Probe Into a Scholar’s Concern through Images
Nietzsche said, “The scenery of plainness without decoration exists for the major painters, while the spectacular and unique scenery exists for the minor painters.? There is a grain of truth in what Nietzsche said,which is substantiated by Dalang Shaos over 30 years of practice in photography. From the commonplace life, the “scenery? of humanistic touch is extracted. Without deep artistic sediment and unique skill, the achievement is impossible. We can carefully probe into this with the help of many cases in the history of the photography.
Let us look at Dalang Shaos scholarly temperament: his elegant style, humble lips, his independent thought and cultural awareness. His inner quality and outer manifestation combined to form his classical and modern scholarly sentiments. He was born into a photographer’s family and was greatly inluenced by profound and broad Chinese culture. He was later humble enough to receive inputs from all directions. All these cultivated in him an extraordinary eye and sensitive hand. He moved freely between the traditional charm of black and white photography and modern way of thinking. His style as a wise man was expressed in terms of four seasons of pure life. The visual bookmarks were lipped open one page after another, as if scattering between the vast Heaven and Earth.
This is a fulcrum, an unshakable corner stone. It is indispensable for the pursuit of independent thoughts, independent personality, independent value and image creation process with humanistic touch.Once this pursuit of independent spirit and loftiness was made, all that came from the lenses were naturally transcending. What he had traversed for the past over 30 years was transformed into rare and inexpressible images.
Among these images of winds and tides, the best symbol for independent personality was none other than the images of sails on the rivers that he took picture of in the past 20 years. Whether it was in Lishui,Yongjia or Xiapu, or whether it lowed naturally or it was digniied, these sails seemed to have traversed many miles of mountains and rivers. The 20 years of vicissitude of life was instantly transformed into light hues! More amazingly, the poems on the sails written by the men of letters in ancient China could all ind equivalent expressions in the lenses of Dalang Shao. The profound humanistic touch transformed the rhythms into the hanging scrolls.
In the misty Xiapu, the solitary sails were still dimly visible against the hills along the two banks. In thewithered branches of the trees in Lishui, the canvass sails broke the autumn wind. If one replaced it with a scroll of picture of Lishui’s thick tree shadows, instantly, one was transported to a scene where the sails came late against the river bridge. You may not ind the right sails you want and enter into a picture other than one of sadness. Wasn’t the negative experiment at the stone bank of Yongjia a testimony of “moonlight shining on the sails in a mist”? As for the aspiration for setting the sails to help the world, Dalang Shao's lenses already demonstrated this through a coverage of thousands of miles… It is not dificult to see the traces of inluence from his grandfather Du Shao, who did an album on Old Trees Greeting Sails in Wind in 1959. Vaguely,we can also see his ambition to do better than his father Jiaye Shao, whose picture Tens of Thousands of Miles in the East Wind won many prizes （1963）. It took Dalang Shao 20 years to capture various angles and atmospheres of sails. In his search for classical naturalness and modern libration, he completed a great leap in continuity and renovation. Just as a poet said, “when the rivers came from nowhere, the sails moved to nowhere.”
In retrospect, the early Dalang Shao was active in Jiangnan region where his father also lived, especially in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and the south of Anhui. Guided by his father, Dalang had a good taste of the beauty of the Chinese pictures under the lenses. The works of this period of time showed strong traces of inluence from his father and grandfather. In every picture taken, it illed with esthetic contentment. As mentioned earlier, Du Shao, Jiaye Shao and Dalang Shao for three generations adopted black and white photography and left magniicent legacy in the history of 50 years of Chinese photography. This legacy, coupled with years of experience, gradually showed the sign of conident transcendence. When I saw the picture of a tree taken at Yi County by Dalang in 2004, I remembered the work The Tree by Wynn Bullock, American master photographer of symbolism in the 1940s. These two works resembled each other in both content and spirit.Just as Bullock said, ?I don?t want to tell what the tree and grass are like. I only want to tell what I am.Through me, I express their meanings in nature.? From the structure of the picture and the experience beyond the picture, the works of Dalang in this period were completely relective of the modern taste resembling that of the works of Bullock. They were also relective of transcendence of the traditional technique of leaving the white space and the mindset of self-contentment. Naturally, the topic of tree will be subject to further interpretation later on. I discuss this here only one example of transcendence from Dalang?s experience in Jiangnan region.
