Jiang Jian: Memory and History, by Vicki Goldberg
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.
In 1984 Jiang changed professions, going to work for the Henan Provincial Art Research Institute, where he was responsible for the photographic and editorial work for a government research project on the folk arts of rural China. At the time, cultural bureaus and research institutes assigned many untrained people to photographic projects, with little regard to aptitude. Jiang was one of the few who turned out to have talent.
Traveling and working in Henan for the Research Institute, he began taking black-and-white pictures in his spare time. Using a wide-angle lens—so as to pack in as much information as possible—he photographed the most ordinary subjects: farm shacks and house interiors, waterwheels, tools, classrooms: rural settings without people in them that nonetheless gave the sense that someone had just stepped out of the frame. The pictures are straightforward, unassuming, presumably objective documents that are infused with a kind of sweet, melancholic tenderness. They play with rich shadows in interiors illuminated only by window light (the literal translation of the Chinese word for photography is “capturing the shadows”). What Jiang undertook was a kind of Walker Evans–style enterprise, minus the social crusade; his pictures show both the poor and backward circumstances and the possibilities of pictorial beauty in the simplest (and sometimes the messiest) aspects of a rural countryside.
In 1993, these Henan pictures were shown in a Beijing art gallery. There were no photography galleries in China then, and this was one of the first one-person thematic photography exhibitions in the country. In 1995, the photographs were collected in a book called Scenes, which Jiang published at his own expense.
The brief captions in Scenes provide a few clues to meaning for Westerners. The text for the first picture, of a double door carefully locked and guarded by two images of “door gods,” informs us that farmers believe the door god is more effective than the lock. The disorder of a room that contains not just a bike but a motorcycle as well is evidence of wealth. But since Jiang’s audience was almost exclusively Chinese, some things are not spelled out. One image of two buildings painted with large inscriptions is captioned: “Unintentionally preserved slogans have become historical remains.” One of the inscriptions, roughly translated, says: “If you are alive and don’t participate in the revolution, what is the use of your life?” The propaganda of the Cultural Revolution penetrated into everyday life everywhere, and did not simply melt away.
Farming communities made up the largest sector of China’s population and economy but were largely unfamiliar to city dwellers, especially young city dwellers. Jiang’s quiet images made clear photography’s ability to disclose the significance and resonance of ordinary things and unexceptional settings. In 1996, a seminar about this work was held by the Photographic Research Center of China Art Research Institute and China Photographer magazine; along with his 1993 exhibition and 1995 book, this made a name for Jiang in Chinese photographic circles. He has since won many awards for his work and for his contributions to photography.
Jiang was one of the early practitioners of independent documentary work in China. Both Mao and Deng Xiaoping had strongly encouraged photography, but under stringent official rules mandating support for the regime and its ideology. Then in 1979—when the government was opening up to the outside world and began to institute reforms—a large, unofficial group known as the April Photographic Association staged an exhibition of apolitical photographs in Beijing that proclaimed the medium’s freedom from governmental control; a preface for the exhibition declared: “The beauty of photography lies not necessarily in ‘important subject matter’ or in official ideology, but should be found in nature’s rhythms, in social reality, and in emotions and ideas.”1
Chinese interest in photography burgeoned after that 1979 show, which convinced people that a cultural renaissance was beginning. It was reported that from the early to mid-1980s more than a hundred photography clubs were founded in Beijing alone, and numerous unofficial exhibitions were mounted as well. In short order, the medium began to free itself from ideological constrictions and from the total, forcible repression of the Cultural Revolution, which had ordered all art—all imagery of any kind—to be propagandistic. With their newfound freedom, Chinese photographers were now able to rediscover the original and inherent capacity of their medium: to record the world as it is. They had also discovered what European photographers had known since early in the twentieth century: photography’s capacity to make visual poetry from mundane material. Western magazines were filtering into China, too, disseminating knowledge about Western photographers and styles, though Jiang says they appeared only slowly in the provinces.
Working on his own in central China in the 1980s, Jiang was unaware that he was part of a movement in Chinese photography that would come to be called “native soil art,” advocating what the scholar and curator Wu Hung calls “representations of ordinary people and what the photographers saw as the timeless spirit of Chinese civilization,”2 without glorification and often in far-off provinces.
1. This information, and much of the historical information on recent Chinese photography, comes from “Between Past and Future: A Brief History of Contemporary Chinese Photography,” an essay by Wu Hung in the exh. cat. for Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, curated by Hung and Christopher Phillips in 2004. The 1979 quote is from the first Nature, Society, and Man exhibition, cited in Hung’s essay (p. 16), with reference to Yongyuan de siyue (Eternal April) (Beijing: Zhongguo shuju, 1999), pp. 88–89.
