Comments on the Work of Qiu Zhijie

By Gao Shiming

Light Writing

Today, people of different ethnicity share the same concept of time. On one hand, time is simplified to an abstract yet absolute digital sequence. The meaning of life used to be encompassed by time but this approach has now disappeared, and the intimate connection between time and human beings is slowly fading away. On the other hand, the linearity of time intertwines with the concept of continuous moments, which states that time is a segment of numerous continuous moments.

The appearance of the instant photo seems to provide direct evidence of such a concept. An instant photo snaps an image, and thus focuses attention on capturing a decisive moment. Gradually, these moments conceal the meaning of photography as a time-based medium.

However, photography is an event in the continuity of the world instead of a meaningless moment of nothing. It is not the solidification of decisive moments because it does not intend to present to us a segment of linear time; nor is its meaning limited to being a connector to the moments before and after on a time axis. Photography is a container of time. What it contains and conceals is an unconsciously lost moment of life. Photography seals moments of time, and fixes them in images in order to make them permanent C from a moment to permanence. Because of this dramatic transformation, people ignore the continuity of time in the course of a camera memorizing, exposing and presenting images. This is a delay between the parallel worlds of image and reality, in which the passage of time is forgotten.

Qiu Zhijie's writing photography pushes the temporality and happening quality of photography to the foreground. He calls the combination of writing and photography calli-photo-graphy. Its meaning is not descriptive of the medium, but is rather more like a way of working. Here, photography regains its original meaning C to write with light. It recaptures the intrinsic temporality of photography. In Qiu's calli-photo-graphy reality can only be realized through the intermediary of a camera. A prolonged exposure is the basic method of making such images. The traces of writing take shape and then become manifest in the process of prolonging the time the camera memorizes images. It is a unique photographic drama performed by writing with light and the memory of a camera.

It is floating light, sweeping shadow ( fuguang lueying ) in its literal sense. Light travels through time, and its traces form images. It becomes evidence for the possibility of experiencing time. Thus, the time elapsed in the process of taking photographs reemerges.

Everyday Life

Many of Qiu Zhijie's calli-photo-graphy works are of the highest quality. The importance of calli-photo-graphy as a method is that it strengthens Qiu's innate tendencies, and reveals certain things buried in his diverse and complex body of works. The following two works that I am going to discuss are derived from everyday life while at the same time they are controlled and measured in feeling. These qualities are rare in contemporary Chinese art.

Qiu took a photograph of his living room, with piles of random objects scattered everywhere. Over the image, a light brush wrote Let it be. That is it. Let it be.

Among Qiu's works in calli-photo-graphy, this one is particularly powerful. The living room is a little messy. Let it be. It is the record of a scene from everyday life, and the residue of an unknown ritual. Everything is done spontaneously. However, a sense of order seems to emerge silently from this randomness, as if it was destined to evoke solemnity. Joseph Beuys would have understood it well. Qiu's attitude is even more everyday life oriented. The everyday stuff is randomly scattered on the floor. When punctuated by words, it seems even more natural. Let it be. In this simple phrase, there are similarities to existentialism, even Chan (Zen in Japanese). Let it be. Bland and ordinary, but also dignified and composed. In comparison, Who is the luckiest one? written in front of the Forbidden City is a little flirtatious and exhibitionist.

The Let it be in Qiu's living room reminds me of one of his early works, Object (1997). This piece also includes everyday objects, which are featured more prominently than in Let it be . It has been praised as a piece without flaw by the contemporary philosopher Zhao Tingyang. In darkness, everyday objects are suddenly illuminated by light, and soon return to darkness. It brings a warm feeling to the viewer, when the numerous objects that have been buried in the darkness of everyday life are momentarily illuminated. It moves us because we can see the inner life of objects as in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), and because of its ritualistic representation of existence and non-being. Although what is illuminated by light is only a tiny corner of the world, it appears miraculous, like islands emerging from the darkness of night. In the moment of illumination and being extinguished, destiny rises and falls.

