasadena, ca, 1987). My thanks to Christopher Phillips for providing me with information about Burns and the Burns Archive. 5 For a definition of experimental art in post-Cultural Revolution China, see Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the 20th Century (Chicago, il, 1999), pp. 12–16. 6 Representatives of these photographers include Lü Nan, Yuan Dongping, Zhang Haier and Han Lei. 7 Beginning in 1989, Yuan Dongping travelled to many mental institutions in China and took a large number of photographs of patients. I discuss works by Yuan in Transience, pp. 94–101. 8 Liu Zheng, interview with the author, 10 May 1998, Beijing. 9 Ibid. 10 The plan described here is based on my final interview with Liu Zheng, conducted in December 2000. His earlier conception of the plan, which I summarized in Transience, p. 167, was somewhat different. To my knowledge, he has not completed this plan, or altered it again, as of 2015. 11 Liu Zheng showed me a ‘complete set’ of this series in the summer of 2000. But when I interviewed him again at the end of that year,

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

I found that he had replaced some pictures with new ones. It is possible that he had kept making changes until the entire set was exhibited and published. Liu Zheng, The Chinese (New York, 2004). Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, nj, 1963). See Ulrich Baer’s very interesting article ‘Photography and Hysteria: Toward a Poetics of the Flash’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 7 (1994), pp. 41–77. Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus (New York, 1972). Bingman (pseud.), ‘The Chinese at the Turn of the New Millennium: A Review of Liu Zheng’s Photographic Series The Chinese’, manuscript, n.d. Liu Zheng, interview wiith the author, 10 May 1998, Beijing. All subsequent unreferenced quotations from Liu Zheng within this chapter are from this interview. Cited in Bingman, ‘The Chinese at the Turn of the New Millenium’. Translation slightly modified based on the original Chinese text. In its original definition, formulated by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, liminality is inherent to rites of passage from separation to transition to reincorporation. See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago, il, 1960); Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, ny, 1967) and The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Ithaca, ny, 1969). Robert F. Murphy et al., ‘Physical Disability and Social Liminality’, Social Science and Medicine, 26 (1987), p. 237. For example, Arbus found that photographing ‘freaks’ caused ‘a terrific kind of excitement’ in her: ‘There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.’ Diane Arbus, p. 3. 10 RONG RONG: RUINS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY A version of this chapter was published as ‘Ruins as Autobiography: Chinese Photographer Rong Rong’, Persimmon: Asian Literature, Arts and Culture, II/3 (Winter 2002), pp. 36–47.

1 Karen Smith, ‘Rong Rong – Records of the Observer’, Beijing, 1998. Unpublished manuscript. 2 Interview with Rong Rong by the author on 11 May 1998. Unpublished manuscript. 3 Cited in Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the 20th Century (Chicago, il, 1999), p. 102. 4 For the full letter, see Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village, 1993–1998 (New York, 2003), pp. 80–81. 5 For a discussion of this performance by Zhang Huan, see Wu Hung, Transience, pp. 106–7.

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6 For a description of this collective project, see Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village, pp. 114–21. 7 Interview with Rong Rong by the author on 11 May 1998. 8 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, il, 1994), p. 57. 9 Interview with Rong Rong by the author on 11 May 1998. 10 Interview with Rong Rong by the author on 23 July 2001. 11 MIAO XIAOCHUN: JOURNEYING THROUGH SPACE AND TIME 1 Wu Hung, ‘A Conversation with Miao Xiaochun’ (2 August 2004), in Wu Hung, Phantasmagoria: Photographs by Miao Xiaochun (Chicago, il, 2004), p. 34. 2 Ibid., p. 29. 3 Ibid., p. 35. 4 Ibid., p. 32. 5 For images and a discussion of his following series, h2o–A Study of Art History, see Wu Hung, Miao Xiaochuan: h2o–A Study of Art History (Chicago, il, 2007). 6 The original text is given in Giorgio Vasari’s La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi, 5 vols (Milan, 1962), vol. i, p. 63. Translated by Kenneth Gross in The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, ny, 1992), p. 92. 7 Translated by K. Gross in The Dream of the Moving Statue, p. 94. 8 These works were shown in Chicago’s Walsh Gallery from 21 April to 3 June 2006. 9 S. J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500–1600 (London, 1975), pp. 471–2. 10 Francesco Buranelli et al., The Vatican Museums: The Last Judgment (New York, 1999). 11 Miao Xiaochun, ‘Guanyu Xuni Zuihou Shenpan de zishu’ (Artist’s Statement about The Last Judgement in Cyberspace), manuscript provided by the artist. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 From a 2006 email from Miao Xiaochun concerning the creation of The Last Judgement in Cyberspace. Private communication. 16 Wu Hung and Julie Walsh, co-curators, Visual Performance, exh. cat., Walsh Gallery, Chicago (Chicago, il, 2004). 17 Miao Xiaochun, ‘Guanyu Xuni Zuihou Shenpan de zishu’.