2. On native soil art, see Wu Hung, “Between Past and Future,” p. 19.
Jiang continued to plumb the implications of photography’s unbreakable ties to memory. For eight years in the 1990s (he takes his time with projects, operating always on his own) Jiang worked on Masters: a color series on farmers and their wives, photographed in the main rooms of their homes (he had photographed some of these sites, in black and white, for Scenes). Radical changes in China’s economy had already caused a massive movement to the cities and major modifications in rural life. Jiang was acutely aware, as he worked on Masters, that many traditions were being chipped away and would soon slip out of sight. He set out to record the persistence of the past and the incursion of the new, to document this transitional state before it tilted so far that the old would be lost in fact and in mind. The result is the book Masters: Henan China, 1993–2000 (2000), with pictures and text that open up a rich history of recent years in China from an angle unfamiliar to most of the West.
“Masters,” the usual translation, is commonly thought to refer to Mao’s notion that the peasants and workers are the real masters. True as that was to socialist ideology, farmers remained at the bottom of the social ladder; what Jiang meant by the term was “masters of the house.” Most of his subjects arrange themselves to greet the camera in the entry hall—the main room in farmers’ houses, where they would welcome guests. They stand or sit, full frontal and generally depicted full length, presenting themselves in their chosen dress—ordinarily their best clothes, so they look better than usual—before the furniture, memorials, and decoration that are also modes of self-representation.
The virtually identical compositions and the formality of the poses make this at once a serial work of art and a social exploration, where personality differences assert themselves in posture and expression and the settings are as revealing and meaningful as the sitters. In China, there were some objections that these pictures were no different from standard family album pictures and should not be considered art. In truth, the portraiture is not exceptional photographically (though the likenesses may well be precious to the sitters—and Jiang made a point of giving pictures to his subjects, some of whom had none before). Portraits in and about context, they are—and were—meant as records, documents, and history. Their apparent simplicity is a telling, clever, indirect way of depicting history as it unrolls and changes, practically from page to page. The clothes, pictures, and objects in these scenes say more about the people than studio portraits could ever convey. Some wear traditional garments and some put on Western clothes; some have gods and ancestors on the walls, others have photographs of contemporary actresses.
As in all portraiture, the subjects put on the face they wish to be remembered by, frequently smiling, sometimes determinedly serious, the children less composed, occasionally even abject. In many cases the homes are relatively poor, and in others income has begun to rise, so that the photographs constitute a partial visual account of the local and national economy. The extensive accompanying captions expand and explain information contained in the images that Westerners could not otherwise read. (The saying “a photograph is worth a thousand words” is not, contrary to popular belief, a Chinese proverb but the invention of an American advertising man.)3
The saturated color and busy backgrounds of so many of these photographs vividly describe a lively visual scene and a profusion of images on the walls. In the 2004 book The Chinese: Photography and Video from China, Annelie Lütgens writes: “As a result of its economic growth, China is gradually shifting from being a culture based on the written word to one steeped in the visual. A crucial role in this development is played by the new media, with photography at the forefront.” The mainspring of Chinese art has always been calligraphy, and writings do share space in these houses with images—but images are moving in forcefully, and many of them are photographic.
The walls of the poorer houses are built of mud and covered with newspapers to keep the dust out. A painting—which is replaced annually—is centered on the wall of the entry hall; it may represent a genealogy or the god of longevity or sometimes even Mao, still revered by many peasants for having changed their lives. Other pictures crowd around: benign gods, Buddha, landscape scrolls, occasional photographs of a late grandparent, as well as calligraphic memorial tablets and wishes, which now sometimes include the benefit of money, never contemplated in farmers’ homes before 1979 and the recent Chinese economic boom. In some homes are signs of Christianity: painted red crosses—red being the color of good luck and other blessings. The book provides statistics of Henan Province: 3,001 Christian missionaries, 1,047 churches and 3,465 “activity places of Christianity,” plus one Catholic bishop and numerous priests and nuns. Many younger people wear Western clothes and decorate their walls with calendar photographs and glamour shots of Hong Kong actors. Televisions crop up in more than one house, bringing news of fashions and other ways of life, and one man who works in the city and sends money home poses with his wife and child before two walls covered with calendars and large photographs of beguiling young women—some in bathing suits.
This is a society where tradition, folk art, Confucian culture, political ideology, and contemporary pop culture jostle one another for space, a society changing before our eyes, practically from page to page. The cities beckon—and even there, work can be difficult to find; poverty is widespread. The first picture in the series is of four children whose father was so heavily fined for violating the one-child-per-family policy of the state that he is now destitute. Poverty is a great preserver of tradition, but on the evidence of this book, the old ways will disappear from just about every place but these photographs as relative wealth and exposure to a wider world move in.
