Wang Ningde: In the Years of Ningde
© Wang Ningde, Youth Portrait No.05 (from the In the Years of Ningde series), 2004
The rolling river of history and memories
The rolling river of history and memories
In the first place photographs are to be understood like ‘verbal images’ that leave traces in us by images that are conceived or seen. Whether these traces are physical, or imprinted on an ‘unconscious physical life’ these visual words are set in motion independently of any intention to be spoken by a speaker. Those visual images are considered to have been given as a stimulus, with a shape of a word, since, now, “the word has no significance,” and are, instead, the “external sign of an internal recognition.” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 205) With Wang Nindge’s In the Years of Ningde we have the opportunity to leave behind the traditional subject-object meaning dichotomy. This consideration enables us (as spectators) to engage with process of expression that, when successfully taken, will bring organically meaning in to life while opening new dimensions to our personal experience.
Wang Ningde’s works are an inquiry into the essence and nature of photography. His body of work exists in that space occupied by the technical capacity that humans have to create visual images, a space existing beyond the transience of the moment. In the Years of Ningde (a sub-series of the Some Days series) Ningde is once more exploring some of photography’s fundamental elements. In here he goes a step further to deconstruct the idea of window and frame so prevalent in western art history and greatly cherished in the practice of photography. The idea of a rigid structure that surrounds or encloses an opening existing in a continuous structure, which divides what is inside from what is outside. Photography, as a practice involving human beings, can be perceived as a protection created against what is derived from the possibilities brought about by the openness into reality.
What is this created reality that is captured by photography? Technologically, photography presents (captures and processes by means of light) a reality as a time-durational view ‘taken’ from the surrounding landscape. Resulting in a kind of captured memory that visually brings us in to a state perceived as being considered as a singular view in to aspects of everyday life and what is one own’s built reality. This view reflects, as a visual experience, upon constructed realities about what is from the public sphere and what is from the private domain. It also denotes a capacity to report to the past and relate it with the present. However, like in any other visual memory the author is positioned on the outside. Just like any spectator standing at a physical safe distance provided by the optical lenses and screens. Photography is a kind of recording device that records the surrounding constructed reality and that allows us to remember what we have become to be without.
In the Years of Ningde the author takes us in to a tangential direction to the Some Days series. In this new visual ancillary course, Wang Ningde “is not working with a cultural divide in mind.” (EYE Magazine 2010 Winter Issue) In the Years of Ningde is not perceived as a window that seems to signify what the ‘other’ is, instead, in here, he seems to capture the tensions existing as ‘singular experiences’ within the ‘collective consciousness’ of what makes contemporary China. While unveiling, unravelling, exposing conditions that are focused on the constant change of one’s own life, while transcending the syndromes brought about by cultural diversity and explored in the Some Days series.
Similarly, since In the Years of Ningde can be perceived as existing as a singular experience, what is the first image that we (as individuals within the whole) remember? Is it framed, or is it a reflection, or is it something else? In the Years of Ningde’s tangency to Some Days is, firstly, constantly reminded by the existing gap between time and memory. Like in Some Days we came across figures with eyes closed (Youth Portrait No.01, 04, 08, 09, and 10), and, in some cases, those organs are hidden behind pieces of cloth that conceal the witnessing of time that passes (Youth Portrait No.05), or are tucked away behind impressed glass, which distorts the placeless of what is made visible by light (Youth Portrait No.06). Reflecting, possibly, on the first childhood and family memories, cultural and ideological beliefs framed by reshaped, remodelled (Youth Portrait No.01, 04, and 10) or burned frames (Youth Portrait No.08). Secondly, the touch between these two personal stories can also be considered as a returning reinterpretation of the rolling river of history and memories, and of the presence of the body within those most basic human questions.
So, close your eyes. Do you see a portrait or do you create a story (history)? Is the image focused and framed or is it blurred and supreme? Whatever can be conceived or perceived is a self-portrait but it is also a story about the self. Wang Ningde’s present body of work, is, metaphorically, thinking about history’s authenticity structure, and, when he reshapes history content, he changes its form and frames. This is a small queue to photography’s strange and innate capacity to make the spectators figure out the sense of being without. Recognition that we are being without the subjects and forms we have inherited and embodied, because those can’t accommodate the complex realities we are trying to live out. For Roland Barthes, for example, it was what has ceased to be in his mother’s absent picture. In Camera Lucida, he was referring to the imbedded capacity that photography has to makes us (as spectators) remember and relate something that we wanted to be related with, with something that recently we want to refresh in to our constructed reality. The recurrent feeling of loss experienced whenever we look at those pictures of unique absent personal moments.