Twenty-Four Seasons

As an important series from the genre of calli-photo-graphy, the Twenty-Four Seasons took a year to complete. Jieqi , as these twenty-four seasonal markers are known in Chinese, used to be a temporal measure of life and everyday experience, but the concept is slowly fading away from the life of Chinese people. The idyllic life punctuated by the twenty-four seasonal markers is disappearing from this world, replaced by all kinds of memorial days. However, what cannot be replaced or erased are months and years that constitute our lives. Qiu is not a particularly nostalgic person. This series of photographs records the effects of time. What it evokes is more than an effort to save the past or memory of the past. At certain moments, memory is also political.

Some seasons in this series, such as dongzhi (the winter solstice) and qingming (the pure and bright) are evocative of feelings rather than depictions of objects. Among Qiu's calli-photo-graphy series, these are the most monumental. The inscriptions do not only express feelings. Rather it might be said that they act as agents of commemoration and the retrieval of memories.

From lichun (the beginning of spring) to dongzhi , Qiu would always look for an appropriate location and environment, and write the name of the season in darkness and emptiness. It is a process of searching in the name of inscription. Slowly, things and events associated with the twenty-four seasons, scattered, unremarkable, and deteriorating, become symbols of the ruins of time. Those unremarkable scenes become memorable. It is a photo album of the vernacular and of personal life.

What moves us in the Twenty-Four Seasons is its feeling of calm ease emerging from scenes of devastation and melancholy. It feels natural. At the same time it is complex C praise mixed with sadness, empathy mixed with nostalgia, like the country mirror looking for the moon. It reminds me of a poem written by Xiao Yao about his hometown Qinchuan:

When I look back at Qinchuan,

Where I was born and grew up

My life, my destiny

My spring season is making a journey

A village is forever here

The earth, always silent, days and nights.

For hundreds of years, weather changes, unnoticeably,

Qingming and guyu (the grain rain), once again pass through the sky of the lunar seasons.

Always in the palm of the earth

Village and spring painted an illusion:

My grandmother who passed away many years ago and my unborn daughter

Two faces so far way, yet they overlap, hard to distinguish.

Along the bloodline of time,

The exchange of bodies makes today undeniable.

With apprehension

Green grass saw the fallen leaf next to her.

After all, what never stops?

Farmers' hunger and faint memories of ruminant animals

Under the roof beloved by rain

Those long nights of dreams and a dreamless life

On this unwavering land, I saw

The spirit of mountain and water, the crafts and skills of the country people

And the farewells of crops on top of hills

I saw the sky gaze down at people shedding tears

Qinchuan, half in dream, it has

The quietness and calmness of life, rice roots drink silently

Here, grass grows for a year, and water flows to the east

When I leave, it is the sigh of the river

When I look back, home is like my mother

Used for leaving and returning, keeping hopes and being buried

In Qinchuan village, music is the smoke from chimneys

I witness tombs from the past becoming new lands

A Landscape for Everybody

On the night of September 16, 2002 , Qiu used his light-brush to write the names of everybody that he could remember. We do not know why the names of people known to him and unknown surfaced in his mind. Each appearance embodies a story in his life, some of great importance, some too trivial to record, some relating to pain and tears, some to happiness and laughter, while some others are merely meaningless names with no associations.

It is a starry sky of numerous people's destinies, a world existing because of him. Everything is pre-determined despite accidents, destined despite unpredictability. It expands without end. It is indescribable, like flowers flying in the sky and the moon reflected in water.

Life continues. The night of memory and writing also continues. Qiu thinks of his life as a plaza where people come and go. Newly arrived people, together with those being slowly forgotten, constantly renew this starry sky of memory. There is an aspect of yinyuan in this. At this moment, all the people in my life, alive and dead, co-exist because of me. It is everybody's landscape.

