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 heavens. How the people must be groaning and suffering!3

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. “It seems,” Han Shaogong writes, “a segment of Chu culture flowed down to Xiangxi.”11 Free from the exigencies of urban life and Han Chinese norms, the last breaths of the great culture captured in the Songs of Chu has survived in the ways of these rural minorities.

While Zhang Kechun’s choice of title explicitly links his photographs to the Book of Songs, the official counterpart to the Songs of Chu, his works are undoubtedly imbued with the same sort of nostalgia that underpins Han Shaogong’s writing. Zhang Kechun’s first photographic journey,

Vol. 15 No. 4 47 undertaken to create The Yellow River, was a project of near-literal “root searching,” setting out from the high-rises of Dongying towards the river’s actual source. In photographing his way towards the pristine grasslands of Qinghai, Zhang Kechun was working not only toward the less spoiled environs of the Yellow River’s source, but also journeying toward the metaphorically unspoiled—the roots of Chinese culture. Qinghai, like Xiangxi, besides being far more rural and sparsely populated than any of China’s coastal provinces, is home to large populations of ethnic minorities—in whose daily lives and culture, Han Shaogong insisted, the true roots of Chinese culture lived on.

Zhang Kechun’s two series are photographic manifestations of the once solely literary Xungen Movement; in The Yellow River and Between the Mountains and Water Zhang Kechun produces in images what the Xungen authors constructed in words. As Li Qingxi explains in the essay “Searching for Roots,” these Xungen authors began to “feel that it was actually easier to see the true face of the world . . . beneath the surface of daily reality.”12 As a consequence, they turned their attention away from extraordinary subjects toward the lives of common people (minjian shenghuo).13 “[T]hese writers,” Li Qingxi continues, “were in the process of extricating themselves from the existing categories of politics, economics, morality and law, and gradually entering the categories of nature, history, culture, and humankind.”14

Beyond this shift in content, Xungen authors began “using ‘lyrical elements’ to burst open the structure of the story.”15 Plot was stripped away as unnecessary. Instead, values, aesthetic and moral, were freely explored. As Li Qingxi notes:

The heart of the matter is that these works transformed external conflicts of action into internal conflicts of value, moving from the realm of time-space into the realm of the heart. Indeed, there are few exciting climaxes, and confrontations between characters either have been eliminated or at least no longer serve as the motivation or lever for the narrative. Yet conflicts of value are everywhere.16

Zhang Kechun, wittingly or not, transposes these concerns from the pages of a literary work to the photographic images of his two series. The half- built—perhaps half-ruined—structures that appear in his frames and the small figures that dot many of his images offer little in the way of excitement. Never shocking, they instead attest to a conflict of values that plays out along the river. Zhang Kechun’s photographs capture a quiet struggle between tradition and reality, humanity and nature, and the material and the spiritual.

In People Fishing by the River, Shaanxi, China, for instance, two men tucked in coal-coloured inner tubes loll about in a pool of deep water ringing an enormous, fragmented concrete and brick cylinder. Jutting out of the loess-tinged water at an odd angle, the half-ruined shaft stands as testament

48 Vol. 15 No. 4 Zhang Kechun, People Fishing by the River, Shaanxi, China, from the series The Yellow River, 2012, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 cm. © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of Beetles + Huxley, London.

Zhang Kechun, People Crossing the Yellow River with a Photo of Mao Zedong, Henan, from the series The Yellow River, 2012, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 cm. © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of Beetles + Huxley, London.

to some abandoned endeavour. In Zhang Kechun’s image, the colossal ruin breaks the otherwise unmarked horizon, creating a kind of visual dissonance symbolic of the struggle between humanity and nature that has long played out along the Yellow River.

A later photograph, People Crossing the Yellow River with a Photo of Mao Zedong, Henan, captures a procession of swimmers, each clinging to a pair of garish orange floats, making their way across the river, a portrait of Mao Zedong fixed atop an inner tube at its centre. Here the tension is not between humanity and nature, but tradition and reality—or perhaps simply the past and present. Echoing Mao’s attempt to swim across the Yangzi River at seventy-two to prove his continued vigour, the aging crowd of swimmers clings to that which has been lost. Awash in the pale haze of diaphanous light that is characteristic of Zhang Kechun’s images,17 the whole scene feels as if it belongs to some lost realm—a fitting metaphor for the nostalgia that imbues the photograph and, presumably, propels the crowd at its centre.