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385

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The seeds of this volume were planted by several collaborative projects with artists and institutions, including the Brush & Shutter catalogue mentioned in the Introduction to this volume, to which I contributed the introduction and an essay. As the number of my essays on photography from China gradually grew, I began to contemplate a book which would use such case studies as building blocks to construct a large narrative over a broad chronological span. The advantage of such a volume, again as mentioned in the Introduction, is to present focused studies on selected cases, thereby complementing general introductions which aim to cover the entire course of photography in China in a continuous, even-handed manner. Among the eleven chapters in this volume, five have been previously published in exhibition catalogues, journals and an anthology (chapters One, Four, Six, Nine and Ten). I have revised them in various ways to make them better fit this volume; publication details are given in the References for the relevant chapters. The other six chapters are new. During the decade that it has taken to complete this work, I have received generous help from a wide range of people. I am conscious of the inadequacy of any acknowledgements I can now give in return. Since all the chapters started from examining original photographs and related visual materials, I would first express my deep appreciation to all the curators who have helped me in undertaking such research. Among them, I want to offer special thanks to Nancy Berliner and Daisy Wang, former and present East Asian art curators at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; Zhang Hongxing of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Jay Levenson and Tasha Lutek of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Anne Lacoste of the Getty Museum, and Frances Terpak and Jeffrey Cody of the Getty Research Institute; Stacey Lambrow, curator of the Stephan Loewentheil collection in New York; and Jin Hua, the custodian of the Jin Shisheng archive. During my research for different chapters, I received invaluable help from many colleagues and scholars. I owe particular thanks to Ding Yizhuang, Régine Thiriez, Lenore Metrick-Chen, Feng Keli, Paola Iovene, Yuhang Li, Joel Snyder, Kristine Harris and Jin Hua.

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Some of them pointed me towards important visual and textual evidence; others inspired me with their knowledge of the history of photography or their ideas about specific historical or conceptual issues. I’m also indebted to Patrizia Galli and Theora Kvitka, who translated the early versions of two chapters from Chinese to English, Jiayi Chen, who checked and refined the bibliography, and Lida Zeitlin Wu, who carefully read the galley proofs and made many improvements. My doctoral student Tingting Xu helped prepare illustrations for the volume, a complex process that benefited greatly from her familiarity with the field of Chinese photography. Six living artists – Wang Wusheng, Zhang Dali, Mo Yi, Liu Zheng, Rong Rong and Miao Xiaochun – are featured in this volume as subjects of case studies. They provided me with all sorts of materials and granted me multiple interviews, and also offered their friendship, which has made this project particularly meaningful to me. I want to thank my publisher Michael Leaman for his encouragement and his helpful tweaking of the book’s title. I have published four books through Reaktion Books since 1996, and I hope that this will not be the last one to result from our collaboration. My thanks also go to the two anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript, who offered not only generous endorsement but also valuable suggestions, and to Aimee Selby, editor at Reaktion Books, whose fine editing and perceptive suggestions have significantly improved this book. Finally, as with all my writings, the present volume has benefitted greatly from my wife and intellectual comrade Judith Zeitlin, a scholar of Chinese literature and culture. Many of my ideas in this book emerged and developed during our conversations, and she was the first reader and critic of each chapter. So to her I offer my thanks, yet again, for helping me through this one in ways too numerous to mention.