There are two monitors facing each other. On monitor 1, Qiu stands in front of a continuously changing landscape and repeats the same sentence I was once here. What changes behind him is not just the landscape, but also monuments and places illuminated by flashlights. Villages, fields, mountains and rivers fly by. People remember, arrive at and leave place after place. The view is determined by a specific viewpoint. The point expands to an image C the designated landscape. These places are confirmed again and again by numerous souvenir photos and their power consequently expands.

Monitor 2 facing monitor 1 is like a fast-forward silent movie, and the protagonist at the center of the image thus disappears. The monitor shows a landscape. In front of it, numerous tourists stop to take photos. They arrive and leave, but none of them is recognizable. Each individual comes and goes rapidly, illuminated by flashlight, but soon disappears into the gloomy depths of the scenery.

These simple images reveal the fundamental meaning of the existentialism of photography. It brings the discourse of photography to framed images and photo albums in every family. Photographic technology and art history become the question of the meaning of a photo to an individual. I was once here takes on an ironic meaning because of the quick shift of images behind Qiu. The repetition of the sentence soon becomes charged with meaning. It is a statement, pronounced for others but also for himself. After all, a fragile life and trivial events also need to be remembered. The easiest way of obtaining such evidence is I photograph myself, therefore I exist. Of course, to be photographed also proves one's existence, just as Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) once said: taking a photograph is self-confirmation through the reflection of others. Thus, we need to take the role of both witnessing and being witnessed, both subject and object. Taking photographs in front of tourist sites is the best interpretation of life. Tourists rush around taking photographs, in the same posture and with the same smile on their faces, as if they are following the same program. However, this common scene reveals the minds of ordinary people, sharing with us the same feelings and emotions. This is perhaps what Qiu tries to prove C the relationship between the fear of loneliness and the confirmation of the self, and the relationship between the desire to break from the mass and the impulse to follow the flow.

The Anomalous

Qiu once compared the goal of his search to the anomalousness of goose's footprints on snow. Those who know him well can understand it as the best description of him.

The phrase of goose's footprints on snow comes from Su Shi's (also known as Su Dongpo, 1037-1101) Rhyming with Ziyou's Poem at Mianchi Recalling the Past :

Wanderings of a lifetime C what do they resemble?

A winging swan that touches down on snow-soaked mud.

In the mud by chance he leaves the print of his webs,

But the swan flies away, who knows to east or west?

The old monk is dead now, become a new memorial tower;

On the crumbling wall, impossible to find old inscriptions.

Do you recall that day, steep winding slopes,

Road long, all of us tired, our lame donkeys braying?

What Su means is that life is short and unpredictable just like a goose taking a rest from a long flight over snow-covered land. It leaves small footprints on the snow, but once the snow melts, no trace will be found. The ancient and the present merge in a moment, and nothing will not happen in life. There are many changes in life; many are beyond one's control. They change without rules, just like white clouds floating in the sky. This is what it meant by all the talk about Qiu's a nomalousness.

Heaven and the earth witness the journey of thousands of things, and time witnesses the passing of hundreds of generations. The continuous renewal of the things on earth highlights the transience of human life. This is a kind of self-realization in broad temporal and special contexts, and it implies an indescribable feeling of desolation. The main focus of Qiu's works is the randomness and anomalousness of a short life in the unchanging universe, and what he tries to express is the understanding achieved despite the despair occasioned by it. For him, this is the most essential characteristic of Chinese people C detachment derived from anomalousness, an optimistic life based on pessimism and a life full of hope achieved by giving up hopes.

In the ideology of the traditional Chinese literati, there is a compensation for the goose's footprint on snow C the understanding that future people will look back at today just as we look back at history. It might be best to call this compensation because it makes up for the lost and lonely feeling of white clouds and short, harsh lives. No era can forget its past, and every era believes that it will be remembered in the future. Chinese literati always have seen their future followers from the pattern of their own lives. Thus, through memory, we become those being memorized. It is like colophons on Chinese painting and calligraphy C it not only proves the provenance of an authentic work but also provides evidence for the existence of many individuals in history. It is like an endless banquet, which constantly welcomes late-comers. And once they have settled down, they will not leave. Together with those who are already there, they wait for late arrivals. Memory is thus promised that the torch will be passed on for ever.

