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Zhang Kechun: Photographing “China's Sorrow”

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Zhang Kechun: Photographing “China's Sorrow” Adam Monohon Zhang Kechun: Photographing “China’s Sorrow” “ t represents the root of the nation,” Zhang Kechun has said of the Yellow Zhang Kechun, Men Climbing a Billboard, Qinghai, from the 1 River. “I wanted to photograph the river respectfully.” Awash in tans series The Yellow River, 2011, archival pigment print, 137.16 and greys, mist and haze, Zhang Kechun’s photographs capture the x 166.37 cm. © Zhang Kechun. I Courtesy Beetles + Huxley, delicate tension between society and nature so characteristic of life along the London. Yellow River. As much a source of life as a bringer of death, the Yellow River has played a fundamental role in the development of civilization in China since its earliest days. A central character in many an extraordinary story, both folkloric and historic, the river is deftly explored as subject in the nearly twenty photographs presented in a recent exhibition in London at Beetles + Huxley (April 20–May 21, 2016), the photographer’s first solo show in the United Kingdom. This exhibition was composed of works from two series and thus provides a useful overview of Zhang Kechun’s young oeuvre. Beginning in 2010, Zhang Kechun set out on a fold-up bicycle from the mouth of the Yellow River, where it pours its silt-filled waters into the Bohai Sea, just north of the Shandong Peninsula. From Dongying, a city in 44 Vol. 15 No. 4 Shandong that has grown along the river’s southern edge, Zhang Kechun made his way upstream, photographing the river as it snakes its way towards its source in the Yueguzonglie Basin, tucked away in a quiet plateau high in the Bayan Har Mountains of Qinghai—a world away from the bustle of Dongying, a city of two million. From its source in Qinghai, a sparsely inhabited and largely rural province peopled as much by Han Chinese as those of Tibetan, Mongol, and Hui extraction, to Shandong, a province of enormous wealth and large population, the Yellow River passes through nine provinces in all. To follow it from source to mouth is to take a journey from past to present, from an atemporal mountain plain to hyper-modern urban enclave. To do the inverse, as Zhang Kechun has done, is a sort of soul-searching for the urban dweller. Zhang Kechun’s first journey upriver resulted in The Yellow River (Bei Liu Guoguo), a series of photographs that capture life along the river, or the absence thereof, in ethereal tones. Begun in 2010, The Yellow River is the product of a three-year sojourn, conducted in segments along the river, a journey as much spiritual as literal. After finishing The Yellow River, Zhang Kechun began a second series exploring the Yellow River, Between the Mountains and Water (Shanshui zhi Jian), in 2013. Ostensibly focused more closely on the relationship between people and their environment, on the mountains and water so central to Chinese conceptions of landscape, this second series is largely an elaboration of themes first explored in Zhang Kechun’s first. The exhibition as a whole privileges Zhang Kechun’s earlier work by showing more of them and including only those images from the photographer’s later series that deal explicitly with the Yellow River and that share a limited, muted colour palette. Together, the works create a stark yet intimate portrait of the Yellow River. Any intimacy or calm that Zhang Kechun creates, however, is on reflection undercut by a near inexplicable tension that infuses the works. Some two millennia before the birth of Christ, on what is today known as the North China Plain, the world seemed to be coming to an end. Quiet settlements arrayed along the banks of the Yellow River were washed away in the powerful torrents of water that began to breach the river’s formerly static banks. Entire villages were swept away in the wake of the heavy, silt- filled waters and vast swaths of land formerly cherished for their fertility were lost to the river’s unstoppable advance. Far from a momentary event, the erratic floods continued for some thirteen years,2 wreaking havoc on those unable to leave the lowlands. The leader of the allied tribes who lived on the land unsettled by the river’s unpredictable ebb and flow, Emperor Yao, is said to have written: Like endless boiling water, the flood is pouring forth destruction. Boundless and overwhelming, it overtops hills and mountains. Rising and ever rising, it threatens the very 3 heavens. How the people must be groaning and suffering! Vol. 15 No. 4 45 Taken aback by the ferocity of flooding, Yao sought the advice of the Four Zhang Kechun, A Family Spending the Weekend Under Mountains (siyue), his special advisors, in