388

PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some permanent locations of works (or of temporary installations of works) are given below rather than in the captions. Courtesy anonymous private collection: 19; courtesy China Book Company: 61; courtesy Christie’s Images Ltd: 16; courtesy Ding Yizhuang: 56; courtesy Feng Mengbo: 150, 151, 152; courtesy Francis E. Stafford Archive, Stanford University: 52, 53, 54; courtesy Freer Museum of Art, Washington, dc: 14; courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: 6, 10, 11, 18, 20; courtesy Hai Bo: 155; courtesy Hanart tz Gallery, Hong Kong: 144, 145; courtesy Jin Hua: 67, 68, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88; courtesy Li Xiaobin: 166; courtesy Liu Zheng: 184, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195; courtesy Lü Nan: 186; courtesy Chinese Trade Card Collection of Lenore Metrick-Chen: 44; courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 76, 77; courtesy Miao Xiaochun: 160, 161, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 220, 222, 223, 224, 225; courtesy Mo Yi: 164, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182; courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: 58, 99, 100; courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York: 23, 27, 39; courtesy National Gallery of Australia, Canberra: 21; courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts: 40, 41; courtesy Rong Rong: 157, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209; courtesy Sui Jianguo: 149; courtesy Wang Wusheng: 90, 111, 112, 113; courtesy Wang Youshen: 156; courtesy Yin Xiuzhen: 153; courtesy You Zehong: 165; courtesy Young Grass Art, Taiwan: 62; courtesy Yuan Dongping: 185; courtesy Zhang Dali: 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128; courtesy Zhang Haier: 169; courtesy Zhang Xiaogang: 147, 148; courtesy Zheng Lianjie: 154.

389

INDEX

Illustration numbers are in italic Alexander, William Costume of China 33 Allgood, George 69, 70–71 ancestor portraits (simulated) 38–9, 41–2 Arbus, Diane 277, 282, 291 auto-photography 261 Ba Jin 227–8, 229, 235 Beato, Felice 55, 56, 58, 64–5, 67, 69–72, 78–82 Arch to the Memory of Virtuous Women 51 Camp of the Headquarters, 1st Division 68 captions to architectural photos 73, 75, 76, 40, 41 Commissioner’s Yamun, Canton 63–4, 31 East Street from Yamun, Canton 53 First Arrival of Chinese Expeditionary Forces 54 The Great Imperial Palace . . . Pekin 76, 38 Headquarters Staff – Pehtang Fort 68, 34 The Heights of Canton 53 Henry Hering’s sale catalogue collection 47–55, 60, 62, 68, 69, 74, 82–3, 22 Interior of the Angle of North

391

Fort Immediately after its Capture 70, 35 Lucknow 56 Name Hui Kung Temple, Canton 62, 29, 30 Nine-storey Pagoda and Tartar Street, Canton 60, 28 Odin Bay (Hering D) 67 Panorama of Hong Kong Taken from Happy Valley 58–9, 27 Panorama of Pehtang Fort 54 Prince Kung . . . Signer of the Treaty 57, 78, 42 Rear of the North Fort after its Capture . . . Chinese Army 70, 36 Talien Whan Bay 51–2, 23 Talien Whan Bay (Hering E) 52, 67, 24 Tung Chow Pagoda 72, 37 View of the Imperial Summer Palace . . . after the Burning 76, 39 Ye Mingchen 57, 26 Cang Xin 311–12 Canning, Charlotte 48, 80 A Century of Chinese History in Photographs (publication) 230–31, 143 A Century of Old Photos (serial publication) 221, 139 Chen Shilin 205–6, 218, 129