The Stele of Master Yang and the Stele of Yang Er

The Stele of Master Yang standing on Mount Xian can best illustrate such a promise. The History of Jin (265-316 A.D.) records in the section of Biography of Yang Hu that after Yang Hu conquered the Jin and Xiang regions (today's Hubei province), he often climbed to the top of Mount Xian to enjoy wine and compose poems. One day, he lamented to those accompanying him that ever since the universe existed, there was this mountain. Since ancient times, many wise and famous men climbed this mountain to enjoy the view from its top just like us. However, they have all died but have not since been mentioned in history. Indeed this makes me sad! After Yang Hu's death, the people of Xiang built a temple and erected a stele on Mount Xian to commemorate him. Whoever passed by the stele would shed tears. Du Yu (222-284 A.D.) then named it the stele of shedding tears. Many years later the famous Tang dynasty poet Meng Haoran (689-749) saw the stele, and with tears he wrote On climbing Mount Xian with Some Friends :

Human affairs have their ebb and flow:

One comes, another goes C that is man's history.

But this great landmark of Nature's remains.

We too have come to climb it.

We can pick out the fish-dam in the shadows at low tide,

And the flooded marshes of Yun-meng under cold skies.

Yang Hu's memorial stone stands here yet:

When I have read it I wipe away some tears.

The Stele of Master Yang is actually a contract for it presents the belief that those who look back will always be looked back upon. Making a statement is an invitation for late comers to join the banquet of remembering and being remembered.

However, what concerns Qiu is: what we should do about the lives and memories of those who are not able to make such a statement? Here, we can see the fundamental difference between Qiu and traditional literati.

In autumn 1990, Qiu was deeply moved by a tomb stele of an unknown person that he saw on the veranda of a home in the Meng magistrate in Zou county, Shangdong province. It reads: Yang Er, of unknown origin. He started his service at the Huang Family of Yuqing Hall in the seventh year of the Republic of China (1918). He is kind and hardworking, and loved by all. When asked about his family, he had two wives and only one son. His wives remarried and his son is unattached and did not have a regular job. Instead, he joined the army of Lu and went west. Nothing has been heard of him since. Yang Er died from disease in the ninth month of the seventeenth year of the Republic of China (1928). He had no land for burial, so his friends asked for a small plot of land in the East. The friends are worried that after some years he would be forgotten so they erected this stele as evidence of his tomb. If someday his son comes back, he will know that this is his father's tomb. The owner of the tomb stele did not even have a name, and is of unknown origin. Indeed an unimportant person. The text was half in written language, half vernacular oral language and the handwriting is ordinary. However, reading it evokes many feelings. Yang Er of course does not belong to the memory system represented by the stele of shedding tears. He belongs to another group of people, who are not memorable, of no historical interest, and silent. Among this group of people, Yang Er was lucky that there is a fragment of stone recording his existence. However, the stone is only an accident, an abnormality. In history, numerous Yang Er's are buried by white clouds, leaving behind no traces in the world.

The difference between the Stele of Master Yang and the Stele of Yang Er represents the difference between Qiu and traditional literati. Qiu's works reveal traces of ordinary people. However, such ordinariness should not be seen as the opposite of so-called elitism. Nor is it the compassion in Buddhist sutras. What we can read from the two steles is something deeper and more meaningful than the essence of an ethical approach to life, and broader and more embracing than compassion. It is something related to fate and nothingness, to life and death.

How important life and death are! Only when it becomes a matter of life and death does the remoteness of loneliness and the abstractness of meditation change into something as real as pain felt by the skin. Increasingly Qiu involves himself directly in his works, which slowly become a specific kind of performance. This performance is not the participation of body in performance art, but the personal experience of witnessing life by the artist.

