“好的摄影会与死亡维持一种关系”

注：尚陆兄为《纸人》写的序，一直想给大伙看看。作为法语为第一语言的他，中文能到这个水平实在了不起。更重要的是，他对我的理解很到位，很精准。字体有颜色的部分，就是我认为的金句，或者表述方式有趣的地方。另上位郭晓彦的评论，也是很西化的语言，相当独特，下回找到再说。——长江注 颜长江是一个天生的作家，在涉足摄影圈前已出版过两本书。1997年的一次新闻采访途中，他在一个寺庙偶遇了为祭祀而备的纸娃娃，这彻底改变了他的生活。被这些纸制品散发的美丽气息所吸引，之后的追逐和迷恋最终使他成为了一名真正的摄影师。这次偶遇折磨了他那创造性的丰富心灵很长时间，并促使他带着相机再次来到“犯罪现场”，以至于他开始幻想到发生在人类和非人类间的爱情悲剧，并试图释放当他首次直面一匹高度接近两米的纸马时的感受。设置爱情故事的布景，再拍摄纸制生命，成为他联系“另一个世界”的大门，导演他的纸演员演戏的森林成为生界和死界的沟通“门户”。在外界不知情的状况下，他完成了一种富有精神共鸣的十年拍摄。 他不仅直观地创造了中国当代艺术场景最原创的概念摄影，还撰写了超过5万字的非现实小说，融汇了浪漫情怀和杀戮的隐秘，字里行间充斥着关于人类生命短暂存在的诘问。他首次让王宁德（另一个著名的概念摄影师）看这些照片时，王宁德说出了“Bernard Faucon”也就是弗孔的名字，这也是颜长江第一次听到这个名字。 自1997年到2007年，颜长江象只候鸟般往来于他的工作地广州和他发现纸人的高州市的乡村。高州变成一个神秘花园，在那里他可以将自己沉迷的童年时的捉迷藏和打仗游戏等移植到纸人场景中。这里我不自禁地将颜长江和日本的摄影大师植田正治（Shoji Ueda）进行比较，后者因其在沙丘中的布置场景而闻名，他的话用在此处最恰当不过：“我喜欢在自然风景中引入人工元素。我喜欢给人感觉到摄影师轻微介入的创作”。 因此每次去高州都象一次朝拜，也是一个全新机会来体验场景布置、体验摄影艺术的光线运用、角度和构图，同时为了丰富其对哲学的探求，他开始了漫长的内心独白，最终形成了文学作品的全貌。这回答了对于作家至关重要的问题：如何描写你从不知晓的过去？对于已经消失很久的这些男男女女的最终归宿我们能知道些什么呢？颜长江的写作兼容了史诗风格的叙事性和比喻手法的“新小说”体裁，经常性的将古典和现代交迭。叙事人时而是作者（你？他？我？），时而又是渔夫，患精神病的杀人犯或者做调查的记者；女主人公时而是个自恋的纸美人，时而又是耽于肉欲的圣母，是颜长江想象世界中理想女性的投射。 图片和文字的结合让人想起巴西或墨西哥的照片小说fotonovelas，甚至法国的小说照片roman-photo，有些甚至可以和Sophie Calle苏菲·卡乐 独一无二的作品相提并论。差别是单独来看的话，颜长江的摄影本身是游走于传统的黑白摄影和原创的当代概念艺术边缘的由个体所完成的震撼人心的作品。作为一套摄影系列不可或缺的伙伴的短文本质上就是Christian Caujolle （克利斯提昂·高朔勒，VU图片社的创始人和艺术顾问）所谓的“以与死亡维持一种关系”。 由于摄影一直都依靠纸张，无论是银盐或者数码打印——除非我们看到录象和电脑里虚拟世界里的图片，看着一对纸恋人被火吞噬带给我们恐惧的记忆，类似分手了的恋人焚毁照片，或者更糟，像那些人类历史上霸王、独裁者和革命者焚烧对统治阶级而言无法容忍的书籍和图片 。透过颜长江表面上无罪地烧毁纸人的姿态，可以明了这不仅仅是中国传统的与地下世界进行沟通的行为，实际上也与摄影的进程息息相关：从拍摄（将影象烧到负片上，捕捉光或火），到在暗房激光冲印照相纸（运用化学方法和水，进行显影和定影），到赋予印片以生命（四处展出，放在影集或装框挂在墙上），最终随着照片被丢弃，撕毁或焚毁而宣告这个创造工作的死亡。在某种程度上这是和纸人的相同故事。人类存在的脆弱，在数字化占领下消失的纸人文化，宗教或种族间的互不容忍和不信任导致的大屠杀和种族灭绝，一种对消失中的艺术的敬献，所有这些主题都可以在《纸人》里找到，如果我们到第二或第三层次仔细阅读还可以发现更多。 多年来，颜长江每次在高州的逗留和拍摄都是精神净化，恢复自身元气的机会。将疯狂的“逐金”城市生活甩在身后，踏上令人振奋并且环保友好的纸人乡土尤胜一次度假。从高州森林出来，颜长江变成个更好的人，拥有更自由的思想，成为更完善的摄影师。无论如何以现代中国的标准来说10年是相当漫长的时间，在此期间他看到这种艺术逐渐消亡。老一代手工艺人退休了，新一代的人很少再有耐心做一匹超过两米高的纸马，在纸人的脸上“画眉毛” 时已没有人具备齐白石式的高超艺术水准（见颜长江的小说），而这更凸显了这整套照片的价值——如果我们将它看作为中国南部的手艺和传统的记录或是档案。 模糊了现实和虚幻、现在和过去的界限，颜长江邀请我们沿着已确定的边界蜿蜒前行，无法分离童年的想象和成年人的幻想，生命和死亡，生的欲望和死的渴望，运用虚构和创意的手法来探索摄影和文学的无限可能，来达到史无前例的戏剧性的值得玩味同时也是沉重严肃的视觉体验，而这些体验正构成了杰出摄影作品的基础。 这里让我们思考一下加缪一句话： “小说就是被图片化了的哲学。” 尚陆 策展人 “A good photograph entertains a relationship with death” Yan Changjiang, a natural born writer, had published two books before his name was even noticed in photography circles. While on a journalistic assignment in 1997, his encounter in a temple with the paper dolls destined for a memorial ceremony changed his life forever. The ensuing haunting obsession that stemmed from his fascination with the beauty of these paper crafts was the crucial motivator for Yan Changjiang to become a photographer. The encounter had tormented his fertile and creative mind for months, to such a degree that he started having visions of a tragic love story between humans and nonhumans, which urged him to return to the “crime scene” with a borrowed camera, trying to relive the aesthetic emotion he felt the first time he came face to face with a nearly two-meter-tall paper horse. Setting the stage for this love story and