Qin Yifeng’s explorations in visual art began with abstract painting, but in recent years, he has dived into visual explorations through the formal means of the camera, and turned his unique thoughts and aesthetic awareness towards breaking new ground in visual art.
The works presented in this exhibition take the photographs as their external form. Considering the external form, Qin Yifeng’s works are indeed photographs, and they appear before us through the typical presentation method of photographs. But what we see here are the negatives that make for the basis of photographs. This description may sound a bit convoluted, but that is truly how it is.
What these “photographs” present is the opposite of the photographic image (positive image), negative image. From these pictures that appear to us as negative images, it seems we can conclude that for Qin Yifeng, his photography – if we can at least temporarily agree that his work is photography – is merely a practice of “capturing” the “shadow” of a thing. This “shadow,” however, is not a projection of the substance of that thing, but the negative image projected onto the negative film. It has been stripped by optical and chemical means from the substance of the thing to become an independent shadow that resides on the film base.
At this point, we must revisit the history of when photography was first invented. As soon as photography was invented, the capturing and production of photographic images had already begun going down divergent paths.
The daguerreotype, invented by Frenchman Louis Daguerre, used an opaque metal plate as the base for an image cast onto it by a photographic lens. Thus, each daguerreotype is wholly unique. The photographer can only make one version of the photograph. In principle, the photograph obtained through the daguerreotype process is not reproducible. For such an image to be disseminated, there needed to be a reproduction method to reproduce and spread the image in print media. The reproduction and dissemination of daguerreotype images would not be possible without the next imaging method described below: the calotype.
Since the daguerreotype could not be copied to make multiple images, it was easy to imagine the technology being swept aside due to considerations of cost and dissemination. Of course, the Polaroid instant photography, a continuation of the daguerreotype later invented in America, was welcomed for a time, but the singularity of the images limited their reproduction, so it could not become the main means of image production and dissemination.
William Henry Fox Talbot, a British contemporary of Daguerre, invented a photographic process that worked on different principles, called the calotype. From the beginning, this photographic process, which entailed capturing a negative image on film and presenting a positive image derived from that, lent this approach to photography limitless potential for reproduction.
In the calotype photography process, the image passes through the camera lens to be cast on a transparent film and produce a negative image. As the material science and technology changed and developed, the material for the negative went from the early paper to later chemical materials, growing more transparent and stronger along the way to allow for a clear, dependable negative image. Through the chemical developing process, the negative image takes up residence on this transparent base covered in photosensitive material to become the basis for photographic reproduction: the negative. All future photographs used to understand the world and reality gained the potential to become positive images through this base (negative) image. As long as there is light, and that light can be made to pass through the transparent negative to reach photosensitive paper, a positive image will take shape on that paper. A positive image on photosensitive paper is a photograph. It is only when light passes through the transparent negative that its significance and value can be realized. Since its first emergence, Talbot’s calotype became virtually the only method for the production (reproduction) and dissemination of photographs, and the fundamental principle of photographic imaging, a state of affairs that continued until the emergence of digital photography, a medium that does not need the negative.
Having introduced the early history of photography, I would now like to discuss this phenomenon that is Qin Yifeng’s negative images of photographic subjects. In Talbot’s calotype, the negative is a mediative object. It exists for the sake of the positive image in the photograph, a seed and embryo prepared for the birth of the positive photograph. The negative itself is never a presentation form, much less presented as the final presentation form. It exists for the final presentation of the image, but is not the final presentation form in itself. The negative is a material facet in the photographic imaging process, and it is always concealed behind the photograph. The negative is hidden behind the image that allows for the understanding of things, reality and the world. Now, however, through the work of Qin Yifeng, we have discovered its existence. He lavishes it with the treatment of the positive image. The negative image is his positive image. In the principles of photography, the negative, when compared to the positive existence of the photograph, exists in a negative state.
Just as “yin” and “yang” correspond in Chinese to loss and gain, when “negative” is seen as the opposite of “positive,” it is viewed as something bad, as opposed to the good of the positive. Today, Qin Yifeng has used his highly complex process rooted in his own sense of photographic beauty and aesthetic judgment, to turn the “negative” existence of the negative into a “positive” existence. I believe that his aim of such a meticulous approach to defining concepts and pondering photography is not to earn a good name for the “negative,” but to bestow it with its natural legitimacy.