Vol. 15 No. 4 49 “I absolutely have to be admitted,”18 the young narrator—and central character—of Zhang Chengzhi’s 1984 Xungen novel Rivers of the North (Beifang de He) said beneath his breath. Standing atop a mountain of loess overlooking the Yellow River, he assured himself of his successful passing of the entrance exam for the graduate course in geography in which he hopes to enroll. A stream of consciousness novel, Rivers of the North, follows the narrator as he travels the Loess Plateau of northern China, preparing for his exam. Zhang Chengzhi writes of the many tributaries of the Yellow River and the landscapes of the Loess Plateau, conjuring up vivid images of the Wuding River in Shaanxi, the Huangshui River in Qinghai, and the Yellow River itself—as well as the land through which they run.

Bereft of plot, Rivers of the North takes as its substance the emotions experienced by the book’s narrator as he traverses the North China Plain. The novel’s interest is the tension between the narrator’s textual knowledge of the lands before him and the intensity of their actual, physical presence. As the narrator becomes increasingly caught in the tension between academic descriptions of the geographical features before him, from volumes like The Physical Geography of China,19 which the narrator has clearly read closely, and the impossibility of explaining the sheer force of the actual landscape before him, it becomes clear that the novel is as much about traversing the psychic geography from youth to adulthood as it is about the literal geography of the Loess Plateau.

Not dissimilarly, Zhang Kechun’s photographs of the Yellow River take the viewer on more than the literal journey they document. Inspired by Rivers of the North, Zhang Kechun, some time after having graduated with a degree in design, set out to Dongying to begin this three-year project that would become the fifty-odd photographs that comprise The Yellow River. Like the young man on the cusp of the next stage in his life at the centre of Rivers of the North, Zhang Kechun drifted idly across the North China Plain, taking in the indescribable scenes that unfolded before him. Although it is not a strict retracing of the novel’s protagonist’s path, The Yellow River clearly owes a debt to Zhang Chengzhi’s lucid, searching prose.

A Man Standing on an Island in the Zhang Kechun, A Man Standing on an Island in the Middle of the River, Shaanxi, China Middle of the River, Shaanxi, China, from the series The captures the vastness of the landscapes Yellow River, 2012, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 that would have confronted the cm. © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of Beetles + Huxley, London. narrator of Rivers of the North as he trudged through Shaanxi and elsewhere along the Yellow River. A lone figure stands atop a broad loess shoal, a faded orange dinghy resting just before him. In the distant background, obscured by a scrim of smog, a ridgeline can just be made out running along the horizon, unmarked by human presence. A sort of Rückenfigur, the man stands in for the viewer, for the wandering narrator of Rivers of the North, or for Zhang Kechun himself, a young man indirectly confronting himself by instead exploring the vastness of the country in which he was born.

50 Vol. 15 No. 4 Referred to as both China’s “Mother River” and “China’s Sorrow,” the Yellow River has proven itself since time immemorial as capable of nurturing life as it is of taking it. Its forces, for better or worse, have indelibly shaped Chinese society. And, if accounts of the Xia dynasty are to be believed, those same forces even gave birth to it, spurring the start of a dynastic cycle that would carry on into the twentieth century. Today, however, civilization is as a much a threat to the river’s flows as the river is to civilization. The glaciers that feed the river have shrunk some seventeen percent, as of a decade ago,20 while the lakes the glaciers feed—which in turn fuel the river’s flow—are themselves threatened by desertification of the grasslands in which they sit. The invisible force of global warming has upset the river’s delicate balance.

Zhang Kechun, People Drink The consequences of these Tea by the River, from the series Between the Mountains changes, and of the astonishing and Water, 2013, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 rates of development and cm. © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of Beetles + Huxley, London. pollution manifest in China in the last decades, seep into Zhang Kechun’s images in surprisingly subtle ways. In People Drink Tea by the River, one of a few photographs from Zhang Kecun’s second series Between the Mountains and Water, included in the Beetles + Huxley exhibition, the remains of a massive overpass sit as modern ruins along the river’s shore. In the distance, along the river’s opposite bank, a crop of highrises lines the shore, all but impressions through the thick smog that hangs in the air. Having set out to photograph his ideal of the river,21 it is clear that Zhang Kechun has come to terms with the omnipresence of pollution and the scars of development that are evident in his second series—much like the group of figures who sit, casually, among cast-off towers of concrete, sipping tea.