zo om i n g i n

Mao at Jinggangshan 216–17, 136, 137 Mao in the field 210, 133 Mao’s first standard portrait 206–9, 130, 131 Mao’s fourth standard portrait 213–15, 135 Mao’s second standard portrait 209–10, 132 Mao’s third standard portrait 210–13, 134 ‘Chinese photography’ 253–4 Chinese Photography (publication) 167 Choi Jongbum Sikaku 347 composite photography 177–8, 185 conceptualism 254–5 Cooke, George Wingrove 57 costume portraits see Miller, Milton Crealock, Henry Hope 49 Cultural Revolution Ba Jin and 227–8, 229, 235 Chen Shilin and 205–6, 210, 217 documentary photography and 253 Jin Shisheng and 157 People’s Pictorial during 200, 201 creative response to in the 1980s 247 Socialist Realist art and 278 Wang Wusheng and 186–7 Zhang Dali’s A Second History and 195–6, 204–5 Ding Guanpeng One or Two? 129–32, 143, 69 disabled people as photographic subjects 277–8 see also Liu Zheng, My Countrymen series documentary photography 247–9, 253–5, 278 see also Liu Zheng, as photographer; Liu Zheng, My Countrymen series; Mo Yi

392

Duan Yingmei (Little Duan) 302, 307 Elgin, Lord (James Bruce) 48–9, 69, 75, 76, 77 Erb, Bunnag 104, 106 experimental photographers 254–5, 275 Feng Keli 219, 221, 226–7, 228, 229 Feng Mengbo 249 My Private Album 238, 150, 151, 152 Feng Sizhi 147 fine art photography 125 Flying Eagle (magazine) 146–7, 148, 149–50 Gellet, W. H. 97 ‘The Rape of the Lock’ 93–4, 96, 108–9, 50 George William Frederick Charles, Prince 58–9, 67 Gong, Prince 53, 57, 67, 77–8, 42 Grant, James Hope 53, 56, 58, 60, 67, 74, 77–8, 80 Green, Hetty 49 Guan Long Photographic Supply Company 146–8, 80, 81 Hai Bo They No. 6 241, 247, 155 Harvest (literary journal) 227 Hawarden, Clementina 104, 106 Heard, Albert F. 49, 80–81 Herbert, Sidney 58–9, 60, 67 Hering, Henry 47 Felice Beato’s sale catalogue collection 47–55, 60, 62, 68, 69, 74, 82–3, 22 Hongren 172 The Coming of Autumn 172, 102 Immortal Mount Kunlun with deer and clouds (lacquer painting) (unattributed) 164, 170, 92

index

immortal mountains incense burner (bronze) (unattributed) 167–8, 170, 96 inventing in Chinese art 163–8 painting 168–76

Students Shooting at Sporting Event at Tongji University 153, 86 Johnston, Reginald Fleming 119–20, 122, 65

Jiang Bingnan 147 Jin Shisheng (Jin Jingchang) 125–6, 135–6, 146–7, 149–50, 153–7 Female University Student with Her Kodak Pocket Camera (1) 144, 78 Female University Student with Her Kodak Pocket Camera (2) 144–5, 79 Guan Long Photography Supply Company 147–8, 80 Guan Long Photography Supply Company Display Window 148, 82 Hu Junlei and Lang Jingshan . . . Shanghai Photography Association 151–3, 85 Jin Shisheng and His First Camera (unattributed) 73, 135, 73 Jin Shisheng’s Friend Reading ‘American Annual of Photography’ 149, 83 Kodak Display Section Inside the Guan Long Photography Supply Company 148, 81 Riverbank (2) 126, 67 Self-portrait: Reading a Photo Magazine in His Dorm 136–40, 143, 74 Self-portrait in His Dorm 126–9, 132–3, 68 Self-portrait in Mirror with Leica Camera 156, 88 Self-portrait in Mirror with Rodenstock Camera 156, 87 Self-portrait in Rodenstock 140–41, 143, 145, 75 Solo Photo Exhibition at Tongji University 151, 84

