Coming from an academic background in Chinese literature, what initially roused your interest in the intersections between poetry and photography?
One evening when I was browsing a late Qing poetry collection, I encountered a few poems written about photographs. I thought it would be an interesting paper topic. It was almost twenty years ago at UCLA, while I was struggling with my dissertation on the topic of classical-style poetry in the modern era. Inspired by the “visual turn” taking place in literary studies, I started to research image-text practices in modern China, and this modest idea grew exponentially and eventually became a full-fledged book project. I had a lot of fun doing research and writing about Chinese practitioners’ domestication and creative use of photography as a new technical medium. I sincerely hope readers will also find Photo Poetics a fun book to read.
To rewind to the very beginning of this history, when did the brush first meet the shutter in China, and how did this encounter/reaction unfold?
This is a very significant, complex question. As you may know, a pioneering book in English scholarship on Chinese photography is titled Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China (2011). The image of the brush’s meeting the shutter vividly captures the clash between two completely different media and pictorial traditions.
The early history of Chinese photography remains sketchy. In the introduction, I have provided several examples to give readers some general impressions of the situation. One example is the photograph of Yi Xuan 奕譞 (aka Prince Chun, 1840-1891), taken around 1863 with his two guards in the Imperial Palace. What is intriguing about this example is the presentation and the style of this photograph. The photograph was mounted onto a brocade as a hanging scroll. On the top, it was inscribed with the prince’s poem in a carefree voice, his signature and two seals. This is a fascinating early example of media mixture, and at the same time it also gives us the impression that the new photographic image was embedded in China’s pictorial practices.
My general impression is that, once Chinese literary men and women had access to the medium, it became quite “natural” for them to resort to old practices to understand, frame and appropriate the new medium. The photograph was initially referred to as a tu (picture) or hua (painting), showing that the Chinese understood or critiqued the photograph in existing pictorial terms. Central questions that I have examined in the book are, in the process of transplanting photography into China, how Chinese pictorial and writing tradition adapted and responded to the new technical media, and how traditional combinations of painting, calligraphy, and poetry were extended into the new media environment. I have argued that, generally speaking, throughout China’s early reception of photography, both pictorial and literary traditions served as an overarching conceptual framework, substantially informing and accommodating new media practices into existing practices.
In what ways did this collision or collaboration reinvent notions of the self?
Please allow me to cast the conception of the self in very broad terms: modern western conceptualizations of the self are typically predicated upon the individual, psychologized, emotional self, more or less independent from the world or other human beings; traditional Chinese concepts of the self are relationally interwoven into the social web, in the self’s relationships with family, friends and the community. This self is also situated in a Confucian framework of the self’s moral and spiritual development. There are multiple ways of linking this sense of the self with photography. Today we love to take a selfie and upload it onto Wechat, Instagram, Facebook, or other social media. Imagine that you composed a poem on the selfie image with an aspiring or humorous voice and then posted this photo-poem to the digital site, you might well receive many more likes. When the photographs became more affordable in the early twentieth century China, the photographs, together with the inscriptions of the poems, messages or letters, were circulated among the family or friends as well as published in newspapers and magazines.
This is an effective way of self-fashioning, establishing and facilitating emotional communications with like-minded others. As is well-known, there was a long-established poetic tradition of writing the poem about or on the painting (painted by the self, a friend or others). The portability and reproducibility of the photograph further facilitated social communications. I’ve attempted to shed light on catalytic aspects of the photographic image in affective exchanges. Further, with regard to the moral sense of self-development, there exists an impressive range of records (written by famous writers or youngsters) in the subgenre of the ziti xiaozhao, when the self looks at the self-image and composed a poem for self-reflection and development. I have examined many poems on self-images in the book, in order to explore the relationship between the self and affect, as well as the self-consciousness and gendered consciousness that were enhanced by these new images.
Photo shooting is a joyful, entertaining and creative activity. People love to dress up in various costumes for fantasy staging. In the costume photos (huazhuang zhao), the popular personas with loaded meanings included fisherman, a beautiful western woman in Victorian dress, a beggar, a solider, etc. This costume photo is from a magazine page from Halfmoon (Banyue) in Shanghai. The female poet Chen Cuina 陳翠娜 (1903-1967) and her younger brother posed as “celestial ladies scattering flowers,” a classical Buddhist scene. The text printed beneath the photograph are three poems written by Chen. The difference between costume photographing and contemporary cosplay lies in that the adopted roles and self-imagination in costume photographing were all deeply rooted in literary traditions, and inscriptions or writings were often integral in this process of self-imagining and pleasure seeking.
I also discussed a number of the photographs of twin-selves (erwo tu) and multiple selves in the same frame in the Republican era. These images may appear to be similar to today’s digital or photoshop manipulation, but it is specifically Buddhist and Daoist conceptions with regard to the self’s different life-trajectories and bodily transformations that structured such imaginative practices in the early twentieth century.