This transcendence is the greatest accomplishment that he scored in his over 30 years experience as a photographer. It is expressed most condensed with the highest value in his photography of the West Lake in Hangzhou. Just as I reported in the past, facing the great lake all day with its shiny and emerald waves, one was greeted with the rhythm of the black and white and took delight in water. This is what Dalang's pictures of the West Lake impressed their viewers.
The West Lake of Dalang was not the one with variegated colors of lotus blossoms, but the one with natural ease like mist and rain. It was not a lake that aroused the Jurchen’s desire of conquest, but a mild place where hills, pavilion, water and cloud were not spectacular. The West Lake of Dalang was not a place for orgy, but a place for solitariness.
Therefore, the West Lake of Dalang had the lights of waves dimly visible. Its color of the hills was at once distant and near. Its hanging willows were at the same time soft and stiff. The sunshine and moonlight were shrouded in the long stretch of mist. The long bridge and small boats appeared in the long dreams.Viewing this movement of the black and white, sometimes, one would feel that life was like a loating seed case of a lotus, whose traces were nowhere to be found. One would lament that the passage of life was as heavy as old pine branches, which could not stop the stumbling footsteps. Dalang Shao faced the West Lake as a wise man. He deciphered the true meaning of life from the lowing water of thousands of years.Therefore, in the seemingly plain touch, he depicted various emotions of the modern men of the West Lake.
It is not hard for us to see that the images of the West Lake in the early period focused more on purity and tranquility of the forms. The works of the later period, however, were more lexible in expressions. On the same tranquility and harmony of the West Lake, he preferred to use modernist tool such as abstraction to distance the West Lake from vulgar esthetics and popular mode of criticism. Dalang Shao was fully awake. Motivated by his mature curiosity and restless delights, he took pleasure in the creative imagination.From the lake water, trees, sky and mountain ranges, we saw the tension. The dreamy rays of lights always surrounded them. Black and white, night and day, revelation and the hidden, the finite and infinite, the natural and artiicial, dynamic and static, the real and the illusion. The harmony was achieved through perfect balance and endless conlicts. The end effect was that the viewers were invited to stretch their imagination in the tranquil space and shared the unspeakable sentiments of the men of letters.
Perhaps, when compared with his father and grandfather, Dalang retained the tenor of more modern men in his depiction of the West Lake on the basis of the classical sentiment. He entered into a disinterested state as human beings would face the greedy world of desires. Perhaps, the visual capacities that he relied on consisted of the perception and imagination. His interest was to clearly deine the differences of these two parts: the power of depth that is generally known to exist in the real and in the mysticism. An excellent photographer could go further and be unconstrained by the traditional ideas through the power of intuition and instincts. The West Lake, where people viewed the natural beauty of moon and tide, was receding from us. Instead, we have the lake approaching us where the people reveled in the luxury of desires. The real in the negative images, the soberness in the illusion, the future of the West Lake will all become modern possibilities.
The West Lake is all that Dalang has. As he found time, he would “cultivate” himself with his photography near the West Lake. But his feelers would reach those tender and yet strong elements in the scholarly concerns in the larger space and further away places. In the traditional Chinese culture, “scholarly concern” was based on Daoism. Its pursuit was world transcendent. It was a “hermetic” lifestyle and therefore aimed for inner place and pleasure. However, “the scholarly concern? in the Confucian context was more powerful and this-worldly. This concern stimulated the blossoming of the lower of the inner desire. In the creations of Dalang, he used both abstraction and montage.