Lai Afong 34 Western Man in Hong Kong Chinese Costume 45, 21 Lai Chong Senggelinqin 39, 16 Lang Jingshan 177–82, 185 Boating on a Misty Lake 106 Majestic Solitude 178, 107, 108, 109 Pavilion in Yellow Mountains 161, 89 Langenheim, William and Frederick Frederick Langenheim Looking at Talbotypes 141, 143, 76 Li Hongchun (Yuxiang) 103–4, 106–10, 118, 56 Li Xiaobin People Pleading for Justice from the Higher Authorities 166 lingzhi mushroom 165, 94 Liu Xinwu 235, 247 ‘Private Photo Albums’ 227–30 Liu Zheng, as photographer 254, 279–80 Liu Zheng, My Countrymen series 280–83, 290–92 An Actor Playing a Female Role 288–90, 190 Along the Spirit Road of a Royal Mausoleum 296–9, 195 Brain Tumour Patient 296–9, 194 Drug Addict in a Rehab Centre 287–8, 188 Gate of Ghosts 293–4, 192 Medical Specimens of Four Deformed Foetuses 292–3, 191 Nanjing Massacre 294–5, 193 Old Man Performing as a Girl 288–90, 189

393

zo om i n g i n

Three Deaf-mute Girls 283–7, 187 Two Disabled Men on the Street 283–7, 184 Loch, Henry B. 49, 68 Lü Nan A Withdrawn Patient in a Psychiatric Hospital 258, 186 Lu Xun 110, 111–15, 60 Ma Liuming 305, 307 Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch 302, 303 Malani, Nalini Unity in Diversity 347 manipulated photographs see Chen Shilin; Zhang Dali, A Second History Mann, Gother Frederick 69–70, 71 Mao Zedong see Chen Shilin; Zhang Dali, A Second History Mei Lanfang 110, 115, 59 Mei Qing 172 Pine Valley of the Yellow Mountains 175, 101 meta-photographs 316 Miao Xiaochun, individual works Arrival 325, 212 Celebration 329–32 Jump 332–3 No Hostility, No Resistance 327, 214 On Herkules 325, 210 Orbit 332–3, 216 Phantasmagoria 323–4, 329, 211 Propaganda and Advertisement 326–7, 213 Screen 245–6, 160, 161 Transmission 328–9, 215 Miao Xiaochun, The Last Judgement in Cyberspace series assumed front and back viewing stations 225 The Downward View 338–9, 340, 220 The Front View 343, 222

394

The Rear View 343–5, 223 The Side View 343, 224 The Upward View 337, 340, 218 video version 348 Michel, John 39, 68, 69, 75, 17 Michelangelo Last Judgement 334–9, 340, 217, 219, 221 Night 333–4 Miller, Milton 19–20, 30–31, 32–3, 41–2, 45, 55 A Chinese Family 24, 1, 12 Chinese Family 21, 24, 29, 30, 5 Chinese Ladies of Rank 21, 24, 11 A Chinese Man 36–9, 45, 9 A Chinese Woman 21, 22–4, 30, 36–9, 45, 8 The First Wife of the Tartar General, Canton 20, 24, 30, 36–9, 45, 2 J. H. Chevechon 39, 15 A Mandarin and His Wife in Full Court Dress (old couple) 24, 10 A Mandarin and His Wife in Full Court Dress (young couple) 21, 24, 29, 30, 31, 4 Mandarin Lady 21–2, 24, 30, 41, 45, 7, 18, 19 The Same Mandarin in Civilian Dress . . . and Three Children 21, 30, 6 Sir John Michel 39, 17 The Tartar General . . . in Front of His Palace 39, 20 A Young Chinese Man 21, 24, 30, 36–9, 45, 3 mirrors in Las Meninas (Diego Velázquez) 133, 71, 72 in portrait photography 103–8, 56, 57, 58 in Wood Panelling Photographed from in Courtyard (unattributed) 141, 77