3. I am indebted to John Stauffer for this information.
Like all photographs, Jiang’s fix their present in memory for the future. His photographs of orphans in Henan Province, which have been published as a book called Archives on Orphans (2006), make this explicit. A philanthropic organization called the Federation of Charitable Organizations in Henan Province worked with Henan’s Federation of the Shaolin Temple to provide more than a thousand poor orphans with money for their lives and studies until they come of age. Jiang was asked to take photographs of the children, who live with family members, to assist the temple’s fundraising efforts, and he turned the assignment into a personal project.
Every child is photographed in black and white, standing against a black background. Each portrait is presented on the left-hand side, and on the right is a color photograph of the child’s official identity document. The paper is tan with black writing and red government stamps, and a head shot, often in color, is stapled in the corner. The document is shown at about three-quarters the size of the corresponding portrait of a child. The impersonal and bureaucratic confronts the personal and individual: the two are of equal weight, the document on a certain visual level as valuable as the person and on another a stand-in for that person, a testimony to his or her existence. In exhibitions, the photographs have shown the children at life size, making the comparison even sharper and weightier.
Hints of personality, clues that are magnified by the unvarying nature of the format, come through in the children’s clothes, stances, expressions, presentations of themselves to the camera. Some stand with their hands held rigidly at their sides, some with their hands before them, a few with hands in pockets, some holding up a “red envelope” that contains money—a present that adults traditionally give children during China’s Spring Festival and here containing the money the temple gives them. Under the circumstances, this looks like a reassurance that some parental figure, if only a stand-in, cares. Some children are calm, some quizzical, some cringing, some almost defiant. People learn ways to present themselves to a camera at a very early age. Although appearances are generally (and often correctly) judged to offer evidence of personality, in photographic portraiture they may indicate only the way a child thinks he or she should look for the camera. Still, the uniformity of the poses makes tiny differences loom large, providing a significant measure of the fascination with these double-page documents.
Unlike the serial portraits of, say, Rineke Dijkstra, there is no emphasis on body here, nor any background, and the salient point is not the subjects’ transitional stage of life, which everyone has experienced, but the fact that they have lost their parents, and that their identity has lost its supporting structure and can apparently be reduced to a slip of paper. Indeed, there is in this series a reduction and schematization analogous to these bureaucratic documents, an emphasis on number, anonymity, and equivalence that speaks not only to the children’s condition but to the condition of photography itself—as in Andy Warhol’s gridded multiple portraits of the same person, or Tomoko Sawada’s grids of photo-booth pictures of herself in different guises.
For all its conceptual underpinnings, Jiang’s Archives project is both strong and touching. In 2009 he will invite five Chinese and five foreign photographers to join him in photographing these children once more, in any way the artists choose; and every five years thereafter he will do the same. This will make a powerful gesture toward cultural interchange and open an unusually direct path of comparison between culturally determined modes of visualizing. The changes in the children’s lives should provide a life history lesson—with some echoes of Seven-Up (director Michael Apted’s ongoing series of documentary films about a group of British children, updated every seven years right on into adulthood), though the circumstances and intent are very different.
Jiang’s projected series poses implicit questions: will the attention these children receive make them feel more loved or more like lab rats? (Some people have already questioned whether the children are being exploited, as they are too young to give consent—although their guardians have. And if donations do indeed support them, it is hard to accuse the photographer and the charities of exploitation. Others have seen the orphans project as Jiang’s venture into social activism, which is not his purpose; he continues to work in the realms of history and memory.) Regarding moral issues, only time will tell whether the sympathy (and donations) the original photographs were meant to elicit will continue, and whether society will assume a moral obligation for these children. And whether photography can encourage that over such a long span of time.
Photographs lodge in personal memory, and often construct it as well; they have the same function regarding collective memory. People “remember” their childhoods because they’ve seen snapshots from it; iconic photographs become the primary memories of events. (During the Cultural Revolution, many destroyed their family albums so there would be no evidence of their bourgeois origins.) Jiang’s Masters catches history going about its unpredictable rounds, which might otherwise slip out of memory. Archives catches children with sad pasts and sad memories and asks not just what will become of them but whether they will be remembered. Maybe photography will give them that. The medium has always been in league with memory and still today pursues its quest for a place in the mind.
All photographs courtesy the artist
Jiang Jian is represented by MR Gallery, and was featured in Aperture magazine, issue 194.
Author's Acknowledgements
This article owes a large debt to Rong Jiang, who translated my conversations and emails with Jiang Jian (as well as the Chinese terms in this essay), and filled in much background information on China and its photography. I am also indebted to D. J. Clark for his knowledgeable assistance.
This essay was published in its entirety in 2007, translated into Chinese, in a monograph on Jiang Jian.