惊鸿照影Chang’an Chang’an

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

The translation of Chang’an Chang’an in Chinese is from poet Lu You, “Walking across the bridge where I had broken my heart, I saw the spring water was still green, in which it seemed that I could still find your beautiful shadow as I had enjoyed before.” The poem is used to describe that the past memory reflects on the surface of lake but just in a flash the shadow disappears. What I tried to look for are the relics and traces of Chang’an (Old name of Xi’an) in modern life, so to find the appeal and aura of history in reality, constructing a bridge between present and past. Just like Bergson’s definition of time is its duration. Everything is flowing. Only when we emerge ourselves in the object, can we acquire kind of inner experience that connects us with past and future.

In fact, photography itself has both progressive tense and perfect tense, so has the power to travel back. Roland Barthes said at the end of Camera Lucida, “the spirit of photography will be that-has-been”. Time is the most impressive part of photography. Walter Benjamin also defined “aura” from the perspective of time, which is “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.” The waving branches under the sun, the profiles of distant mountains all can convey the uncanny appeal at that moment, and arise audiences’ experience connecting to the past and reality.

I combined the special phenomenon of aura with the concept of “cun（皴）” in Chinese traditional painting, which implies the texture of objects, such as the skin of bark and the form of rain. Taking photos of the texture of the city, the invisible history appeared by the process of reconstruction. The final project was showed as a scroll. Audiences can see it on the wall or hold it in hands, looking at it from right to left with the movement of steps. The scroll has three chapters, and there are no obvious divisions between each chapter, because time itself is a indistinct container. Entering history from abandoned village and temple, the viewers wandered around the uncertain period of time, and then gradually human showed up. With human’s continued modification of society, the line between history and reality can’t be told. At last, everything disappeared, except the silent trees still growing in the pitch dark.