photographing the paper creatures then became an open door for him to reach out to the “other world,” and the woods where he directed his paper actors became the portal of communication between the living and the dead. Unbeknownst to him in the course of a decade he has produced a work with deep and wide-reaching spiritual resonance. Not only has he intuitively created the most original conceptual photography in China’s contemporary art scene, he has also written a fifty-thousand-word fiction that combines romance and murder mystery, with between the lines a metaphysical interrogation about our ephemeral existence. When he initially showed his pictures to Wang Ningde, another successful conceptual artist, the latter uttered the name “Bernard Faucon,” which Yan Changjiang heard then for the first time. So from 1997 to 2007 Yan would commute between Guangzhou his workplace and the Gaozhou village where he had discovered these paper men, a secret garden where he could indulge in his favorite childhood play of hide and seek, cowboys and Indians, and the like, which he transposed into the scenario of the Paper Men. One cannot help but compare Yan to the Japanese master Shoji Ueda, famous for his stage-setting series in the sand dunes whose quote applied so appropriately here: “I like to introduce in natural landscapes some artificial elements. I like that one feels a slight intervention of the photographer.” Indeed in some of Yan’s pictures the presence of these stage hands can even be seen. Each trip to Gaozhou was like a pilgrimage but also a new occasion to experiment with the art of stage-setting, with the photographic art of light, angles and composition, and at the same time to nourish his metaphysical quest he started a long interior monologue that finally had all the features of a literary achievement. It answers the fundamental question for a writer: how does one write about a past that one has not known? And what do we know of the destinies of these men and women who have vanished long ago? Yan’s writing is both a narrative in the style of a road epic and a “nouveau roman” rich in metaphors, with constant crossover from classic to modern genre. The narrator is at times the author (you? he? I?); at other times the fisherman, the psychopathic murderer or the investigative reporter, and the heroin is at times a narcissistic paper beauty, at times a sensual Madonna, or all the projections of the ideal woman in Yan’s world of fantasy. The combination of pictures and words reminds one of the Brazilian or Mexican fotonovelas, or even the French roman-photo, and some parallels can be established in the work of the inimitable Sophie Calle. The difference is that separately Yan’s photography per se is one single body of stunning work at the borderline of classic black-and-white photography and original contemporary conceptual art. The short novel per se, though it becomes an indispensable companion to the photographic essay, corresponds to Christian Caujolle’s quote (founder and consultant of VU’ agency): “a good photograph entertains a relationship