index

Mo Yi 255–7, 258 City Dwellers 259 Expression of the Street 259–63, 267, 273, 170, 171 Hallways series 270–71, 273, 180, 181 Landscape Mixed with Red 268–9, 177 Landscape Outside a Public Bus 264–6, 273, 173, 174 My Neighbourhood 255–7, 182, 183 Photos Taken through a Dog’s Eyes 266–8, 175, 176 Red Lamp Posts series 255, 269–70, 273, 164, 179 self-portraits 268 A Swaying Bus 263–4, 266, 273, 172 Urban Signs series 269, 270, 273, 178 Urban Space 263 Mural in Dunhuang Cave 249 (unattributed) 168–9, 97 national personification images ‘China – the Cake of Kings and Emperors’ (cartoon) 89–90, 46 ‘No More Chinese Cheap Labor’ (trade card) 88, 44 ‘Outside, Sir! Outside!’ (cartoon) 88–9, 45 Puck cartoon 90, 48 Sun Yat-sen 61, 62 ‘War in China’ (postcard) 89, 47 Native Soil Art 253, 278 Nature, Society and Man (exhibition) 186 New Photo (magazine) 254, 168 Nieuhof, Johannes 33 Old Photo Album (serial publication) 221, 140 ‘old photo craze’ 219 in contemporary Chinese art 231–46

395

invention of photo/text and 225–31 Old Photos and 219–25 Old Photos (serial publication) 138, 142, 143 decline of 222–5 ‘Eight Sisters’ 247, 162, 163 founding of 219–21 use of photo/texts 226–31 Old Photos of Students Sent to the Countryside during the Cultural Revolution (serial publication) 222, 141 One or Two? (painting) (unattributed) 129–32, 143, 70 Peaks of the Yellow Mountains (handscroll) (unattributed) 171, 99, 100 People’s Pictorial (magazine) 190–91, 192, 198–203 performance art see Mo Yi; Rong Rong photo/texts and the ‘old photo craze’ 225–31, 246–7 photographic studios 34–6, 42–3 photographic suppliers 146 photography magazines 146–7 see also individual magazines and serial publications pictorial photography 125–6 portrait photography Chinese style as a stereotype 42–5 individuality in 30–33 reinventing a Chinese style 34–42 simulated ancestor portraits 38–9, 41–2 use of mirrors in 103–8, 56, 57, 58 see also Miller, Milton Puyi, Emperor 110, 119–23, 64, 65, 66 qi (universal life energy) 166–7 qi yun (spiritual consonance) 178–82

zo om i n g i n

Qianlong, Emperor 129–32 Qu Yuan 163 Queen Mother of the West with auspicious qi-clouds (mural) (unattributed) 167, 95 on Mount Kunlun (rubbing) (unattributed) 165, 93 queue cutting 85–8, 90–91, 96–7 ‘Freedom by Force’ (newspaper cover image) 94–6, 108–9, 51 Le Petit Journal cover image 91–3, 49 Li Hongchun (Yuxiang) 103–4, 106–10, 118, 56 Lu Xun 110, 111–15, 60 Mei Lanfang 110, 115, 59 Puyi 110, 119–23, 64, 65, 66 Sun Yat-sen 110, 115–19, 61, 62 Wang Yi’an 102–3, 106–10, 118, 43, 55 see also Gellet, W. H.; national personification images; Stafford, Francis E. realistic photography 125 Rennie, David F. 71–2 Robertson, James 55 Rong Rong 249, 254, 301–4 Beijing, Wedding Gown, No. 1(4) 318–21, 321, 209 No. 2(2) 318–21 East Village, Beijing, No. 1 304, 196 No. 2–1 307, 198 No. 20 305–7, 197 No. 35 307, 199 No. 70 311–12, 202 No. 89 307–9, 200 Fragments No. 14 315–16, 206 Ruin Pictures, No. 1(1) 312–15, 317, 203 No. 1(2) 312–15, 317, 204 No. 2(2) 245, 318, 207 No. 3(2) 242, 157 No. 10(1) 315, 205 Self-portrait No. 3 310, 201

