Photographic Geomancy: Images, Fieldwork, and the Poetics of Geography
Guangdong Times Museum
July 12 – October 7, 2024
In the absurd and disordered time dimension, people always instinctively seek and try to understand the secrets of heaven, in order to find a solution, or at least to temporarily comfort and sustenance. The second exhibition of Guangdong Times Museum this year is called “Photography and Geomancy”. Compared with the previous group exhibition “Follow Your Feeling” curated by curator Qu Chang who focuses on emotional politics and popular culture, it is similar and different: the curator He Yining invited this time, based on the media language and research themes he has long been concerned about, approaches cultural politics in the same globalized and embodied position, focusing more on the investigation and research-based visual practice under the geographical experience and national decolonization. From the title to the scene, “Photography and Geomancy” is like a meticulous and mysterious combination compass. He Yining interweaves the knowledge structure of geographical culture, geological ecology and geopolitical issues, so that the originally complex ideas are deconstructed one by one according to the geopolitical paths of the four plates.
“Kan” means high place, heavenly way; “Yu” means low place, earthly way. “Dao” is the truth of worldly affairs. In “Xiangdi Kanyu”, “Kanyu” is more like a predicate verb. It is a natural science “Kanyu” that integrates multiple disciplines such as geography, geology, astrology, meteorology, landscape, architecture, ecology and human life information. Between looking up at the sky and looking down at the geography, the Orientals understand, adapt to and transform nature through observation and calculation. Therefore, Kanyu is Feng Shui, which is a numerology used in Chinese civilization to hide the wind and get water and shade the descendants. “Xiangdi” as an attributive corresponds to the ancients’ investigation of the geographical situation, and also points to the use of more advanced technologies and concepts in today’s world to analyze, translate and compare data, knowledge and wisdom. Visual language replaces the original complex “Xiang” (Xiàng, matching and selection) and re-endows art with a new “Xiàng” (Xiàng, photos, landscape). In this way, “geomancy” is extracted from the context of Zhouyi and becomes the focus of photography, image and video practice in this exhibition.
Taking the elevator to the 19th floor, I remember that looking out from the spacious terrace of the art museum, the surrounding scenery changes significantly every time: the new shopping mall rises from the pit, and suddenly there is a lot of traffic. The renovation of the old house not far away seems to never stop. Even if it is a yellow border, it will soon be incorporated into another new “old Guangzhou territory”. Feelings gently covered another layer, and I immediately turned and entered another world of entropy reduction that runs counter to expansion and speed. The entrance of the exhibition hall is divided into two by a vertical wall, with light on the left and dark on the right. The audience will naturally walk towards the light between yin and yang, and the order of left in and right out is defaulted. The overall perception of the space is winding and changeable. Walking through dense images, settings and documents is like drifting slowly in the mountains and rivers, quiet and selfless. By adding independent or related exhibition walls and exhibition racks, “Geomancy” really lists the geographical creations of 20 artists from different aspects in a system of one step and one scene. The smooth and smooth visiting route not only makes the narrow space of the Times Art Museum fully utilize its possibility of being divided and folded to form a circuitous passage, but also allows the audience to have a multi-sensory experience that is neither repetitive nor boring through more walking, sitting, and pushing and pulling the perspective.
Facing the entrance, the first thing that comes into view is the three platinum prints selected from the “Wei Wan Travel” chapter in Taco’s “New Records of Caves and Heavens” (2017-): “Danfang”, “Donghu” and “Reading the Stele”. Ta Ke conducted field research and historical tracing of the natural caves “Dongtian” where the ancients communicated with gods and prayed for blessings, and cast a modernist perspective on the mountain-cut tombs of the Han Dynasty in the 3rd century AD, capturing and exploring the perception of life in the textured rock walls of the deep caves. Next to it is “Lingshan Ji” (2021), which is like a series of continuous mountains on paper. Guo Jiaxi conducted visual research and video recording of the Lingshan Mountain at the intersection of the Qiantang River and the Fuchun River. He used the comprehensive method of handmade books to poetically restore the “new landscape” with a very unique landscape after human mining, and used the moving perspective of the viewer to imprint the miniature restoration of the mining land in an objective sense into a volume of remembrance of time and existence. The literati landscape that can be viewed, visited, or lived in pushed me to the towers deeper in the exhibition hall. Previously, I heard the conversation between Taco and Lin Shu on “different ways to shoot monuments and towers” and “admiration for the ancient” in a podcast program: both of them emphasized photography as a kind of “view” that focuses the line of sight to some extent, but compared with Taco’s continuous creative clues and research background, Lin Shu’s “tower” is more like an image-based expression of the image itself from the inside out, which then forms a kind of – whether we are looking at “Lingguang Temple Glazed Tower (Tang Dynasty)”, “Kaiyuan Temple Renshou Tower (Song Dynasty)” or “Thousand Buddha Tower (Yuan Dynasty)” and “Shisun Island Stone Alum Tower (Qing Dynasty)”, it is like looking at a landscape portrait that is independent of real history, standing in time and space with incomparable clarity and incomparable distance.