hope of finding “someone who a Bridge, Shandong, China, 4 from the series The Yellow could regulate the waters.” On their advice, Yao appointed Gun, who River, 2012, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 cm. spent the next nine years overseeing efforts to construct dams and dikes, © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of Beetles + Huxley, London. desperately seeking to stem the waters’ flow. In time, Gun was replaced by Yu, who brought the river to heel; through deft efforts, Yu spared the lowlanders from the waters’ omnipresent threat. Shun, the successor of Emperor Yao, was so impressed with Yu’s ability to tame the seemingly unstoppable river that he appointed Yu his heir. In stemming the floods Yu is said to have opened nine passages through which the excess water that had formerly menaced the lowlanders could run easily to the sea. In doing so, Yu divided the territory into nine provinces that, after the passing of Shun, Yu would unite, establishing the first Chinese dynasty, the Xia (c. 2010–1600 B.C.). Yu set the capital at Yangcheng, a city at the foot of the sacred Mount Song, not far from the banks of the river he had brought under control. Under the Xia dynasty, the Yellow River must have taken on an even more epic aspect than it carries today, the knowledge of the terror it had wrought and the heroic feats required to bring it to heel still a recent memory for those who then lived in reach of its waters. Today, the tale of the great flood lives on as mythology, an epic flood story tucked away in China’s oldest written histories. Yet Zhang Kechun’s photographs manage to bring to the fore the tension of the days when Gun and Yu valiantly fought the river’s waters. The Chinese title of The Yellow River, Zhang Kechun’s first series of photographs, Bei Liu Guoguo, meaning “the rivers rushes north,” is far more 46 Vol. 15 No. 4 telling than the English one. Taken from the Book of Songs (Shijing),5 the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the title suggests a conscious casting of Zhang Kechun’s gaze back to the earliest epochs of Chinese history in his efforts to understand the river at which he aimed his lens. Compiled by Confucius during the Warring States Period (475–221 B.C.), the Book of Songs, one of the Five Classics (Wu Jing) of Confucianism—for centuries a central text in the education of China’s elite—brings together some three hundred exemplary works of Chinese poetry from the eleventh to seventh centuries B.C. Zhang Kechun’s title, in particular, references a segment of a poem by an anonymous author describing the Yellow River. “The river is immense; the river rushes north”6 it reads, conjuring up the river’s quiet power in an elegant, eight-character couplet. Alongside the Book of Songs, another collection of poetry, the Songs of Chu (Chu Ci), stands as an exemplary record of the poetry of early China. It is in the echoes of Chu culture that Han Shaogong (b. 1953), a Chinese novelist who emerged as a leader of the Xungen (“Root Searching”) Movement, locates the true roots of Chinese literature. As part of a campaign led by Mao Zedong to instill socialist values in educated, urban youth through rural living and manual labour, Han Shaogong was “sent down” (xiafang) to live along the Miluo River. While settled along the river in Hunan as a sent down youth (xiafang qingnian), not far from a shrine to Qu Yuan, the central poet of the Songs of Chu Han Shaogong writes: “I used to consider a question all the time: Where has the magnificence of Chu culture gone?”7 Apart from a few local phrases taken from the lines of poetry in the Songs of Chu, Han Shaogong insists, “the traces that Chu culture has left behind are infrequently seen.”8 Despite the area around the Miluo River being rich in places mentioned in the Songs of Chu, Han Shaogong notes, the temples and pavilions that dot the region are infrequently dedicated to Chu people. Instead, they pay tribute to individuals from outside the area. “Confucius and Guan Yu are from the north, while the Buddha is from India,” he states, yet buildings dedicated to them dot the land around the Miluo River.9 Among the Miao, Dong, and Yao minorities in Hunan’s Xiangxi prefecture, Han Shaogong found the forgotten culture of the Chu living on. While mainstream Chinese culture has long since forgotten the contributions of the Chu, Han Shaogong argues, Chu culture lives on in the minority communities of Xiangxi. He explains,“In the year three hundred B.C. the Miao people laboured in the area around Dongting Lake”; however, “having fallen victim to disasters both natural and manmade, they followed a stream southwest,”10 settling in present-day Xiangxi—carrying with them Chu culture.
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