Let us look at the abstraction irst by using The Cable in the Sky as an exemplar. The abstraction is the highest realm of art. For example, music, the crownless king, conquers the world by its power of abstraction.Stravinsky, a noted musician, had one extreme, but meaningful adage: expression is absolutely not the purpose for the existence of music. Even if music appears to express something, it is an illusion, not a
“reality.” Stravinsky did not mean to negate the “meaning” of music. Rather, he believed that the “meaning”of music was not attained by “expressing” none-musical matter, but by the formation of the music itself. As for photography, after countless experience of the concrete images for 180 years, its power of abstraction naturally attracted Dalangs attention. His cable reminds me of the controversy of “hot abstraction” and“cold abstraction” in the history of art, which was represented by Wassily Kandinsky and Pieter Mondrian respectively. The former abstraction could be seen in the visual metaphor of the image, while the latter abstraction was a pure combination of lines and plans. Whether it was a metaphor or the simplistic dots and lines, in the group of pictures about the cables, it was an experimental manifestation. What he faced with was the spiritless world of matters.
Now lets take a look at the composition of montage. Take Montage at the City as an example. This group of photos was taken from 2007 to 2011. It reminds me of The Window Models, published a few years ago by Lee Friedlander. The dates of photography were between 2009 and 2011, which were very close to that of Dalang. They were taken at important cities in the US such as New York City, Washington and Los Angeles. On the surface level, both of the two photographers used window relections to demonstrate the montage of the city views. However, Lee Friedlander’s works relected more static space and carried one dimension, while Dalangs montage varied, which was superior to the former in the psychological expression of confusion. Of course, they had one thing in common. Both as onlookers observed the confusing form and state in the three dimensions world and momentarily captured the transformation of the form and state into the two dimensions world of tidiness, perfection and rationality. These pictures were in a sense a visual feast. They transformed the insigniicant objects through montage into surrealist psychological experience.The viewers experienced a sense of setback, as they were prevented from looking with their eyes rather than psychologically experiencing the theme of the photographer.
In fact, this exploration is omnipresent. Especially in his series of Respond to the Object and Image the Form, he fully demonstrated that he was no longer satisied with the simple representation of the real world.Instead, he attempted to use the subtle change in the form and transformed the unspeakable suppression into the releasable visual low. For example, he tried to do projection superimposition on the streets of the US, which showed his skill in his depiction of absurdity. For another instance, in his Random Works on the Journey, he randomly picked up the photo with an unstable composition, which resembled an experimental color of the avant-garde. In his Coming and Going, he used the pinhole camera to capture dazing shadows.The image turned from the clear to the fuzzy, from the formed to the formless, which contained mystique and imagination. These experimental explorations gave viewers a delightful sigh of relief.
Clive Bell, a British art critic, put forward a theory of “meaningful form? at the end of 19th century. In Bells view, esthetic sentiment was different from life sentiment. The former was a pure form of sentiment.In esthetics, one did not need life concept or passion. One only needed the knowledge of form, sense of color and three-dimensional space. Esthetics transcended life. Based on this understanding, Bell thought little of narrative art. He believed that this type of art had the value of psychology and history, but could not move the viewers esthetically. He especially extolled primitive art, believing that primitive art usually contained no narrative nature, no exact representation, but only meaningful form. The form was meaningful because hidden behind the form was object itself and ultimate reality itself. The purpose of artistic creation was to get hold of this “ultimate reality?. We could not grasp this “reality” through reasoning and sensibilities. Only in the intuition of the pure form could we grasp it. Bell’s theory had a profound inluence on modernist art in the West. “Meaningful Form? became a most popular expression in esthetics.