Riding on the calm sunlight, the exploration and translation of landscape issues in various landscapes, reflecting each other and independently filling 1/4 of the exhibition hall, which is the first chapter of the exhibition “Kunyu Address Search”. Passing through the Hexi Corridor in Zeng Han’s “Yuan Shanshui” (2021) silk, I seemed to hear Su Dongpo’s sudden long whistle among the shaking grass and trees: “The mountains echoed, the valleys responded, the wind rose and the clouds surged”, and then came to the area of new images and sculptures by southwestern artist Chen Xiaoyi. The 15-minute black-and-white video “Ancient Vision” (2024) unfolds from the pursuit of white conch as a traction clue for ecological memory, and then in a threshold time and space where the virtual and the real are intertwined, the disappeared ancient landscape is painted on paper. In the unspeakable ripples and untraceable spiral symbols, the intertwined dialogue annotations are like fine needles and threads threading through frames of static photos, thus creating a sense of “everything is silent like a mystery” that transcends language, geography and time. Meanwhile, Chen Xiaoyi’s UV-printed aluminum work “Withered Rocks” (2024) breaks down this inexpressible natural language into fragmented chunks like scattered words. The material and vision make the vast things visible, but what exactly are the original appearances of mountains, rocks and the natural world? People seem to need to use existing coordinates to imagine the blind man touching the elephant in order to reach the deep sea.
Going straight ahead, watching Li Yong’s post-industrial archival video titled “Oil Star” (2022), the remaining oil tanks, golden rust and amber, and oil dust do share very similar forms with floating stars in the universe. I can’t help but think that perhaps carbon-based civilizations in tens of millions of years will also be meaningful because of their life instincts in the cycle of flickering and fading—democracy, dignity, resistance, and self-repair. He Zike’s “Garbled City” (2023) is based on the future narrative of the interdisciplinary project “Guizhou Under the Clouds” co-sponsored by her and Long Xingru. She was born in Guiyang, China’s data capital, a multi-ethnic place surrounded by clouds in the mountains. The stationing of many infrastructures such as the power station dam, the first iCloud data center in Asia, and the FAST telescope server has completely changed the lives, environment, society and memory of local residents. Imagine that all the data in this world is completely disordered or lost. Will our relationship network and existing cognition face unprecedented paralysis and collapse?
At this time, I just walked to the end of the second section of the exhibition, “Geological Perception”. A hole on the exhibition wall is like an island and a boomerang, which just opens up the works of Taco and Zhang Wenxin on the theme of “cave” respectively; looking from this irregular window to the opposite side, you can just see the girl lying in the corn pile with a smile in Xu Xiaoxiao’s lens. “Drinking Horses at the Great Wall Cave” (2017-2018) is such a series of photographs that record the villages along the ancient ruins of the Great Wall. One of the most densely populated areas of the exhibition is the ongoing project “Topology of Caves and Bodies” (2014-), which contains images and texts: The cave itself is an all-encompassing concept. “It not only points to the philosophical metaphor of residential sites, such as “cave heaven”, but it is also a channel for viewing, especially looking inward.” Zhang Wenxin shared this in the lecture: “And this place is often the last habitat of anarchists and unproductive people, and is also called the “living place” that is not allowed by the regime.” While feeling the cruelty drawn out by the research institute, I looked at the “Eye of the Cave” (2021) that I had just taken on my phone. The hollow hole, which was illuminated by strong light and had nowhere to hide, made me wander for a while.
The exhibition built a temporary darkroom open to the outside at the central axis, and Zhang Zixuan’s three-channel video “Colorless in the Air” (2024) was played opposite. The narrative of underground iron ore mining and smelting is unfolded from the collectivist perspective of the industrial movement in the 1970s. Three display screens flicker in the deep space like a mine mouth. The dark and repetitive pictures are like ghosts. Machines, environment and labor are mixed together in this movement of questioning emptiness. When overflowing from ecological criticism, I seem to feel a faint heat behind me, as if there is an unknown energy burning. When the underlying logic of visual expression is forged by a lot of walking and research, then we may have more opportunities and confidence to walk faster than the real world, and use the power of deduction, imagination and criticism to predict a certain future and then retreat to reality to make up for the loss.
