The Lives of Form: From Zhang Jin to Aaron Siskind
2016; Volume: 1; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/asa.2016.0041
ISSN2381-4721
Autores Tópico(s)Healthcare, Law, Governance, and Management Studies
ResumoConsider pictures by three contemporary Chinese photographers, each of which engages with organic and inorganic forms between abstraction and figuration by means of an aesthetic of flatness and surface.In Another Season (You Yi Ji) (2010-2013), Zhang Jin focuses on the entanglements of human artifacts and natural forms, nomadism and ecology of the remote past as well as of contemporary life as they both emerge from and shape the presentday landscapes of China's far northwest.Zhang connects the aesthetic of his black and white photographs which, he says in an interview with the Chinese edition of Artforum, negotiates "between abstraction and figuration," to their depictions of objects and patterns in the landscapes of the Silk Road, the global trade route of the past that had connected China to India, Central Asia, and Europe. 1 "Most of the many objects on the Silk Road," such as the "Wordless Stele" (Wuzi Bei) depicted in Zhang's eponymous photograph of 2011 (figure 1), "are no longer in the geographical positions they were in during the Han and Tang dynasties, they had been moved all over the place in later generations.With this migration of position and loss of their own functionality, static objects became homeless pastoral nomads." 2 Crucially, Zhang Jin's description of his work draws together the nomad and migrant, object and landscape, through an interplay of abstraction and figuration--the meaning of its images of nature as historical, of nature as process and form, becoming clear, the critic Cao Liangbin writes, if placed in the context of China's economic development. 3 Zhang Jin is one of a number of photographers currently at work in China who, despite their distinct differences, have in common a conception of the emergent forms of surfaces--whether surfaces depicted in a photograph, the surface of a photograph itself, or an interplay of both--as constituting ecologies: interactions of animate and inanimate
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