Personal experience of witnessing is not representation, presentation or performance. It requires the deepest understanding, like pain felt by the skin. The famous revolutionary writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) wrote I will use my blood (i.e. life) to commemorate the Chinese ancestors and its civilization. Li Shutong (1880-1942) used his blood to write Diamond Sutra ( Jingang jing ). The most striking among Qiu's works is Writing a Hundred Surnames with Blood . I speculate that at that moment, Qiu identified himself with the belief in the equality of all living beings and compassion for them. However, it is not just an interpretation of the ideas of Buddhist sutras. Qiu used his own blood to write C used his own blood to inscribe the surnames of other people. It embodies pride, fear and pain. It is a calm yet awe-inspiring ritual. It is a sacrificial ritual and offering of the self to everybody in the world.

In Qiu's own statement, Writing a Hundred Surnames with Blood is a way to form a bond with the world. It forms an alliance between the self and people. It is also the fusion of the self and the world. Just like Qiu's drawings of the disappearance-of-the-self theme, it points to no-self between life and death.

Because of his great wisdom, the Buddha is not subject to life and death. Because of his great compassion , neither does he abide in Nirvana. The realm between life and earth is boundless. Neither causes and conditions nor life destinies are determined or unchangeable. The purpose of eliminating worldly attachment is to attain complete freedom. Qiu said that Writing a Hundred Surnames with Blood is an explanation of the word yuan (fate or destiny) . This is perhaps what he means.

Among contemporary Chinese artists, few are as cultivated as Qiu. However, when talking with friends he has expressed several times his disdain for those who are always talking about the Book of Changes or the yin-yang of Daoism. For him, once tradition is codified in books, it is no longer a tradition that can be passed down. Instead it can only claim the status of cultural heritage or become a tourist attraction. The most cherished essence of Chinese people is not abstract or remote. On the contrary it is in the experiences of everyday life. Because of such an understanding, he created Memory Test on the Qingming Day in 1994 (1994), Tombstone (2001), April 8 th (1999), Landscape (1999), Writing A Hundred Surnames with Blood, and Night of September 16, 2002 (2002). In these unusual works, Qiu expresses the same sentiment: equality detached of individualism, existentialism without humanism. It is the re-presentation of the invisible history surrounding each individual, the care for the unmemorable lives of countless individuals alive today, and an expression of deep concern for the anomalous lives of everybody who has ever lived.

Postscript

I

The above texts were written when I was on the road. The notepad in front of me is filled with my random thoughts and writings. Among them are two pages of photographs. I assume they have something to do with my old friend Qiu.

One of them is a photograph of the Russian movie director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) working on a film set. With a loudspeaker in one hand, his gaze is demanding and determined. Tarkovsky may not be the type of director that Qiu would like, for his stubbornness and religious tendency is something that Qiu is against. Qiu does not like his slow, intense and precise long shots either. Qiu likes to make videos and movies by himself. While so many recent video-artists work with a team of assistants, Qiu insists on his own style C no involvement with team work and staying outside professional studios. The only time he used a studio was for his work Spree , in which the studio is designed as a trap for the audience instead of as a theater designed for the sole purpose of representing scenes taken from life.

Qiu is a gifted creator of fictions, but in his own work he is more interested in causes and conditions. In his view, there is no need to intentionally insert a performer into the world. Reality, albeit disorderly, is more dramatic and powerful than a constructed pure studio. Qiu's important photographs and video works are documentary. He is essentially a documentary maker. The world surrounding us is an unfinished old movie; it is boring, gloomy, lacking a theme, and fragmentary. Our body is a camera and at the same time a projector. We may easily think of an image as a world of happiness and sadness. We are the audience, living in our own world but at the same time facing it with discomfort. This world is fragmentary but also continuous, difficult to grasp. Images provide us with an opportunity to face this world.