Continue walking, the third and fourth sections of the exhibition are unobstructed wide spaces. Facing the photography, video and wallpaper work “Yu’s Water” (2021-2024) by Luger, a Tibetan from Wenchuan, the subjectivity of “people” is clearly introduced here. National culture, geological disasters, and changes in settlements are differentiated into many complex issues in highly aesthetic images. In “Island in the Reservoir”, Ruger reflects on his embodied experience from an archaeological perspective by blurring the relationship between the island and water, which refers to the tribe of ancestors, into multiple completely opposite meanings, including life maintenance, nurturing the tribe, instantaneous drowning when overturned, and isolation. “On July 23, 2020, Ruger’s father lost contact for 5 days in the Wolong flood due to traffic and power outages caused by the flood. Fortunately, nothing happened later.”
Man-made products are always causally related to ecological changes. This dynamic relationship is also reflected in Feng Fangyu’s image records of Yangshupu, Hongkou, Shanghai’s “Xiazhijiao” area, and the former Far East’s No. 1 thermal power plant. Similarly, the mining plant “China Shougang” in Hebei and the telegraph station built by the Danes on Gulangyu Island in the 19th century are also shown in the form of wandering imagination in Han Qian’s video “The Silence Between the Tides” (2022) and Zhang Beichen’s image installation series “The Sun Rises, the Great Northern Telegraph Station Sinks to the Seabed” (2022-). Going north on the map, the frozen scene of Changbai Mountain and the upper reaches of the Songhua River became the narrative carrier for Liu Yujia’s “The Light Fading” (2023), which combines documentary, literary and ethnographic elements to try to break the binary opposition and human-centered perspective. Going south on the map, the historical landscape is translated from the real land to the virtual world. Hong Kong classics such as “Infernal Affairs II” and “Love in a Puff” are re-screened in the form of digital module pixels in the “Minecraft” game world created by artist Liu Wei in “Memory {Reset}-East Kowloon” (2021). Similar to the exhibition logic of Liu Yujia’s works, Liu Xin’s video “White Stone” (2021) was also presented on site in combination with three photographic works taken during the shooting journey. As a supplementary part that encompasses more creative emotions and visual thinking, the derived images are like body fragments that fell from the story of the rocket remains, recording the birth and death of technical objects while also providing viewers with a channel of empathy.
As the exhibition drew to a close, the space seemed particularly bright. Perhaps it was because of the on-site set design, or because I had done many hearty “geomancy” in the form of viewing and reading. The injection of modern perspectives made the 19th-century German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen’s journey to China in Zhu Yinghao’s comprehensive presentation of “An Imaging of a Cross-Strait Rock Formation in 1868” (2022-2024) connectable and perceptible, and also made Zheng Andong’s “How to (Un) Name a Tree” (2024) series on the other side span between botany and geopolitics from a poststructuralist perspective, completing an individual re-watching of the composite pine landscape.
At this time, I sat quietly in the dark blue light box community, imagining the same question as Ren Zeyuan’s “Have You Been Here Before” (2019): When and where do we really exist, and where are we striving to reach? The familiar Ningbo dialect in the film seems like some kind of definite coordinate reference value, but the ambiguity of the city and the coast makes the time and displacement experienced by the flesh become discrete. At this moment, it seems that “Geomancy” provides the audience with self-positioning under countless landscapes and research methods, just as curator He Yining pointed out: “Find the position of individuals in the storm of collision between theory and practice, so as to better build an open, inclusive and transcendent action model.” The audience walking around the exhibition are also parallel creators in the strict sense. The significance of interdisciplinary methods and visual images may be visible but not tangible, but the antidote that can resist nothingness and obstruction in the end is still the embodied action of individuals.
The lofty intention of the exhibition “Geomancy” is, to some extent, a manifestation of the academic ambition of the average doctorate student today. However, whether the exhibition can raise and solve some folk issues may be an effective handle for more ordinary audiences who have not received art education (but hold the fate of the box office) to connect and respond. Looking back at this exhibition, which I think is excellent in terms of content and quality, it was held in the hot summer in southern China, where business and production were emphasized. The long exposure to sunlight during the day forced daily work to be reduced, and the nights that should have been spent “enjoying the cool under tall trees and sitting among falling flowers” were often lost in the extended labor of capital chasing high efficiency. In the face of reality, establishing a balanced dialogue still requires ideals and reflections, but the fluid context also makes art and even cultural production often give way and compromise with distorted reality. Thinking back to the ancients’ use of Qiankun to draw hexagrams, and the way they predicted the future and made decisions by observing the terrain, landforms and geographical environment, may be the simple method proposed by the exhibition so far to resist the fog of infinity, disappearance and grandeur: hiking and exploring, entering the city and returning home, and knowing the reasons of the living and the dead.
*Originally published on Art-Ba-Ba.
Yuting (Roxy) TANG 