Review of “Go With the Flow”评“河流故事”

河流故事

Fotografiska，上海，2024年3月29日至6月23日

在北京生活多年，推动了厦门阿尔勒国际摄影节建立的法国策展人零零，最近在上海的「Fotografiska」——一家关注摄影的艺术中心——呈现了群展“河流故事”；但意外的，这并不是有许多印刷图片、紧扣着“摄影”二字的那种“古典”摄影展览。展厅不大，只展出了庄辉、程新皓、秋麦、塔可、陈秋林五位艺术家的旧作。墙面和海报的主色调也并非我想当然的蓝色：2022年，广东时代美术馆做过大型群展“河流脉搏”，蓝色是当时海报和展厅的主调。当时张涵露和格布的策展着重在澜沧江、怒江、雅鲁藏布江这几条流经“佐米亚”地区、从青藏高原和横断山脉向南流淌的河流，借河流引出沿岸复杂的社会和族群议题。当时的展览中也有程新皓的作品，美术馆委任他做了录像《象征》（2022），讨论生活在澜沧江流域中的亚洲象如何被转化进入历史文本、社会现象等不同语境。相比当时展览里程新皓毫不停顿的讲述和分析，“河流故事”和其选择的作品都更加内敛克制。展览的背景框架虽然是中国长江和黄河流域三十多年来经历的社会变迁（国家工程、经济发展、城市化等等），但现场作品总会回归更加沉思的、隐喻性的河流——河流像是蜿蜒、宏阔的时间坐标，艺术家们则在沿途打捞记忆。展览的空间和作品笼罩着或明或暗的银灰色调，让人想起赛璐珞胶片薄膜、档案柜的尘埃，或者夜空中浓稠的银河。

庄辉1995年所作的《东经109°88，北纬31°09》是一组30张的黑白照片，每张照片都俯拍了一张艺术家在三峡大坝施工现场的土地上挖的洞。“三峡”的辽阔万千在此被化作一个个具体的点位。这组照片在展厅入口的一侧灰色墙面排开，对面是三屏录像，演示三峡大坝建成后的2007年，这些点位被淹没，只余江水两岸。这时，观众也会听到清脆的牛铃。这声音来自程新皓记录自己徒步经历的录像《你不要到南方去，你不要到北方去》（2022）。穿着现代运动装束的勤苦徒步者在穿越碧罗雪山的茶马古道时，偶然会碰到和他一样默然不语的放牛人，只不过放牛人在重复他日常的短途“通勤”，而程新皓背负着取自澜沧江的一壶水，要去倒入山那边的怒江。庄辉以打洞来记录跨越千禧年山河巨变的方式如刻舟求剑，带着倒计时之中的紧迫、肃穆、无奈和决绝；相比之下，程新皓的长途步行没有戏剧性——巨变已然发生，古道已经被高速公路替代，绵长的、步行的时间反而带来了抚慰。

河流与时间的变化贯穿在展览中五位艺术家的作品里，而艺术家在江河与时间中的穿梭、试图铭刻的尝试，在展览中此起彼伏地呼应着。秋麦的《长江万里图》（2010—2017），不管是名字还是形式，都在仿古。精细的像素颗粒被印在宣纸和三桠皮纸上，模拟着水墨画，裹成卷轴。细致的努力反而凸显出这个时代的摄影与古代同题水墨画的区别：此前从江头到江尾是相似的层峦叠嶂，如今从长江源头的湿地到中段是鳞次栉比的楼宇，长卷也像史诗了。在一旁，塔可的成名作《诗山河考》（2010—2012）错落地挂在银光熠熠的墙面上。从前观察这些图像的低反差、高锐度和浅灰色，我会把它们视作艺术家的怀古叹今滤镜。但这次，这些《诗经》里的山丘、土堆、树和水泊因为四周的静谧变得晶莹剔透起来——不把摄影展做得像“摄影展”，真能让作品更可爱。

展览末尾的投影《别赋》，是陈秋林在2002年拍摄的家乡重庆万县。万县在当时已经开始因为建造三峡水库而搬迁——一年之后，库区水位将达到135米，淹没大部分老城。这些如纪录片的片段中穿插着京剧《霸王别姬》里虞姬自刎的镜头。每次虞姬出现时作品的气氛会变得有些突兀：京剧并不属于这方水土。故土将失时普通人的仓皇神情和遍地瓦砾已足够令人心惊，不需要“观念录像艺术”里符号化素材的引入。但听着中间的唢呐向外步去，穿过门口的珠帘时，很可恶的观众反应出现了：我不由自主地回忆起项羽、虞姬、乌江这一系列精英和经典叙事，那些普通人的神情开始模糊了。

Machine translation (AI) of the Chinese original, not yet reviewed by the author. Please cite the original.