Could you give us some examples of inscriptions on photographs and explain how the inscriptions work in this context?
One great example that I explored in the book is the set of works by the Republican photographer Luo Bonian駱伯年 (1911-2002), who collaborated with a group of well-established cultural and political figures in the 1930s. What Luo did is to print his photograph on good sized paper and solicit inscriptions from his acquaintances. A dozen of such works survive in his archives. This work Fishermen’s Song on the Lang River is a shot of the tranquil scenery of West Lake at sunset. The famous writer Yu Dafu 郁達夫(1896-1945) wrote his inscriptions in a fluid style of calligraphy beneath the picture in 1935. Imprinted with three seals (two by Luo and one by Yu), this work conjointly informs us of social and cultural networking of the time, and commemorates cultural memories associated with scenic Hangzhou.
How did Chinese aesthetic and pictorial traditions influence pictorial photography in the modern era?
One key issue that I addressed in the book concerns how Chinese ways of seeing informed the photographical practices and how the mind (xin), or to be more specific, lyricism and aesthetic ideas, functioned in the new technological media environment. Since the 1920s, Chinese photographers explored the potential of the technical medium’s expression of feelings and lyrical ideas. The most representative photographer in this regard is Lang Jingshan郎靜山 (1892-1995), whose artistic career extended from the 1920s in Shanghai to the end of his life in Taipei. Well-known for his “composite photography” (Jijin zhaoxiang), he made avant-garde efforts in turning this technical visual medium into an expressive artistic one. He composed virtual landscapes based on theories of Chinese landscape painting through the combination printing techniques and laborious work in the darkroom. This work, titled Night Mooring by Maple Bridge (Fengqiao yepo), was made of three negatives in the 1960s, with careful spatial arrangement and subtle interplay of light and shadow. With the lush tree branches in the foreground against the fisherman’s boat and the bright moon in the distance, this piece was inspired by the literary scene of “night mooring at Maple Bridge” (Fengqiao yepo) in a household known poem from the Tang dynasty.
The second example of Lang Jingshan’s work, A Panoramic Embrace of Landscape (Hushan lansheng), is a magnificent piece of work made when he was in his nineties and illustrative of adopting a moving, lyrical gaze instead of linear or Cartesian perspectivism. Impressive in its sheer size (40cm by 296cm), this work at the National Museum of History is composed of ten negatives that he shot throughout his life all over the world, evoking aesthetic ideals of the handscroll painting of mountain and rivers. When Lang was to present his works as gifts to his friends, he usually inscribed words onto the works with his personal seals. More examples of such works can be found here: https://photographyofchina.com/blog/lang-jingshan
How do you see this form of the image-text practice playing out in the visual culture of the contemporary and the future?
In our contemporary proliferation of multimedia communications, image-text practices have become more intense, creative and diverse. For instance, digital poetry or hypertext, taking advantage of the ideographic qualities of characters, has been enthusiastically embraced and experimented with in contemporary Taiwan. (see, for instance: https://tea.ntue.edu.tw/~xiangyang/workshop/netpoetry/) Here I would like to offer two more visual examples by two artists, Ho Fan 何藩 (1931-2016) and Ma Liang 馬良 (b. 1972), to illustrate the extension and complexity of image-text practices. In Ho Fan’s work, he wrote Du Fu’s elegiac poem in eight vertical lines in calligraphy and placed the seven images of the floating boat with the fisherman at the bottom. The floating boat is a common scene that he shot countless times in Hong Kong in the 1960s, rendering a sense of displacement and enhancing the emotional turmoil captured in words.
If we think that the image and the poem are mutually supportive and harmonious in Ho’s work, the image-text relationship is more complex, contradictory, and open-ended in Ma’s work. Secondhand Tang poems (Ershou Tangshi) consists of nine photographs created by Shanghai artist Ma Liang in 2007. In one of them cited here, the excerpts from the Tang poem “Yellow Crane Tower” (Huanghe lou), handwritten in an amateur style by the artist, is integrated in the artificially arranged scene, filled with toys, props, dirt and other ordinary stuff. Instead of paying homage to tradition, the artist established a fraught, ambivalent, and ironic relationship with that very tradition. There are quite a lot of contemporary artists engaging in these types of exciting experimentation, showing fertile resources that tradition can offer to contemporary image-text practices. Other contemporary photographers that I can think of include Wang Wusheng王蕪生 (1945-2018), Hong Lei洪磊 (b. 1960) Liu Zheng劉錚 (b. 1969), to name just a few. There are certainly a lot of innovative ways to incorporate the traditional image-text practice into contemporary photography.
About the authorShengqing Wu is professor of Chinese literature at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is the author of Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900–1937 (2013).
More information: Wu, Shengqing Wu. Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture. Columbia University Press, 2020.