For Qin Yifeng, the negative film that carries the negative image is itself a carrier that presents its own alluring image. This is Qin Yifeng’s unique understanding of photography. The views and perceptions of the thing that emerge after the reversal of the negative are clearly different from the perception that arises from viewing the positive image (actually, this perception and viewing also require a certain amount of training). But we have never truly confronted the significance and value of the “negative” existence of the negative image. Now, Qin Yifeng is subversively viewing the “negative” as “positive,” and in the process of visualizing this upended understanding, he has provided his unique visual experience while also revealing the significance and value of the “negative.” He helps us to discover and understand photography, in what is a new viewpoint and method for seeing things in reality. Here I would like to emphasize once again that what photography captures is the shadow of the thing. It is just that no one has noticed that the shadow that resides on the negative is itself worthy of attention and pondering. People frankly treat the negative image as a medium for the presentation of the positive image of the photograph, and accept its value as a medium while overlooking its own aesthetic significance and artistic value. Now, with his unique presentation method, he is revealing the existence of the negative and its value for all to see.
Qin Yifeng says, “I don’t want what photography wants.” What is it that photography wants? What photography wants is to use mechanical, optical and chemical technology to ensure the truthful representation of the world, the technological truth that photography promises. This technological truth is a representation of reality sculpted from light and shadow. Its veracity will be subjectively processed, even distorted, in the dissemination that follows, but before that, its veracity is ensured by the modern technology that is photography. Even so, the role, significance and value of the negative in the positive-negative image system that brings this technology into being has never been truly confronted. What Qin Yifeng has achieved today is to let us see this negative presence. This is a negative existence bestowed with aesthetic value by him. This is a thorough aesthetic exploration of the “negative.” Qin Yifeng has expended this great effort to gain a positive negative. This effort was not intended to gain a negative that could reproduce more photographs, but to end the negative’s mission as a seed for reproduction and produce a negative image with visual and aesthetic value.
Qin Yifeng is treating what is normally a facet in the photograph presentation process (a very important facet) as an end in itself. He has turned the negative image that resides on the mediative material into the ultimate goal image. This is the result of his pondering over the essential principles of photography. I am wary of being too quick to use the term “meta” to describe someone’s photography, particularly practices that use photography to ponder the whys of photography. But Qin Yifeng’s sustained photographic practices have so undoubtedly and perfectly demonstrated that they are about the whys of photography that I cannot escape the temptation to use the term “meta” to describe the properties of his work. If we ask what meta photography is, it is Qin Yifeng’s photography.
Qin Yifeng is doing this to test the capabilities and possibilities of photography, as well as to test our understanding of it. His goal is not to find how to maximize the potential of the lens, but to reach artistic ends, the lens must satisfy his demands to the greatest possible extent. He has applied such demands to other materials as well. In a sense, photography exists as it does precisely because it is able to stand up to the rigorous tests of photographers and artists. Through his meticulous crafting and labor-intensive photographing, his ideas are presented in total perfection. Returning to the principles of the Talbot process, we could say that Qin Yifeng’s works have produced an impenetrable transparent negative. Here, the light has been bounced back by the positive negative he produced, to act on our vision and intellect, to tell us of the significance and value of the negative, and to tell us what photography is and the reasons for its principles. Here, light cannot penetrate this surface presented to us as a negative.
As an abstract painter, Qin Yifeng reached his insight into the ontology of art and artistic language by collecting minimalist furniture of Ming dynasty. His photographic works of Ming furniture convey his aesthetic pursuits in more vivid clarity. The heavy hues, abstract textures and simple designs of Ming furniture provided him with rational, ample integrity for the high level of coordination between form and language in his art, and also presented an apt carrier for the content of his expression. We could venture to say that no photographic subject is more suited to Qin Yifeng’s explorations in pursuit of photographic purity than Ming furniture. The grains which shift between sparsity and density are natural records of the growth of life, as well as direct witnesses of the miracles of nature. Such pure photography and its mysterious nature arise from both nature and human culture. Today, through his unique presentation, this sense of mystery has only grown.
Qin Yifeng says that his photography uses a subtractive approach. This is in keeping with his longstanding aesthetic principles and pursuits. Here, he is using the means of photography to carry out a minimalist aesthetic pursuit. In artistic practice, the artist is free to choose between addition and subtraction. Perhaps what is more important, regardless of what modeling methods he employs, is whether the artist possesses an awareness of this medium and its unique properties, and whether this awareness receives adequate attention and presentation in the artist’s creations. That is to say, his creations must persistently cause people to confront the existence and uniqueness of the medium, and even effect a new visual demonstration of them. Coincidentally, I just read an interview of German artist Thomas Ruff, in which he said that his teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher told him that he must have an ontological awareness of medium. I feel that Qin Yifeng’s photographic practice possesses the same properties. His works are the conscious products of this high level of ontological awareness of medium.