Actually, this extreme pursuit of the sense of form was an expression of “strangelization” in the eye of Dalang Shao. Just as Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian art critic, said, the purpose of art was to enable the people to feel the things and events, not just to know the things and events. The craft of art was strangelization of an object, and to make the form dificult and to enhance the dificulty of feeling and the length of time, because the process of feeling itself was the esthetic purpose and so one must try to lengthen it. In this process of“lengthening”, Dalang Shao went all out to tread his own way. He tried to use a new form to accept the real world as it was. That was to say, he accepted the real world as a complex and rich “factual world”, superior to the rigid old form. In this way, he compelled the viewers to change their own subjective world. Actually,he attempted to produce a form from “the world as it is? and duplicated it in form. The explorations like these entailed much renovation in form, which sent further shocking wave to the outdated and conventional art form. To some extent, the whole modernism and avant-garde took an active approach to do the passive work.This was an “esthetic” means to catch up with the development of the modern world and to ind a niche in form in the new experience in time and space and in society caused by the dominance of new technology and commodities.
Therefore, perhaps that was a ?strangelized? view. It did not only demonstrate a world, but also a century gone by, a nature that we were familiar with, but could not get close to. Perhaps, the most forceful element between the black and white of the pictures of Dalang Shao was that it could record the unique part of the world, and yet perfectly integrates with the esthetic feeling of the individual photographer. The result of the integration was an explication. What interests us was that after being iltered by human soul, what it would become. Perhaps, this was the new height that a scholarly concern could reach in modern days.
Of the works of Dalang Shao, one topic is Knocking at Silence to Find Sound. This is to obtain the echo of the soul from silent solitude and transforms it into the life rhythm of variegated lights and shadows.Especially in the two groups of pictures taken in Europe and Japan, very modern rhythm is represented.Indeed, in the silent solitude, the movement of the soul was sounded. This reminds me of what Xu Fuguan said in his The Spirit of Chinese Art: Someone may ask, the spirit of art founded on the school of Zhuangzi and Neo-Daoism is mystical and simple. It appeals only to the hermits. In the highly industrialized society,the competition is ierce and the change is drastic. It is opposed to the spirit of Zhuangzi and Neo-Daoism.Will the life of Chinese painting die out as the industrialization of China develops? Art is relective of the time and society. The relection usually takes two forms: one is compliance and the other is introspection.The compliant reflection would push or assist the reality that it reflects, and therefore, its significance is usually determined by the practical meaning of the object it reflects on. The Chinese landscape painting was long suppressed by authoritarian politics and constrained by the greed of the literati class. It longs to return to nature in order to gain spiritual freedom, to maintain spiritual purity and restore the life energy.This is the introspective relection. The scholarly concern that Dalang Shao extends is mostly introspective art. Its import is vastly different from the traditional Chinese painting. It no longer simply expresses “ease”,“tranquility” and “innocence” in the mind of the artist. It focuses on the mind and nature, the ethical dimension of the artist. Beyond life transcending pursuit of art, it shows its concern for real world and the people in it. Especially, in his journey in Japan and Europe, once he found an object that matched his soul, “this other-worldly” spirit of the traditional Chinese painting found an excellent exit for its narration and grandeur.
As for the theme The Tree, most of the pictures were taken in recent years. This seemingly unattractive life power reminds me of some noted photographers. In the latter part of their life, they put a lot of passion into the trees. Like them, Dalang Shao also did this. Were they at a certain stage of their life and heard the divine music in silence? Or did they naturally ind the visual object that matched their soul? For example,Lee Friedlander, an American photographer, distanced himself from the attention to the cities in his photos after 1990s.He took “landscape” as the theme and concentrated on the portrait of the trees. He found a resting place for his soul in the complex and irregular branches. Another American photographer Mark Seliger paced in the Central Park in his later days and took pictures of branches and leaves of the thick trees. His album was called Listening. He raised one topic in an interview: all artists will go to the landscape…especially the landscape of trees with their inality. Besides, the idea of “landscape” means a sense of maturity. I am not alone to think in this way. Perhaps, trees are most vital in nature and are most dificult to ponder. Dalang Shao likewise attempted to listen for something in the landscape of the trees: extremely simple or lush, one syllable, a group of melody or a grand movement. In the moment of returning to simplicity, something wells up from the bottom of one’s heart with the high speed of growth.
