Oscillating between Aboriginal and Urban, amongst Spirit, Painting, and Photography - by Xu Peiwu

“Photography is contingent on the independency of a photographer’s spirit. It is beyond space and time.” In autumn 2007, in a small pub in Shanghai, I blurted out these sentences when my friend asked me “what is a good photo?”

The first time I came across the concept of spirit was in 1981 – the year I decided to learn painting on my own – in an antiquarian bookshop in Guangzhou. There I read Shanghai painter Chen ShiFa's painting book, Bird and Flowers, in which the preface, entitled "Too High Spirit to Describe", outlined the relation between spirit and painting and concluded that it was the very spirit that underpinned his highest realm of art.  Even since then I have immersed myself into the deliberation of the relation between the spirit and art I pursued, be it painting or photography. And this photography book, in a way, is a brief summary of my deliberation. 

In this exhibition, horse plays a very important role in many ways. This can be traced back to the experience in my early stage. When I was in the first year of the senior high, I went to a mountain town in north Gaugndong Province and bought The Sketches of Xu Beihong. I was so excited and archaised, inter alia, his early work, "Horses and Groom". While archaising the elder with his smoking pipe, the intimate eye contact, their shadows, and the forest behind them, the elements combined in the painting triggered my fascinations between the lines and obsession with horse. After learning sketch, I started to learn oil painting and had an unconscious intention to archaise those paintings which had motifs or elements relating to horses, e.g. the eighteenth century French Fontainebleau painter Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot's "The Sin-le-Noble Road near Douai" and English landscape painter John Constable's "Hay Wain".  In May 2008, I was invited to exhibit my photographs at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. After the exhibition, I went to London to see the origin of "Hay Wain" in the National Gallery. The cottage and river path, the rural life of a group of haymakers, the horse-drawn cart standing in the water in the foreground, and the meadow across in the distance on the right – the picturesque scenery of Constable’s “Hay Wain” – brought back all the memory in my early stage. And it was not until then did I start to consciously retrospect my obsession with horse and deliberate the meaning of the oscillation amongst spirit, painting, and photography. 

In the late 1980s, I started my on-site painting. At the beginning I went on-site painting with a camera. The motivation was to refine the painting with the help of photos. In this process, I shifted part of my focus to photography. In 1993 I arranged a twenty-day photography field trip to Cang Mountain, Erhai Lake, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, and Shangri-La at the fringe of Yunnan Province. Later in the same year, the photos I took made me a professional photo-journalist. In spring 2005, I had my first solo photography exhibition in Shanghai. A friend of mine, Chew Junwei, came to the exhibition and said to me, “It is just like a musician who devotes his life to music must have a proper instrument, you need a large-format film camera.” He further suggested me to replace my middle-format film camera with an ALPA large-format film camera. After that, a pair of sculpted wooden grips has become the symbol of my professionalism. My deliberation of techniques/representations, subjects/objects, spatial/temporal – those subtle issues essential to photography, especially in the digital era in China – have been imbricated with precision, accuracy, purity, and simplicity – the tectonics and aesthetics of ALPA.

31st December 2005 was a rare shining day. I rambled with my camera in Guangzhou Grand World Scenic Park, where the Sung dynasty military drama, “Mu Guiying Broke through Tianmen Array” was performed by Wuqiao Great Circus of China from Hebei Province. At the moment when warrior maiden Mu Guiying led the kneed warhorse, I pressed the shutter unconsciously. One year later when I saw this photo again, I did think that this photo conveyed certain meaning. The juxtaposition of the warrior maiden and warhorse in the Song Dynasty with a private real estate – a common element of the capitalist urban landscape in the 21st century in China – embodied a surreal spectacle. For many years, I have been trying to find the way to express my contemplation and reflection deriving from reading the “Exile”, the best photography book of a Czech photographer in exile, Josef Koudelka. The encounter with Mu Guiying gave me a hint: This ambiguity of a field of tension which puts together unrelated elements in the landscape, on the shore, and on the street – so closely interconnected and yet sharply despaired – is the very spirit a photographer pursues. Though this elaboration is nonetheless intuitive and fragmentary, it has become the discipline of my photography, and led me to shot the life of a horse caravan in a valley in north Guangdong Province, the monks leading their horses in front of the Lingji Monastery, Tagong Grassland, Sichuan Province, and the Northern-Song-Dynasty-style horse trailers outside the Qingming Riverside Landscape Garden in Henan Province.

When I was preparing for the exhibition and publication of this photography book, curator Jean Loh came to see all the photos and scoped the motif of this exhibition as “Dragon, Horse, the Spiritual, and the Divine”. When combined, these four characters comprise the Chinese idiom “龍馬精神” (spirit of dragon horse), though denoting different things in Cantonese context, meaning “ambition and vigour”. When comprehending these four characters separately, they, both literally and metaphorically, provide vivid and variegated connotations. “Dragon” implies the son of heaven, the metaphors of the divine in different circumstances, the dragon dance in southern China since the Ming Dynasty, and the dragon boat festival that commemorates the death of the great poet Qu Yuan in ancient China. “Dragon horse” is a synonym of “fine horse”. “The spiritual and the divine” denotes the peculiar funeral rites of the Yao ethnic minority group in Guangdong province, Miao ethnic minority group's “Nuo opera” in the west of Guangdong Province, and the rites of “moving god” in southern China.

''Too high spirit to describe.'' Tis so in the realm of photography. Moreover, I do think the “spirit” of photography also concerns the life circle of elements and subjects in photos. For example, those once heavenly mansions have become the memory’s vanity but the reality’s remorse. It is just like the desolate lotus pond in winter, only erected but withered lotus branches are left. When spring comes, nevertheless, it would sprout new branches and grow new leaves, and flowers would be in full bloom again.

This exhibition would not have been possible without the support and help from many people. I owe my deepest gratitude Mr. Jean Loh, who has made available his support in many ways. I am extremely grateful to Mr. Werner E. Nievergelt, Consul General of Switzerland in Guangzhou, who promoted this exhibition as one of the Swiss-China cultural exchange projects. I also wish to extend my thanks to Mr. Wang Huangsheng, Director of CAFA Art Museum, who offered me his inscriptions for the exhibition and photography book; Mr. Fred Chew, Representative of Beijing-based ALPA China, and Mr. He Jianxiang, Chief Architect of Guangzhou-based O-Office Architects Principal, for their support in providing me with different resources in Beijing and the creatively designed studio and gallery in Guangzhou. Lastly, I would like to make a special reference to Mr. Yuan Tianwen for his quality photo making, and the English translation of Dr. Cheng-Hsuan Kao, Department of Geography, King’s College London, UK.

Xu Peiwu  2010. 03. 29