396

Scar Art 253, 278 Scenic China (magazine) 176, 105 Second Opium War 55–6, 64–7, 73–8 maps 32, 33 shan (Chinese character) 164, 91 Shitao 172 Eight Views of the Yellow Mountains 176, 103 Landscape of the Yellow Mountains 176, 104 Snow, Edgar photo of Mao 192, 118 Socialist Realist art 278 Stafford, Francis E. 97–101 Francis E. Stafford removes a man’s queue 101–2, 53 A man having his queue braided by a barber 101–2, 52 A young man taking a picture after cutting off his queue 101–2, 54 A Standard Ancestor Portrait (painting) (unattributed) 38, 14 stigmatized people as photographic subjects see Liu Zheng, My Countrymen series Su, Princess 106–8, 58 subjective photography 125 Sui Jianguo Women/Here 238, 149 Sun Yat-sen 110, 115–19, 61, 62 Sussman, Eve 89 Seconds at Alcazar 347–8, 226 Thomson, John ‘Hong-kong Photographers’ 34–5, 43–5, 13 Vance, Robert H. 19, 32 Velázquez, Diego Las Meninas 133, 347, 71, 72 video art 345–8 Wang Chuan 247, 144 Survivors 232, 145

index

Wang Gongxin Always Welcome 347 Wang Wusheng 184–7 Eighteen Disciples of Buddha and First Grade Peak 184, 111 First Grade Stone 184, 113 Surging Waves in Front Sea 184, 112 Wolf ’s Fang Stone in the West Sea Valley 161, 90 Wang Yi’an 102–3, 106–10, 118, 43, 55 Wang Youshen News Paper 245, 156 Washing: The Mass Grave at Datong in 1941 245, 158, 159 war photography see Beato, Felice Weed, Charles Leander 19 Wood Panelling Photographed from in Courtyard (unattributed) 141–3, 77 Wu Hongjin (Curse) 302, 305 Xing Danwen 302 Yang Yiping 247 The Square 234, 146 Ye Mingchen 56–8, 25, 26 Yellow Mountains (Huangshan) 170–92 see also Hongren; Lang Jingshan; Mei Qing; Scenic China (magazine); Shitao; Wang Wusheng; Yuan Lianmin Yellow Mountains (woodblock print) (unattributed) 170, 98 yi (mind) 184 Yin Xiuzhen photo installation 238–41, 153 Yu Deshui Untitled (1986) 258, 165 Yu Fan Women/Here 238, 149 Yuan Dongping Sisters 258, 185

397

Yuan Lianmin Thriving with Each Passing Day 182, 110 Zhan Wang Women/Here 238, 149 Zhang Dali, A Second History 189–91, 203–5, 218 ‘Chairman Mao in Northern Shaanxi’ 192, 118 ‘Chairman Mao in Yan’an, 1943’ 194, 119 ‘Chairman Mao Reviewing the 359th Brigade of the Eighth Route Army in November 1944’ 195–6, 120 ‘Chengzhuang Agricultural Labour School’ 201, 124, 125 ‘The Great Communist Warrior Lei Feng’ 197, 121 Guangdong Art Museum exhibition, 2010 191, 116, 117 Mao in People’s Pictorial 200, 202, 123, 127 ‘The New Beijing University Fearlessly Advances under the Leadership of the Working Class’ 201–2, 126, 127 perfecting Mao 191–7 ‘Reduction of Land Rent, Reduction of Loan Interests’ 197, 122 Sublimation: A New Art Project by Zhang Dali (exhibition) 189, 115 ‘The Ten Thousand Li Yangzi River’ 189, 114 ‘Victory Over Winter’ 202–3, 128 Zhang Haier Self-portrait 258–9, 169 Zhang Huan 302 12 Square Metres 302, 305–7 65 Kilograms 302, 307–9 Zhang Xiaogang 247 Genesis 234–5, 147, 148

zo om i n g i n

Zheng Lianjie Family History 241, 154 Zhou Xiaohu The Gooey Gentleman 347 Zhu Ming 307, 310 Zong Bing 168–9, 187

398