Photographer Xiao Quan's "Present Tense"

Photo by Peng Yina, a descendant of the martyr Peng Pan, the "king of the peasant movement."

● Chen Tong

25 years ago, Xiao Quan became a retainer of time with his portrait collection "Our Generation", and the four words "once upon a time" can summarize the theme of this batch of works. The characters photographed by Xiao Quan, poets, novelists, actors and painters, were not only the trendsetters of that era, but also witnesses to the ideological and cultural changes of several eras. Xiao Quan uses documentary techniques to capture everyone's looks and states in different living spaces, and also recalls the process of approaching them with words. There is no doubt that even in such a situation, Xiao Quan's shots still carry a certain subjectivity, but each choice considers "typicality" to a certain extent and places it under the personality of the subject. At that time, Xiao Quan was more like a war correspondent, and his way of working and enthusiasm could be found in his later gratitude to the famous French photographer Mark Lü Bu. Moreover, it must be mentioned that the entire literary and art circles of that era were still intertwined with modernism and postmodernism, and Xiao Quan was undoubtedly deeply involved in it, becoming a witness to the artistic fashion with a camera.

If the subjects in "Our Generation" have more or less played a pivotal role in the relay between modern and contemporary, it seems to me that Xiao Quan and contemporary art are in a relationship of imminent separation. He did not do "conceptual photography" because he was always inseparable from concrete and real people; he did not devote himself to the recording of specific events, because he was always touched by some emotion associated with something beautiful. In this way, Xiao Quan at least maintained his consistent posture and maintained his reputation as a portrait photographer. As for the unavoidable contemporaneity under the conditions of the times, I think Xiao Quan did not turn a blind eye, in other words, he also bid farewell to "Our Generation" to a certain extent, saying goodbye to scars, roots-seeking, and the "Eighty-Five-Year New Wave". When we compare his present with his past, the impression obtained, though not surprising, is somewhat fresh and pure. Especially as an old friend of his, I can feel the bold experiments he's trying to make in it, and I can see at a glance that he's changing rather than adding something.

In the "Portraits of the Times" photography exhibition, what is evident is the artist's change in concept of time, which is both obviously felt and less easy to express when compared to "Our Generation". Time here is neither a scale, nor a historical marker of transduceration or retrospection, as in Our Generation, it is "now." Although these subjects also have their own history, because they are not in their own space, they are like a mirror embedded in the wall, in which we can see ourselves and at the same time find that they are looking at the mirror behind us. And it's true: some of the subjects are wandering the halls in an expression or costume similar to that of a mirror, looking for themselves and returning to a space that doesn't belong to them. The space that Xiao Quan placed was a standard event place, like a stage or football field, so in addition to contributing to themselves, each subject had to play a "nother me" under a specific light, showing professional movements, so that the authenticity of photography in the traditional sense began to be doubted. This diametrically unreal spatial arrangement gives the impression of an interruption in the flow of time, which ultimately gives us the illusion that "all time belongs to the present." In this interruption and illusion, the subject's own history is briefly used to prove identity by various "labels", occupation, age, gender, shape and expression, while the rest of the historical information we are trying to capture disappears into the background. This background is certainly not empty, it is another representation of time - nothing is existence, and less is more. We can find the same example of this process of material expression in Manet's portrait creation, which is the result of the influence of oriental aesthetics and the beginning of the so-called modernity on canvas.

Xiao Quan's recent series of portrait photography has opened up a large distance from "Our Generation" 25 years ago, which is a kind of self-settling after getting rid of documentary techniques and returning to the source of portrait photography, that is, returning to the Nada era. Perhaps some of the old intellectuals are very nostalgic for the historical spaces intercepted at different times and conditions, because there are too many familiar things in them, from scenery to furniture, from costumes to gestures, and of course, the main thing is the same cultural memory. Although the value of all this does not diminish a little over time, we are also eager to realize that the "now" is not the moment when history is about to converge. The philosophical "now" is not simply equated with the "now", and I believe that xiao Quan is not exploring how to represent "new" characters, although it seems that most of the subjects' faces are indeed "new", even with "beauty" that has not been seen in the past. As the artist himself puts it, his aim is to present the inner world of the subject through photography, "so that people a hundred years from now can see what we are today: plain, sad and happy, desperate, indomitable." ”

(The author is the vice dean of the School of Chinese Painting of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, a contemporary art critic and curator)