A Buddha Head in a coalfield, Ningxia

2020 - Photography (Photography)

Zhang Kechun

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Zhang Kechun’s photographic series The Yellow River documents the effects of modernization along the eponymous Yellow River, the second longest in Asia. The Yellow River is considered the cradle of Chinese civilization but also poses a great threat, as the river is capable of breaking its banks at any time. Inspired by the novel River of the North by Zhang Chengzhi, the artist travelled on a fold-up bicycle through eastern China’s Shandong province, where the river discharges vast amounts of water into the sea, before slowly tracing it westward over several month-long trips heading to the river’s source near the Bayan Har Mountain in Qinghai. Zhang’s photographic series demonstrates the various ways in which the areas surrounding the river have been devastated by flooding and poetically reveal the impacts on the local population. A Buddha Head in a coalfield, Ningxia depicts an abandoned Buddha head left beside a coal mining field in front of the Helan Mountain in the Ningxia region of Northwest of China. A coal mine owner had started building a dozen metre tall golden Buddha, but when the head broke, no one wanted to deal with it due to its symbolic significance. A Hui man (Chinese Muslim) wearing a white Taqiyah stands gazing at the Buddha head. The facial expression of the Buddha is placid, yet is unspeakably detached with a melancholic gaze. Pollution accounts for the foggy ambiance of the hazy landscape. The delicate intensity of Zhang’s photographs reside in the tranquility of the land and river strewn with abandoned man-made objects, in contrast to the local people appearing as miniscule figures in the landscape. The bleak and desolate vastness that is characteristic of this photo series recalls the landscape painting aesthetics of the Song and Yuan dynasties. With an eerily quiet ambience, Zhang’s images demonstrate how human activities have altered—sometimes irreversibly—the fragile ecosystems surrounding the Yellow River. Zhang does not attempt to reveal the symbolic meanings of the Yellow River and its cultural significance; he unfolds small moments of authentic intervention between local residents and the landscape. Whilst the project was not initially intended to confront environmental issues, Zhang found that ecological matters became unavoidable and the series hums with melancholy for the lost landscape.

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Photographer Zhang Kechun documents striking scenery that meditates on the significance of landscape in modern Chinese national identity. Emphasizing the interactions between people and nature, and using bodies of water in China as a geographical point of departure, Zhang’s work illustrates the social, cultural, economic, and emotional impacts of modernization in China. His photographic series of the Northwestern region of China captures the poetic, subtle, and meditative essence of historical and modern aspects of the environment in visual representations inspired by landscape paintings from Song (960-1279) and Yuan dynasties (1279-1368). Manifesting the splendor and significance of the natural landscape, Zhang’s photography ruminates on modern landscapes as a visual archive embedded in the process of rapid modernization and ever-changing conditions of China.

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Colors:

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• pollution.n.01
• modernization.n.01
• landscape.n.01
• environmental.a.02
• natural_resource.n.01
• chinese photographers