Following Barthes thoughts on photography’s unique potential to communicate real events, on a first level, we (as spectators) can infer that Ningde’s photographs are either about China or about his own personal story and views on Chinese constructed history. From the photographer’s viewpoint In the Years of Ningde series can be a reflection on the relationship between what Barthes called of studium – the symbolic meaning of a photograph as a representation of the real – and punctum – the personal and individual views brought in each individual framed photo, a recurrent feeling of experienced loss. Nonetheless, this proposition defines Barthes as being both author and spectator. While we, you, anyone else except Wang Nindge, we are only spectators to the conditions being proposed. On a second level, our sense of place always informs what we do and the networks we are part of, whether we are conscience or not of it. So, as spectators, we will bring a kind of objective ethic that comes from lived experiences and attributed contexts and will be left with a feeling of being without when engaging with those pictures, with that performative reality. This condition, on another level, according to Irit Rogoff, transports us (as individuals) to a state that reminds us that previous knowledge about a proposition is no longer of use in relation to a new and emergent situation. And by recognising that we are made aware of the limitations of the surrounding space and we will be raising questions about the way of producing knowledge. The framed photos in In the Years of Ningde, on their turn, are a reminder of Barthes’s ‘what has ceased to be’, as was already mentioned. They remind us, therefore, of the world’s ever changing nature as opposed to be a trustworthy and institutionalised representation of reality. And this knowledge tends to disturb. It is important to disrupt the safe and accommodating space occupied by the spectator. That is what art is all about, and photography is thus an external accompaniment of thought.
Wang Nindge by breaking into the spectator’s space (as being the author), by entering into their space (like in a kind of stage-diving) questions positions in the communication process. By disturbing the spectator’s position he (the author) makes us all enter a moment of realisation of knowing and being unable to know, which characterises the condition of being without,as was asserted by Rogoff. Here, as everywhere, it seems to be a consciousness construction that the experience of communication derived from photography, in particular, appears to be an illusion. As a result of a distancing from what has the intended meaning established by a direct relationship between the author and the object or person in the photo, the spectator has to assemble things that aren’t necessarily connected in the story. And like in stage-diving the route taken by the singer body (the story) is not delineated by his or her particular imposition or determination. It is produced by a phenomenological articulation between bodies, between things. It is the spectator, not the author that gives to an image, like for instance Youth Portrait No.03, its meaning.
Let’s get back to Adam Chodzko’s Too (2013). A body of work, previously shown at VASA project, in which the author recorded in pictures, what he believed to be the effects of nature acting. His work touches Barthes’ ‘what is’ and ‘what was’, when we (as spectators) consider the possibilities arising from the conditional relationship derived from the remembrance of time that we (as witnesses) are without when confronted with found images of natural disasters; and, are about ‘what has ceased to be’, when we considered the possibilities arising by the conditional relationship derived by the presence and effects of dust (a code for time and the passage of time) in found slides by the artist. Alternatively, these pictures impact on our (as individuals) embodied perception of time and space, of life and death. Similarly, Ningde’s work, like Chodzko’s work, is about time, in the first instance; and the bodily expressions being exposed since we (as spectators) can only anticipate what might come to be, in the second instance. However, that is not to say that we discover an unknown reality through its relationship with a known one. For example, in the disturbance caused by stage diving in the spectator’s private space, the spectator has to raise his arms and hold the author up while moving him around the room in a manner that is organic and pre-undetermined. Meaning, the anatomical organisation of bodies in space produces a correspondence between specific gestures and given ‘states of mind’.
Bibliography:
Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang.
Kester, G. H. (2013) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M (2002) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge Classics.
Rogoff, I. (2003) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org. Retrieved February 26th, 2013, from http://www.kein.org/node/62
Rogoff, I. (2006) ‘Smuggling’ – An Embodied Criticality, in Kein.org. Retrieved December 28th, 2016, from http://eipcp.net/dlfiles/rogoff-smuggling
Snider, H. (2010) Some Days Eyemazing Magazine, in EYE Magazine 2010 Winter Issue.
© Rui Goncalves Cepeda, 2016