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Wang Qinsong, “Follow Him”, 2010
About ten years ago there was a flurry of activity with contemporary Chinese photography. It was for a moment the new and best thing. As always the original work survives fashion, and the tableaus by Wang Qingsong are the strongest: thoughtful, well produced, funny and unique.
In “Follow Him”, 2010, the artist has posed himself working in a library, a seeming great man doing great works — surrounded by his books and crumpled up pieces of paper. (his rejected collected works?). The artist brings a satiric edge to his stagings with excess. Unusual here is that he is not surrounded by other actors as he is in most of his stagings.
The history of this kind of photography stretches back to its beginnings with Hippolyte Bayard’s (French 1801 - 1887) “Self- Portrait as Drowned Man”, 1840 followed by the staged dramas like what we have here, literally a small and well made play. Oscar Gustave Rejlander (Swedish 1813 – 1875) specialized in “tableau vivant” designed to convey a specific message. With “Two Ways of Life”, 1857, he presents an allegory about a youth torn between virtue and sensual abandon. Perfecting the idea of combination printing, Henry Peach Robinson (English, 1830 - 1901, combined negatives to construct scenes. His most famous “Fading Away”, 1858 involved five separate negatives.
The Wang Quinsong images appear to have shot “in camera” with post production amounting to clean up, and not the wholesale introduction of separate scenes. No PhotoShop. But as in assessing the work Western photo-based artists like Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson, it takes more work than just looking closely.
The Chinese work also reflects an historical legacy of scroll painting.
All of that aside, the most striking element is the basic solidity of the image on its own.
©2022
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