Let us come back to what Nietzsche said at the beginning of this essay. Small landscape was prepared for a great painter. The views in the lenses of Dalang Shao are rarely famed mountains or a big river. Usually,he shot only one hill, one stone, one river, one tree or a segment of a city. Even as vast as the West Lake,he took one ladle of it. These became the landscape in his mind. This resulted from his grand esthetics with a scholarly concern. On a general level of esthetics, the unity of Heaven and man means that celebration of life, taking delight in life and afirming the values of senses. One is grateful to the Heaven and Earth,experiencing the life, reliving the life and being attached to the life. On this basis, one is able to establish a psychological reality of senses. The esthetic realm superior to morality naturally means a realm of freedom where one forgets about beneits and harms, rights and wrongs, goes beyond time and space, and cause and effect. This is the realm that Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism often described and mentioned. However, after Dalang Shao entered the realm with his superior power of understanding, he was not satisied. He attempted to get close to the highest realm of Chinese life one step after another. He distilled the essence of free exploration of Chinese culture in the images. Without worldview, cosmology, life outlook larger than art and nature, it would have been dificult to achieve the grand esthetics.
Walter Benjamin said, the true image of the past lickered momentarily. We could grasp the past as a momentary image only. If we missed that moment, we were all dead. In the past 30 years, Dalang Shao has persisted in this way of exploration. He doesn’t want to miss countless leeting moments. The continuous accumulation of the scholarly concern enables him to establish grand esthetics in its true sense. Perhaps,it is not dificult to ind that his works seem to break free of the time constraints and move to the category of space, even into “meaningless” space art. Just as Milan Kundera consistently expressed his view of the world, this world is pure space, and is absolutely meaningless.
Kundera wished to demonstrate another dimension of existence in his later fictions. This dimension displayed the distance in space, not continuity in time. Consequently, it threw skepticism towards the world of meanings. What were thought of as meaningful such as love, suffering, struggle, human rights, children’s smiles were all subject to skepticism. The world was an accident. Value or meaning in the inal analysis was given by human being in order to give a reasonable explanation of existence. In the view of Kundera, it was this pursuit of meaning that gave rise to ideological struggle, resulting in great disaster.
Therefore, let us once more enter into the depth of the space of Dalang Shao’s pictures. In the unfathomable limit of the shadow of the black and white, let us experience the pure joy of the soul. The classical scholarly concern seems to be too heavy here. Only through reconstructing the modern scholarly concern could we shoulder this responsibility, “returning to the spot” and “touching the history” as it was.That’s all what we need.
Perhaps, none of these is an accident. Dalang Shao shot his pictures sparingly, but the messages they conveyed were extremely rich. His pictures bear repeated viewings. They lure us to find the ultimate consequence. Or we may say, they test our ability to read the metaphors. Once your eyes enter into his pictures, they will be irmly attracted. Perhaps, you cannot immediately identify the photographer’s point of view, but in the face of the landscape, you could indeed feel an indescribable power. These pictures not only enable us to experience the real world, they invite us to truly experience the richness of the real world. In fact, every picture tests its viewers. Before you draw a conclusion, have you given enough space for thought?
As a matter of fact, the photography of today could not be interpreted only as a visual art. The view that the audience take in from the artist is nothing but a bridge. Many a bridge is meant to lead the viewers to the other shore of thinking. How beautiful the bridge is no longer important. Now the vision must combine with the way of thinking the artist designates for the other shore so to achieve an overall effect of the work.Dalang Shao exhausted his resources to build this bridge. As the artist uses the man （including scholarly concern） as an element of work in his artistic expression, his work becomes more plural and deep. Perhaps,starting from his “image beyond image”, we are already so absorbed as to forget to return home. We only see our days as if “the mountain is quiet and the sun is long”.
A spring day in 2108 at Blackstone Apartment in Shanghai