Photography / Yu Yuntian Interview / Li Delin Duan Linlin
Divine Comedy, Antarctica, 2017. Photo by Yu Yuntian
editor:
Teacher Yu Yuntian was a representative figure of landscape photography in the 1980s and 1990s, and the cover work of the inaugural issue of this magazine in 1988 was Teacher Yu's work "Blue Dream". To this day, he has been immersed in the practice of landscape photography. Teacher Yu is deeply influenced by traditional aesthetics, benefits from the foundation of painting, has rich personal experience, coincides with the reform and opening up, and the ideas of foreign photographers are also injected with vitality; this generation of landscape photographers has a common feature: willing to endure hardships, rigorous shooting, solid images, and naturally become the idol of landscape photography enthusiasts. Along the way, their persistence is also changing - what has changed is the exploration of the language of photography, and what has not changed is love and precise expression. Although today's landscape photography enthusiasts are no more fanatical than they were then, the team is getting bigger and bigger, and people's pursuit of beautiful nature cannot stop. From the interviews with the teachers, we also want to reminisce about the charm of traditional images, understand empirical methods, explore new ways of expression and various possibilities in the computer age, and the opportunities for integration with other arts.
Scenery can change the outlook on life, but also to touch your and my soul.
Milky Way (Mozhigrad River), Hailar, Inner Mongolia, 1983. Photo by Yu Yuntian
Jinshanling Great Wall, Hebei, 1998. Photo by Yu Yuntian
Li Delin: Some commentators believe that your work has a mysterious style like "Zen realm". Does this "Zen" come from your "ordinary mind" (Buddhist term, Yunshui Zen mind, pure silence)?
Yu Yuntian: When facing the landscape, I don't express it bluntly, I will skillfully use the "technology" in photography for artistic processing, so I express "heart like landscape". The "Empty Forest" I made in 1995 is a good expression of my understanding of Zen Buddhism at that time. It was a birch forest in late autumn, the light at that time was very weak, and the scenery in front of me was the yellow of the old trees in autumn and the lonely hanging of the bright moon, which reminded me of the ethereal realm of "knowing God's self-realization, observing the void realm beyond silence" in the "Hanshan Poetry Collection". The art of Zen emphasizes the grasp of tranquility—"the state is created by the mind." At that time, I added a high-sturdy medium gray gradient mirror to reduce the density of the sky and expose it with a slow door. This shows the dilapidation of the birch forest and the sparse branches. In order to attain this "meaningful form", the realm of "Zen".
Huangshan, Anhui, 2014. Photo by Yu Yuntian
Dunhuang Crescent Spring, Gansu, 2017. Photo by Yu Yuntian
Ark series, Iceland, 2018. Photo by Yu Yuntian
Li Delin: How has your landscape photography work changed before and now? What are the new realizations and ideas?
Yu Yuntian: In the early years, landscape photography focused on the interpretation of traditional culture. Aesthetic interest is more about capturing fleeting strange landscapes, "reproduction" rather than "re-creation". The aesthetic theme of landscape photography of that era was the first element, that is, "the combination of lines and colors that evoke aesthetic emotions". However, with the continuous recognition and exploration of images, I have become more and more aware that those originally extreme, beautiful, and aesthetic natural scenery are only the primary display of beauty, and are the perceptual cognition of pleasant emotions. Get rid of the old traditional mold, create a novel landscape "Gestalt", through thinking and reflection, the perfect fusion of sensibility and reason, redefine the connotation of photography art in China and the United States. That's what I later learned when I created the Ark series. After all, the more objective beauty of nature inevitably ends at the moment of leaping towards the spirit of freedom, in the words of Hegel's concept of true artistic beauty: "to begin with the pursuit, then to reach, and finally to transcend." ”
Ark series, Sydney Island, Australia, 2015. Photo by Yu Yuntian
Ark series, Wenling, Zhejiang, 2010. Photo by Yu Yuntian
Li Delin: How do you define landscape photography?
Yu Yuntian: The pursuit of beauty and the cultivation of the soul has always been the realm I expect to achieve in landscape photography, and the significance of excavating the deeper connotation of landscape photography lies in this. People always say that my works have an ethereal and zen meaning, but in fact, this is because I like to capture the divine strokes of nature, simplicity, loneliness and "decisive moments" like "cherishing light like gold", and this is the real charm of landscape photography.
Ark series, Fuzhou, Fujian, 2014. Photo by Yu Yuntian
Duan Linlin: How do you judge the current situation and future development trend of Chinese landscape photography?
Yu Yuntian: I have seen a critic who once criticized landscape photography as a mess, which probably means, you wait and see, ten years later, landscape photography must be "scenery no longer", not recognized, not popular. Today, landscape photography has not withered away as critics say, but there are many people engaged in landscape photography. You can't ask everyone to shoot documentaries, they like to carry the machine around nature, exercise, entertain themselves, in fact, this is the mass foundation of photography, is the majority of photography to the end. I don't think there's to worry about the future of landscape photography. It is like an attractive entrance, many young people, middle-aged and elderly, is from the initial hobby, continuous shooting, after reaching a certain level, began to divert, turn to different categories. For example, start paying attention to society and shooting documentaries; such as integrating ideas, shooting destroyed and disappearing nature, and so on. At present, landscape photography is actually a habitual title in the eyes of the Chinese people, and the photography of nature and the like are collectively referred to as photographing scenery. I think in the meaning of the word is entangled in what is the scenery and what is the scenery? It really doesn't make sense.
Ark series, Beidaihe, 2014. Photo by Yu Yuntian
Ark series, Wenling, Zhejiang, 2012. Photo by Yu Yuntian
(From China Photographer Magazine, Issue 6, 2019)
Photographer Profile:
Yu Yuntian, born in 1950, his ancestral home is Tai'an, Shandong. Graduated from Tianjin Academy of Arts and Crafts. In 1975, he was transferred to Tianjin Dagang Oilfield with his parents, and later engaged in art creation and news film documentary shooting in North China Oilfield. In 1980, he was transferred to the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts as a secretary. In 1982, he was transferred to the magazine "Civil Aviation of China" and served as a photojournalist and editor-in-chief, during which he took a large number of photos of scenery, folklore and architecture. In 1989, the group photo of "Nine Songs" won the first China Photography Award. He has served as a judge of international and domestic photography competitions for many times; his photographic works have won awards in domestic and foreign photography competitions and held film festivals; he has published dozens of various types of photographic picture books such as "China's Most Beautiful Place", "Mysterious Tibet", "Chinese Photography Artist Yu Yuntian" and so on.
*Originally published in the 6th issue of China Photographer magazine in 2019, the original text: "From <九歌>to <方舟>- Visiting Photographer Yu Yuntian", Photography / Yu Yuntian, Interview / Li Delin, Duan Linlin.
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Edited | Cheng