Jean Baudrillard voiced his dissatisfaction with photography many times. Is the excess of emotion, the excess even of emotions towards animals and plants because photography is too cultural?
The birth of Qin Yifeng’s series of “negative photographs” seems to provide an answer to Baudrillard’s conundrum of photography: through three dimensions of a reversed world, the disappearance of a depth in background, and the concealment of history; through total rationality, absolute precision of color saturation, and patient waiting for natural light… is this cold photography not the reemergence of the ghosts of Malevich and Reinhardt?
I do not know.
Allow me to begin from here.
Line Field is the title of one of Qin Yifeng’s early abstract series. The act of causing the concrete, material object to disappear, and having a physics concept occupy that “empty space” is, for Qin Yifeng, serendipitous and random, but also prophetic – directed at an object, at a very concrete object, until it eventually captures all of Qin Yifeng’s attention, causing him to spend long periods locked away in his house, obsessed, immersed in the world of physics to the depth of the alchemist. The concept of the “line field,” which he had happened upon by chance, led the artist to a discovery of the non-emotional properties of “planes” and “lines.” More magical principles concealed within physics awaited him at some point in the future. Aside from “line fields,” there are also gravity fields, electrical fields, magnetic fields, various vectors and gradations.
For over a decade, Qin Yifeng avoided the clamor and retreated from the trends of contemporary art, and gradually fell under the influence of a quietly growing revival of old styles, moving forward in retreat to eventually arrive at everyday life. The outside world was a torrent of disagreement, of confusion, of floods of information swirling around an empty center. Resolved to no longer blindly follow the times, fate led Qin Yifeng to an encounter with Ming dynasty furniture in an antique shop, and as if struck by a shaft of light, he suddenly found a spark of enlightenment, and so he turned back, a true beginning, departing from one labyrinth only to set foot in another.
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” may be out of date, but Qin Yifeng’s studio puts it to extreme use – in an anti-Beckett manner, Godot will emerge at precisely the most breathtaking moment: a compressed moment, the sunlight gradually shifts, an eclipse, the shadow cast by the object strangely disappearing, the object itself joining its surroundings in an “illusion of flatness” under a uniform hue. Qin Yifeng has discarded the most important function, the most desired effect of photography, the “three-dimensional illusion,” completely subverting it.
The shift in creative techniques from the hand-drawn Line Field to the rigorously process-driven Shadow Object Investigations, in the structure, the ideas, the focus of his interests, and the goal of the expression, in the involvement and control of technology and equipment, it has gone beyond, completely changing Qin Yifeng’s entire process. From this point, Qin Yifeng began a series of experiments for which he was full of curiosity. The material is derived from “objects.” Using photographic exposure, he waits for the “shadow” he wants. The outcome he wants is not some particular record (though he tirelessly records the entire working process and all related data), but an “illusion.”
Qin Yifeng has a soft spot for those old, heavy cameras, the ones that are getting obsolete, like collector’s items in the antique shops, things with histories, crafted by hand, legends on the verge of being forgotten, their names pleasing to the ear, the playthings of a small group of people. These are the secret chants of fetishists from days past, the anti-Oedipus… Of course, only machines like this with the will to resist can engage in a silent dialogue across time and space with these fragments of Ming furniture at the focus of the artist’s secret obsession, a table top, a chair leg, a concealed affectation.
The sounds of iron nails, the color of rust, falling from the shell of a boat, sticking out like thorns, swords or signs… They have been pulled out and once again see the sky. They scatter, come back together, form an array, and fall silent in continuity. Refuting their function, they are nameless things, objects, empty shells of objects, bodies, bones. The sun seeps into the artist’s studio, and they awaken, sway, shimmer, and at that perfect moment, the shutter is pressed, and a ghost enters into that dark chamber, and bizarre photographs are born. The negatives are magical, like X-rays, penetrating the sunlight, skeletons, time, stacking them atop one another. There is no word to name them.
The creative process behind Shadow Object Investigations is quite complex. The artist has evaded the inquisitive gaze of the future viewer. When the series is finally presented in a solemn “classical style,” the viewer will be confused by everything that meets their eyes, because even though photography is the first property of Shadow Object Investigations, when we look out across this expanse of silver-gray rectangles lined up along the walls of an empty space and fading into undifferentiated chaos, what is the artist’s intent?
The viewer undoubtedly has no idea of the what, how or why of the emergence of these “artworks” before their eyes, and cannot take responsibility for knowledge of the context and connections between the works. Their act of viewing is fleeting. Qin Yifeng, on the other hand, is not racking his brain on Shadow Object Investigations to gain acceptance from some random interloping stranger. To a certain extent, the gray tone of his works stands as a metaphor for solitude and also conveys his innocence. The artistic direction is destined to convey emptiness, and silence its character. Perhaps it is better for the artist to remain silent.