The other photograph is a shot from the movie Ulysses' Gaze directed by Tho Angelopoulos (1995). In the movie, a statue of Lenin removed from its pedestal is shipped back to Russia from an East European country. Lying on its back on the ship, the raised arm of the statue is now pointing meaninglessly to the sky. As the ship sails by one village after another, villagers rush out to witness the arrival and departure of the once great leader and teacher. Angelopoulos did not meticulously portray the psychological states of the villagers, but instead presented the journey as a prolonged ritual.

I am confident that Qiu would like this film, but not only for its political meanings (Qiu read the autobiography of the Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky (1879-7949) many years ago). More importantly, like Angelopoulos, he is searching for an answer to the question: what does image mean to us? For Angelopoulos, Ulysses' Gaze is a prolonged reflection on the reactions of a traveler. Image is, essentially, memory. In his movie, the search for a film strip made years ago leads him to travel through the wars and conflicts of modern European history. Film becomes the organ memorizing history, both collective and individual. For Qiu, film is, fundamentally, documentary.

Documentation is the soul of photography. Photography's morality, or the lack of it, is based on documentation. Documentation does not mean recording the only truth. The issue at stake is how to construct meaningful reality and truth. The answer manifests an artist's skill and ethics. Photography is fundamentally a constructed documentation, a way of living inside. Here, the documentary maker Qiu becomes Mr. Palomar in the novel of the same title (1983) written by the Italian novelist Italo Calvino. He is entangled with and penetrates the observed world and those observing the world. Image transcends the distance between subject and object, and becomes a way of self-observing and self-defining.

II

In Qiu's more than one decade as an artist, calligraphy remains a core element and a fundamental method. I call it a method not because he created many calligraphy-related works. In fact, calligraphy in his oeuvre is beyond the function and meaning of material, symbol and medium. I even think that calling calligraphy a method is not strong enough to show its importance. Calligraphy for Qiu is a way of life and cultivation. It is directly linked to the changes of mood in his works in recent years.

Qiu started to practice calligraphy when he was a child. The importance of calligraphy for him is more than a form of art. He even said once that calligraphy becoming art is actually a decline. Calligraphy is extraordinarily subtle and encompassing. I am not a practitioner, so I will not make comments. Here, I only attempt to discuss the inspiration provided by non-art calligraphy to contemporary art.

I personally use three criteria to measure whether an art form is mature:

1. Does it have a detailed and accurate set of measures for judgment?

2. Can we infer from it a broadly and deeply meaningful realm?

3. Can it mix with everyday life to become an inseparable part of life?

Apparently, these three criteria are the characteristics that calligraphy possesses but contemporary art does not, and the levels that calligraphy can reach but contemporary art cannot.

When I talk with my friends, we always lament that the criteria for contemporary art criticism are crude and shallow. I think whoever has a profound experience with classical art would agree. Of course, the activities of many early modern artists were refutations of rigorous modern systems and the powerful constraints of tradition. Their directness and bluntness is also their strength. Later, in multi-cultural America , art became the intermediary of culture/identity and politics, and claimed a remarkable role in the discourse of post-colonialism. However, no matter whether art is a rebuttal of traditional experience, a sarcastic commentary on the ideology and systems of contemporary art, or a resistance to hegemony and power, it may be described as an attempt to accommodate itself to art criticism, but not necessarily as the true intention of the artist.

The crudeness of the criteria for contemporary art criticism is largely due to modernist historicism, which advocates experiment leading to the exploration of greater possibilities. However, in the language of modernism, no possibility can be developed or explored deeply. This is the reason for the co-existence of colorfulness and meaninglessness of art in the last hundred years. From the beginning of modern art to today, the history of continuous experimentation is also the history of self-delusion and self-castration. I won't explore this topic here.

Qiu's calli-photo-graphy uses the most profound and mature non-art to enter the reality and inner feeling of life. We can not only judge the quality of his writing in these works, but also consider the appropriateness of the chosen environments and words. To be more precise, there are four elements worthy of appreciation: 1) the appropriateness of the chosen environment; 2) the appropriateness of the chosen words; 3) the quality of the calligraphy; and 4) the depth of range and meaning constructed by writing (including calligraphy and words) and environment.