with death”. As the photographic support remains paper, be it gelatin silver print or digital print unless we look at the images in the virtual world of video and computer, watching the two paper lovers consumed by fire brings to mind the chilling memory of all the pictures burned by former lovers, or worse, all the autodafés (destruction by fire) committed by emperors and dictators and revolutions in humankind’s history, of books and pictures deemed intolerable to reigning regimes or to tornapart lovers. Through Yan’s apparently innocent gesture of paper burning, it is not just an act of the Chinese traditional practice of communicating with the Other World, it is indeed a transcending act relative to the whole process of photography from the snapshot that is burning the image onto the negative film (capturing light or fire), to the alchemy of darkroom printing on photographic paper (manipulation with chemical solutions and water, revelation and fixing), to giving life to the printed picture (showing around, display in an album or in a frame on a wall) and finally to the death of the creative work when the photograph is discarded, torn and destroyed by fire. In a way this is the parallel story of the Paper Men. The frailty of our human existence, the vanishing paper culture under the threat of the digital conquest, the intolerance and mistrust among religious or ethnic groups leading to pogrom and genocide, the tribute to a dying art, all these themes and more can be found in the Paper Men if we care to read at a deeper level. Over the years, each photographic sojourn for Yan to the Gaozhou country would serve as a catharsis, an occasion to reinvigorate himself; leaving behind the frantic “gold rush” city life for the inspiring and still ecofriendly land of the Paper Men has been more rewarding than taking a sabbatical. From the Gaozhou woods Yan would come out a better person, a freer mind. and a more accomplished photographer. Nevertheless over a decade, which is pretty long in modern China’s standards, he could see that the art is dying little by little. The old craftsmen have retired and the younger generation has fewer patience to build a two-meter-tall paper horse. None would have the art of Qi Baishi (cf. Yan’s short story) to “paint the eyebrows” on the face of the Paper Men which makes the whole series all the more valuable if we look at it as a testament to or a documentary about a craft and a tradition of Southern China. Blurring the lines between reality and illusion, present and past, Yan Changjiang invites us to zigzag along an ill-defined boundary that hardly separates childhood imagination and adult fantasy, life and death, Eros and Thanatos, using fiction and creativity to explore the infinite possibilities of photography and literature, to achieve an unprecedented, dramatic, playful, and at the same time grave and serious visual experimentation that forms a fundamental and enduring work of photography. Let’s meditate on this quote from Albert Camus: “A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.” Jean Loh Curator