Go With the Flow

Fotografiska Shanghai, 29 March – 23 June 2024

Victoria Jonathan, the French curator who lived in Beijing for many years and helped found the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in Xiamen, recently presented the group exhibition “Go With the Flow” at Fotografiska in Shanghai, an art centre devoted to photography. Unexpectedly, though, this is not the kind of “classic” photography show packed with prints and tightly bound to the word “photography”. The galleries are small, and show only earlier works by five artists: Zhuang Hui, Cheng Xinhao, Michael Cherney, Taca Sui and Chen Qiulin. Nor are the walls and posters the blue I had taken for granted. In 2022 Guangdong Times Museum staged the large group exhibition “River Pulses, Border Flows”, and blue was the dominant colour of its posters and galleries. That show, curated by Hanlu Zhang and Gebu, focused on the Lancang, the Nu and the Yarlung Tsangpo – rivers that run south from the Tibetan Plateau and the Hengduan Mountains through the region known as “Zomia” – using them to draw out the complex social and ethnic questions along their banks. Cheng Xinhao’s work was in that exhibition too: the museum commissioned his video March of the Elephants (2022), which looks at how the Asian elephants living in the Lancang basin are translated into different contexts, from historical texts to social phenomena. Compared with Cheng’s non-stop narration and analysis in that show, “Go With the Flow” and the works it has chosen are more restrained and reserved. Although the exhibition’s background is the social change that China’s Yangtze and Yellow River basins have gone through over the past thirty-odd years (state engineering projects, economic development, urbanisation and so on), the works on show keep returning to a more contemplative, metaphorical river – the river as a winding, vast coordinate of time, along which the artists salvage memories. The space and the works are veiled in silvery greys, now bright, now dark, recalling the film of celluloid, the dust of filing cabinets, or the thick Milky Way across the night sky.

Zhuang Hui’s Longitude 109°88′ E, Latitude 31°09′ N (1995) is a set of thirty black-and-white photographs, each looking down on a hole the artist dug in the ground at the construction site of the Three Gorges Dam. The vastness of the “Three Gorges” is turned here into specific points, one after another. The photographs are lined up on a grey wall to one side of the entrance; opposite them is a three-channel video showing how, in 2007, after the dam was completed, these points were submerged, leaving only the river and its two banks. At this point visitors also hear the crisp ringing of cowbells. The sound comes from Cheng Xinhao’s video Don’t You Go to the South, nor to the North (2022), which records a trek of his own. Crossing Biluo Snow Mountain along the old Tea Horse Road, the toiling hiker in modern sportswear now and then meets a cowherd as silent as he is – except that the cowherd is repeating his daily short “commute”, while Cheng carries a flask of water taken from the Lancang to pour into the Nu on the other side of the mountain. Zhuang Hui’s way of recording, by digging holes, the vast changes to mountains and rivers across the millennium is like the man in the old fable who marks the side of his boat to find the sword he dropped overboard: it carries the urgency, solemnity, helplessness and resolve of a countdown. Cheng’s long walk, by contrast, has no drama – the great change has already happened, the old road has been replaced by a motorway, and the long, walking time brings, if anything, a kind of consolation.

Changes in rivers and in time run through the works of all five artists, and the artists’ passages through rivers and time, their attempts to inscribe them, echo one another back and forth across the exhibition. Michael Cherney’s Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze River (2010–2017) imitates the ancients in both name and form. Fine grains of pixels are printed on xuan paper and mitsumata paper, imitating ink painting, and mounted as scrolls. The meticulous effort, if anything, highlights the difference between photography in our time and ancient ink paintings on the same theme: where once the river ran past similar layered ranges from source to mouth, now, from the wetlands at the Yangtze’s source to its middle reaches, buildings stand row upon row, and the long scroll has become something like an epic. Next to it, Taca Sui’s breakthrough work Odes (2010–2012) hangs in a staggered arrangement on walls shimmering with silver. In the past, looking at the low contrast, high sharpness and pale grey of these images, I would have taken them as the artist’s filter for longing for the past and lamenting the present. This time, though, the hills, mounds, trees and pools from the Book of Odes became crystal clear in the stillness around them – not making a photography exhibition look like a “photography exhibition” really can make the works more lovable.

The projection at the end of the exhibition, Farewell Poem, was filmed by Chen Qiulin in 2002 in her hometown of Wanxian, Chongqing. At the time Wanxian was already being relocated to make way for the Three Gorges reservoir – a year later the water would reach 135 metres, submerging most of the old town. Spliced into these documentary-like fragments are shots of Consort Yu cutting her own throat in the Peking opera Farewell My Concubine. Each time Consort Yu appears, the mood of the work turns somewhat jarring: Peking opera does not belong to this land. The panicked faces of ordinary people about to lose their homeland, and the rubble everywhere, are already shocking enough; there is no need to bring in the symbolic material of “conceptual video art”. But as I walked out, listening to the suona in the middle of the room, and passed through the bead curtain at the door, a rather wretched reaction came over me as a viewer: I couldn’t help recalling Xiang Yu, Consort Yu, the Wu River – that whole chain of elite, classical narratives – and the faces of those ordinary people began to blur.