These are also the four contributions of this series of works. The fourth one is of special importance.

Most contemporary art does not lend itself to the consideration of such subtle and precise matters. It is not interesting to talk about the technical skills of Andy Warhol's silkscreen paintings of soup cans. Of course, for films by Matthew Barney and installations by Huang Yongping we can talk about the meticulousness and banality of their details. For Cai Guoqiang, we can marvel at his careful calculations.

Calligraphy is the combination of language, image and word. Then, what is the function of calligraphy for Qiu? What is the difference between Qiu's calligraphy and calligraphy in general?

I have discussed the first question in the previous section. To answer the second question, I want to first talk about the medium of the light-brush. Using a light-brush to write, the writer needs to express forms and brushstrokes through space and movement. For the writer, none of these is visible. Images only slowly take shape after a lapse of time. The writer thus enters a particular state C writing becomes abstract movements. Just like Qiu's A One-Thousand-Time Copy of Lantingxu (1990-97) where he wrote on slowly blackened paper, it is closer to Chan meditation than to the strategies of contemporary art. It is worth pointing out that such an experience is inspirational for calligraphy itself. Calligraphic works in modern history pay too much attention to ink for the achievement of a strong visual effect on paper. The result is that the fundamental experience of writing slowly fades away.

At the same time, Qiu does not write on a piece of blank white paper. Nor does he write in pure darkness. He writes in the landscape. The difference lies in that writing needs to be considered as a photographic element incorporated with its background. This is similar to colophons written on landscape paintings. However, traditionally colophons are mostly used to fill empty space C they are written in unexpected corners and places on monumental landscape paintings of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1126). Qiu's writing is closer to inscriptions on rocks in real landscape. When the ancients visited a famous or beautiful site, they would write inscriptions to commemorate the occasion. When later generations visited the same site, they would reflect on the poems composed by their predecessors and try to understand their feelings. Overcoming temporal differences, this is the overlap of remembering and being remembered. I have discussed this in the previous section.

Traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting were of crucial significance because those who were involved were the literati, who could compete in their skills, respond to each other with emotion, and exchange ideas in the environment constructed by calligraphy, poem and painting, without ever thinking of the hypothetical and abstract public. However, contemporary Chinese art is losing its self-confidence and spirit. Among my friends, many have an anti-intellectual tendency C they pretend to be cool, dumb or cruel. It might be a strategy to succeed right now, but in the long run, it is self-destructive.

My thanks to my old friend Qiu. He gave me an opportunity to use words such as taste, appreciation, the realm of emotions in the world of contemporary art. It is something I have been waiting to do for a long time.

A representative of this concept is Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), who used the term cinematographic illusion in his 1896 publication Matter and Memory . He wrote that: we invest in past events all kinds of momentary images. We only need to connect these images, at the bottom of the machine of cognition, into an abstract, uniform and invisible becoming (devenir). At the same time, consciousness will naturally emerge. But, it extends to the thinking, expressing and even recognizing of becoming; what we shoot is only a kind of intrinsic film. If Bergson is correct, film is but a kind of common projection of images, and our everyday activity and feeling is an intrinsic process of film-making. That is to say, we always make films unconsciously, but this intrinsic process is not visible externally and thus cannot be seen. However, as Bergson discovered later: time is not a hegemony consisting of numerous moments, but a continuity of movements combined with images. Thus, film directly shows moving images. Of course, in front of a screen, illusion/image comes before consciousness. Images are ready for you to observe, and thus can be constantly adjusted according to the consciousness within one's mind. In our visual experience, it is impossible to behold at the same time a series of still images and moving images. We only see movements directly without realizing that what we see are in fact reality presented by a series of still images, which are translated into moving images based on the psychological system called trust. It seems that we see moving images directly C the world is represented in the same direct way.