Zhang Kechun, Buddha in a Absent from this exhibition are Coal Yard, Ningxia, from the series The Yellow River, 2011, the many images from Zhang archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 cm. © Zhang Kechun. Kechun’s first series that deal Courtesy of the artist. with coal. While much of the land along the Yellow River is too scant in resources to sustain much industry, there is one exception, as Jim Yardley has noted in the New York Times, “The northernmost route of the Yellow River courses through the centre of China’s coal country.”22 In the cover photograph of the catalogue for The Yellow River series, Buddha in a Coal Yard, Ningxia, a Hui man, dressed in white cap, white shirt, and black pants stands staring at a massive Buddha head, surrounded by piles of earth and the tracks of earth movers. A failed casting of a sculpture commissioned by coal bosses, Zhang Kechun explains, “it was abandoned to the side of a coal extraction pit.”23 Depicting a Muslim man caught in a moment of quiet reverence toward a Buddhist statue commissioned as some sort of repentance by men cashing in on one of China’s most destructive industries, the image is a pure distillation of

Vol. 15 No. 4 51 the issues Zhang Kechun has been forced to confront in traveling along the Yellow River’s banks.

As Yardley notes in his 2006 New York Times article on the Yellow River: “Throughout history the Yellow River has spawned floods, and emperors who could not protect the people were said to have lost heaven’s mandate to rule.”24 While Yu was the first to tame the river’s floods, “The Communist Party has built more dams than any dynasty,”25 bringing the river’s flow firmly under control, but not without cost. Through the photographs’ ethereal tones and inexplicable tensions, Zhang Kechun quietly alerts us to this crisis. Navigating the myriad contradictions of values that confront China today with all the aplomb and poetic power of the best of Xungen literature, Zhang Kechun creates images that stand alone as brilliant, tragic—sometimes comic—scenes of life today along the land from which Chinese society sprung. Together, the photographs combine to create a lyric portrait of the river that stands as so much more than the sum of its parts.

Notes

1. Emily Rauhala, “Root of the Nation: Zhang Kechun Photographs China’s Yellow River,” Time, November 13, 2012, http://time.com/54766/root-of-the-nation-zhang-kechun-photographs-chinas- yellow-river/. 2. Yang Lihui and Deming An, Handbook of Chinese Mythology (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 74. 3. Wu Kuo-Cheng, The Chinese Heritage (New York: Crown, 1982), 69. Translation by Wu Kuo-Cheng of a passage from The Book of History (Shang Shu). 4. Sima Qian, The Grand Scribe’s Records: The Basic Annals of Pre-Han China, trans. William H. Nienhauser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 21. 5. Yin Xiamo, “‘The River Rushes North’: Photographer Zhang Kechun’s Solo Show (‘Bei Liu Guoguo’: Zhang Kechun Sheying Gezhan),” FOTOMEN, http://fotomen.cn/2014/05/guoguo/. 6. Original text: Heshui yangyang, bei liu guoguo. See Mang Ye and Xianyi, eds., “Shuo Ren,” in Book of Songs (Shijing), Gushi Yuan Han-Ying Yicong (Beijing: Waiwen Chubanshe, 2001), 87. 7. Han Shaogong, “The Roots of Literature (Wenxue de Gen),” in The Roots of Literature (Wenxue de Gen) (Jinan: Shandong Wenyi Chubanshe, 2001), 76. This and all subsequent translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 77. 11. Ibid. 12. Li Qingxi, “Searching for Roots: Anticultural Return in Mainland Chinese Literature of the 1980s,” in Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey, eds. Pang-Yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 111. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 115. 16. Ibid., 116. 17. Zhang Kechun has said: “I choose cloudy, gloomy days to photograph and I overexpose my photos,” a process that lends them their ethereal quality. Rauhala, “Root of the Nation.” 18. Zhang, Rivers of the North (Les Rivières du Nord), trans. Catherine Toulsaly (Beijing: Editions Littérature Chinoise, 1992), 30. 19. Ibid., 9. 20. Jim Yardley, “A Troubled River Mirrors China’s Path to Modernity,” New York Times, November 19, 2006. 21. Rauhala, “The Root of the Nation, Zhang Kechun Photographs China’s Yellow River.” 22. Yardley, “Troubled River Mirrors China’s Path to Modernity.” 23. Zhang Kechun, “Documentary China: Zhang Kechun (Jishi Zhongguo: Zhang Kechun),” interview by Jiazazhi, http://www.vice.cn/read/jiazazhi-in-china-with-zhangkechun/. 24. Jim Yardley, “A Troubled River Mirrors China’s Path to Modernity.” 25. Ibid.

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