Qin Yifeng’s encounter with Ming furniture began as a diversion in his everyday life, but it has grown into the catalyst for his current conceptual photography production. When an artist’s concepts and the materials and mediums he employs effect a breakthrough in extraordinary expression, it forms into difference, surprise and strangeness, and produces a new way of seeing, one which brings not only an aesthetic perspective, but a technical and rational one. Qin Yifeng has been long known as an abstract painter, so the sudden emergence of Shadow Object Investigations may lead viewers already familiar with his style to see this “silver-gray series” as an extension or expansion of his abstract world, one which combines the formalism of photography with big words such as “meaning, universality, nothingness, time, and emptiness” – words which Qin Yifeng seems to rarely use, as he is not interested in the use of language to sort himself out. His concepts are a form of “transitive” action, construct, process, experimentation, control, and generation. The role he plays throughout the process is that of the engineer, his subject bringing “shadow”, “object” and “investigation” together as one.
The photograph is intentionally shot in a way as to have no depth. Light and shadow are no longer used to create the illusion of “three-dimensional space,” but instead merely compositional elements, sometimes fulfilling symbolic and metaphorical needs, or sometimes creating a strange, uneasy and mysterious atmosphere. Since the emergence of cinema, photography gave rise to such “bad photography” strains as “anti-depth”, “serendipity”, and “printerliness,” for example with snapshots of Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol and Giorgio de Chirico, and Warhol’s own self-portraits, and so on… The account of “shadows” in art history tradition is overly complex, from all things possessing shadows, to the discovery of mirrors, to self-imitation, the shadow cast by a gaze, the shadow image of a man, and on, to the capturing and reproducibility of shadows through the discovery of photography two centuries ago.
The vain quest to endlessly repeat a thing, or to reproduce something to make it eternal, is something people have pursued despite knowing full well it is impossible. Such illusions are locked into a plane and collected, making them infinitely continue. Each work is a shadow, and also the “original”: every work in Qin Yifeng’s Shadow Object Investigations is a “singular reproduction.” Each one conceals secrets, each one reflects an infinite glow of a corner of the world.
Beginning with a fragment, order is restored as a broken piece is expanded to become “whole,” the substance of the original prototype is diminished, as if sealed away. Faintly, the silent wrinkles and folds, the space rearranged by dislocation, and the language of disappearance all ritualize photography, affirming that inner passions are born in solitude. Waiting for the arrival of a mysterious, monochromatic silver-gray that lingers like a reflection, it then transcends into a void space and is placed in the “altar”.
Bizarrely, Qin Yifeng’s Shadow Object Investigations is at once transparent and concealed, this “concealment” referring to his “joy in secrets,” and the joy that comes from his “verification process”: there is always a hazy goal ahead, tempting, miraculous, surprising and full of anticipation, using excess energy to engage in a meaningless task, day in and day out, a task that is totally meaningless, unless one day it is “affirmed” as art, but at this moment, who knows… Each record is, for him, like a verse of poetry, each datum a delight. Qin Yifeng does not ask anyone to immediately understand his obsession. It is as if he temporarily forgets himself. He seems to have been grabbed by a form of self-regulating order. He is persistently interested, seeing each day an unimaginable realm, the decaying wood under the noonday sun, a magical, fleeting moment where light and shadow bleed into each other. It is not a known illusion, and can perhaps be controlled, arranged into a precise path, analyzed, calculated, deduced. He has found a set of principles through experience and burning through the time of one day after another…
Three types of historical accounts revolve around Shadow Object Investigations: first is the convoluted tale of how those “remains” of objects from centuries past separated from their bodies. Second are the traces of origin, traits, functions and personality left behind by these “pieces.” They were once discarded, but now they are summoned again. They are no longer precious, but are still in service. They have incomplete form, they are substitutes, and they cannot piece together a fragmented history. They have been scattered across the land and across time, and right when they were about to disappear, they were “discovered.” Third, due to chance or destiny, the artist has picked them up, and so, just as you see them now, Qin Yifeng kept them, and wrote a new story for them, thus bringing about “fusion” between these three histories.
Oddly, Qin Yifeng seems to have coated his Shadow Object Investigations with an aura of quicksilver. Quicksilver is a metaphor for the most mysterious magic of ancient times. Here, the decaying body preserves its form to wait for resurrection. The scattered bones, skin, organs and appearances must, in the artist’s eyes, come together once more. Let them be fixed in those magical boxes of silver salt, so that they may forever remain unchanged: a state of standstill is an imagining of an eternal state. Virtually every one of the photographs has a faintly visible horizon line near the bottom. Is that just a hallucination? Or perhaps it is because, for a moment, you saw an infinite silver desert, a reflection of the abyss on the coast of the quicksilver sea.
Shadow Object Investigations is perfect, its perfection deriving from nothingness. Its origin is a chance encounter with an unknown object that broke off from a certain era, nameless due to its separation, no longer object or subject, like a letter sent to the depths of history, but without an address. It has left indiscernible traces, lost its momentum, and has no goals, no desires. Only the artist chanced upon it, and grasped it. Only the artist discovered it in the dark depths of the world, and saw it as a “future whole.” It will be shaped into its own subject, leaving nothing but a remnant trace, through alchemical filtering, through verbs and objects, it will return to the world of subjects.