Time elapses at the crossing of two worlds. This reminds me of an anecdote recorded in Records of the Strange written by Ren Fang (460-508) of the Southern Dynasties: there is a stone chamber in a mountain located at Xin'an County (today's Guangdong province). During the Jin dynasty (265-420), Wang Zhi walked into the chamber where he saw several children playing chess and singing. Wang stayed to listen to them. After a little while, the children asked him: you have been here for a long time. Why don't you go home? Wang Zhi stood up and saw that his ax had rotten. Upon returning to his village, he discovered that several hundred years have passed, and nobody from his time was still alive.

Of course, only when we juxtapose this series of photographs with other kinds of images (such as those for museum display, tourist attraction, scientific research, education, and propaganda), can we sense such ambiguously political meaning.

In relationship to it is the concept of change. In this series, the normality of environment remains but people move on is reversed. The world changes faster than people. In a blink, the familiar is gone and becomes unrecognizable. The changes of the world illustrate the abnormality of people and things.

Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment ( Yuanjue jing ) says: The world is like flowers of emptiness, randomly blossoming and randomly weathering. There is neither attachment, nor detachment, neither binding, nor unfettering.

Translator's note: yinyuan is a Buddhist term normally translated as causes and conditions, or simply as fate or destiny in non-religious contexts.

Translator's note: the translation is from Burton Watson, Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o , Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1994, p.22

See Qiu Zhijie, Shuowen jiezi as a Way of Life . Translator's note: Shuowen jiezi is the title of the earliest comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters compiled by the Later Han scholar Xu Shen (ca. 58 - ca. 147).

Translator's note: the translation is from Innes Herdan, The Three Hundred T'ang Poems , Taipei : The Far East Book Co., Ltd, 1973, p. 259.

Documentation is to transform the world into image. Once the world is transformed, reality becomes plural.

The secret of film lies in our desire for images. It breaks from us and thus can be controlled. We look at that world comfortably, which has already been visualized by an eye outside the world. Thus, it is only a world been seen. Projection and the act of seeing in a movie theater are facing the same direction, but the images in this process of projecting-seeing come from an earlier projecting-seeing while the film was being shot. Seeing in a movie theater is like restoring the moment when the film was being shot, and translating the projected images into images of reality. This is to say, the audience always thinks of the screen as a glass that cuts the visual cone, and the world represented by the film is behind this transparent slice. Of course, we know that there is no world hidden behind the screen. That world actually exists behind the audience, passing the point of projection, reflecting back to the outside world.

According to the French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), as containers of time, objects can evoke memory. On the contrary, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) believes that photographs interrupt memory.

Qiu Zhijie, On Photography: A Personal Account .

Ibid.

Ibid. Image makes it possible for you to see fragments of the world. You are responsible to put them back to your world and let them form their own world there. What image presents to us is a world seen. Thus, we discover that: images on a screen are at the same time images and a world. And the world in front of us (we always put the world surrounding us to the front) is at the same time a world and images. It is as if we have gone back to Plato's cave. The only difference is that: when Plato's prisons face the cave walls, they always see their own shadows; but the images in front of us are a world without us because it is a pre-determined world seen by us. A camera is outside its world, and I do not belong to that world either. This point is of the most importance. The American philosopher Stanley Cavell (b. 1926) once said that our permanent world is the one that does not include me put manifests in front of me. This is the essence of film, but it is also dangerous. It considers life an entanglement with this world. For this reason, it is reasonable for me to demand a camera to deny the continuity of the world, its continuity of the past, and its complete existence without me. However, it is equally reasonable to confirm that a world without me is complete. This is necessary for my request for permanence C permanence means the existence behind and outside me.

Because in the end, contemporary art is only a shorthand for us to discuss problems and issues. There is no standard or absolute version. However, as a collective reality, we may be able to choose one or two versions to discuss it. Can we contemplate details? Can we express its entire meaning through language? This is my method of judging works of art.