Pages:
Scenes: 16 loose cards with offset image tipped on
Masters: 16 loose cards with offset image tipped on
Ma Jie: 13 loose cards with offset image tipped on
Orphans: 13 loose cards with offset image tipped on
Time: 13 loose cards with offset image tipped on

Archives is a project that began in 1986 and spans two decades. Divided into five groups—Scenes, Masters, Ma Jie, Orphans, and Time—the collection is comprised of loose, offset prints, each group in its own paper envelope, packaged within a larger envelope signed by the artist. This presentation utilizes an object that is significant to the Chinese people: each citizen's lifelong permanent record is kept in one of these envelopes, never to be seen by them, maintained by the government or one's employer. These archives grow to become official biographies, of sorts. As such, Jian presents each series as a distinct photo archive of the subject.

The different groups are best described in the artist's own words:


Scenes



My life experience has determined my emotional color and created my inner vision concerning life scenes in the rural areas of the Central Plains. In a sincere, reasonable, and quiet eye-level view, I combine my personal emotion with real life, which is full of vitality, in Scenes.

To understand the farmer is to understand China. Let art return to nature and life, and leave a bit of truth to history—that is what I want to do.

Masters



Chinese peasants are a huge and special sector. The lives of these people represent the primary colors of Chinese culture. Only by focusing on their living conditions for a long time could one really understand them, and China alike.

"Peasants" means "people living forever," and their homes are a basic element of our culture. Family is the most basic unit of society, so I chose this social angle with which to observe their lives.

Portraits are like a conversation between two souls. Recording one's spiritual world is the highest achievement for an artist. Masters is an effort to record the spiritual and material lives of Chinese peasants through environmental portraits.

Ma Jie



I have been taking photographs of Ma Jie festival's storytelling folk singers since 1985. Recently, though, I realized that this massive, fifteen-year documentation has mostly concentrated on the storytelling event itself, neglecting the artists. The performers are the sole and real directors of their stories, and through their work they have come to write the history of the festival itself. In the past several years, many famous folk singers have fallen ill or died, and many lesser-known ones have silently exited the stage. So, in 2002, I started to formally register and record a portrait of each Ma Jie participating artist. While recording and preserving this rich and precious cultural heritage of Ma Jie, let us remember, too, the storytellers themselves.

Orphans

In 2004, the Federation of Philanthropic Organizations in Henan Province and the Shaolin Temple launched the Campaign to Assist One Thousand Orphans, which provides aid to 1,036 very poor orphans under the age of sixteen. The Shaolin Temple provides each of them with 560 Chinese Yuan per year for their studies and living expenses until they come of age.

As a photographer, I went about recording and witnessing this act of kindness and love in the form of a photo archive. I follow and record changes in their lives every five years with different photographic methods.

Archives on Orphans is not just a photo work; it has had impact on my life as well. For me, it creates a new view of the relationship between art and life.

Time



Forty years ago, twenty-nine women from Zhengzhou went to Tibet to provide aid. They have since reunited to recall their time fighting together, photographed here.

Nowadays nostalgia is fashionable, a mode of modern spiritual life. We can trace our lives through literature, sculpture, painting, and music, which are special and creative ways to experience and recall life. But we have entered into a century of reading images, where images have grown to be considered the best evidence of the past and way of recollecting it.

I built a time and space tunnel of sorts with two portraits, one black-and-white and one color, of each of the twenty-eight women. some photographs were taken forty years ago, some later, so viewers can travel within it and imagine freely. It is a broad space for multiple imaginings and readings, which will hopefully encourage people to get used to reading portraits.

The romantic and personal memories of these women could soon become public memories through various art works, which have both intrinsic artistic value and social worth.

In 1984, when Jiang Jian began to take pictures of rural scenes in China's Henan Province, he was prompted by nostalgia for his own experience in the countryside. What's astonishing about this is that the only time he was on a farm was during the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to '76. During that tumultuous decade, officials, professionals, intellectuals, and artists of every stripe were sent to agricultural areas to work under harsh conditions in order to be "re-educated." Millions went to jail, had health and spirit permanently broken, careers and lives devastated, or died. It could scarcely have been a worse time.

Jiang's father, a senior party official in the government of one of China's provinces, had been associated with a faction that defended certain senior leaders whom Mao Zedong considered enemies; he was consequently deemed "conservative," and he and his wife and six children were sent for two years to a rural village in Northeastern China (the region known to many Westerners as "Manchuria"). Jiang was sixteen, and worked in the fields only after school and at harvest time during the first year, then from sun-up to sunset during the second. The village had no electricity; water had to be hauled from a well. The area was so backward that one astounded farmer, hearing Jiang's father's radio, asked: "Where is the little man who is speaking in the box?" Yet Jiang has written that he found the extreme hardship of those years so naturally mixed with happiness that he felt that was the way life should be, and a good way too.

He did not start out to be a photographer. He learned how to play a Chinese string instrument on the farm and then took up the viola, certain that the only way he could get work in the city was to join a song and dance troupe. He enrolled in a music conservatory to train on the viola, and in 1980, after his family had moved to Henan Province, Jiang became first viola in the orchestra of the Henan Troupe. He says today he was lucky not to have studied photography, as all he would have been taught was "salon" photography: a kind of idealizing pictorialism that prevailed in China after the Cultural Revolution.