UCCA Beijing Open Today, 10:00-19:00 (Final entry: 18:30)
UCCA Dune Open Today, 9:30-18:00 (Final entry: 17:30)
UCCA Clay Open Today, 9:00-18:00 (Final entry: 17:30)
Audio Guide
I was in an exhibition at Princeton University in 2009, where they asked the artists to create a piece of art inspired by something in their collection. And they have this very important set of paintings of the Xiao Xiang Ba Jing [潇湘八景, Eight Views of Xiaoxiang], that’s in Hunan. The Xiao Xiang Ba Jing was a really important theme in painting back in the Song Dynasty. And so it became a kind of a little quest, a challenge for me to try to find real sites that evoke the spirit of those classical paintings and poems.
And I thought at the time it was a very challenging thing. But it actually, it ended up being really just a training project for the Chang Jiang [Yangtze], which was a much larger scale project. Because there are so many iconic works in classical Chinese painting that represent the Chang Jiang. It’s a very intimidating subject. And so there’s many iconic paintings, but the one that was most helpful to me was this one particular painting in the collection of the Freer—this is the National Gallery of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. There’s a scroll. It’s by an anonymous artist, but it’s assumed to date from the late Song dynasty because of the names. So it’s a painting of the Yangtze River, but it includes many labels of towns and temples and other sites along the river.
I used that scroll almost as like a starting point to try to translate that into a real-world geographical understanding of the river. And so you look at the scroll, and other artworks too, then look at online satellite imaging and figure out some of these places still exist, some have disappeared, some have become big cities. Many of them have been renamed. And so just start planning out: okay, here’s this site. Now, is it possible for me to get there? Or is it possible to get there, get pretty close and then can I somehow make my way to find a particular site? Or if there’s no mountains, how can I get some vantage point where I can see the river from somewhere? It was important to prepare like several options for each location because sometimes it looks okay on a satellite image, but then when you get there, the view may be blocked, obscured by foliage or just things have changed and there’s no way to get there. And this is 2010, 11, 12. A lot of the photography was those few years. And then after that, 2013, 14, 15 was mostly mounting the photography.
And really looking back to China at that particular time, it was like the whole country was being transformed. Looking back now, it was a really good time to choose to do that particular project because it represents this moment of great change.
And I thought at the time it was a very challenging thing. But it actually, it ended up being really just a training project for the Chang Jiang [Yangtze], which was a much larger scale project. Because there are so many iconic works in classical Chinese painting that represent the Chang Jiang. It’s a very intimidating subject. And so there’s many iconic paintings, but the one that was most helpful to me was this one particular painting in the collection of the Freer—this is the National Gallery of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. There’s a scroll. It’s by an anonymous artist, but it’s assumed to date from the late Song dynasty because of the names. So it’s a painting of the Yangtze River, but it includes many labels of towns and temples and other sites along the river.
I used that scroll almost as like a starting point to try to translate that into a real-world geographical understanding of the river. And so you look at the scroll, and other artworks too, then look at online satellite imaging and figure out some of these places still exist, some have disappeared, some have become big cities. Many of them have been renamed. And so just start planning out: okay, here’s this site. Now, is it possible for me to get there? Or is it possible to get there, get pretty close and then can I somehow make my way to find a particular site? Or if there’s no mountains, how can I get some vantage point where I can see the river from somewhere? It was important to prepare like several options for each location because sometimes it looks okay on a satellite image, but then when you get there, the view may be blocked, obscured by foliage or just things have changed and there’s no way to get there. And this is 2010, 11, 12. A lot of the photography was those few years. And then after that, 2013, 14, 15 was mostly mounting the photography.
And really looking back to China at that particular time, it was like the whole country was being transformed. Looking back now, it was a really good time to choose to do that particular project because it represents this moment of great change.
So at the start of the exhibition, we’re looking at the two sources of the river. In painting or maps-slash-paintings, the traditional representations of the Yangtze River, they usually depicted the source as the Min Jiang [Min River] in Sichuan province. Now we know that if you follow connecting waterways, you can actually follow much farther into Qinghai province, going all the way through this Tuotuo He, the Jinsha Jiang, Tongtian He. And because I’m doing something based on art history, I felt it was important to photograph both sources. It’s hard to follow the whole series geographically in one line because it's really shaped more like a Y, a capital Y. Eventually they merge together and become the Chang Jiang. So we’re placing the two disparate sources of the river next to each other, even though those two places are far apart geographically. So the Tuotuo He scroll shows [the] scientific farthest away point where the Yangtze River starts. It’s actually just after passing thunderstorms, so that’s why the sky looks a bit dramatic. Right next to the Tuotuo He we have the Min Shan [Min Mountains], the traditional source of the river.
The Hu Tiao Xia, the Tiger Leaping Gorge scroll, was the only site along the river where I had such a wide, unobscured view of the river from one horizon to the next. So you’re really thinking about 180 degrees, so wide it’s impossible for your eyes to see both ends of it at the same time. And so as long as there’s enough of the negative that repeats, photographing one little part to the next, I can just line those up and we get the whole view. But what happens is the image gets distorted. And so many of the scrolls in the series are really just one slice of one photo. They may look panoramic, but they’re really not that panoramic, because it’s just a matter of me centering the river flowing across a film frame and then just cropping away the foreground and the sky. But this was so wide that it took several photographs to kind of stitch it all together. It’s almost like you imagine yourself looking straight down into it, like you’re standing on the cliff. Imagine like a really strong wind. It’s a little scary. And if you tilt your head to the left, then you can see how the left side gets kind of aligned. Then if you tilt your head to the right, you could see how the right side aligns and you look straight down into it to see the valley.
And listening to the audio guide, people can see there’s a picture on their phone. That was my travel companion, A Ge, who took a picture of me standing on the edge of this cliff, looking down into the river. It was a little hard to get to this spot. There was even a landslide right around that time. But I survived, so it was okay.
And listening to the audio guide, people can see there’s a picture on their phone. That was my travel companion, A Ge, who took a picture of me standing on the edge of this cliff, looking down into the river. It was a little hard to get to this spot. There was even a landslide right around that time. But I survived, so it was okay.
If you’re looking at the scroll called Jiading Fu, and right at the start of the scroll, it looks almost like mountains, but those are actually high-rise tall buildings that were pretty new. So then it kind of flows into this a little windswept island. Off towards the end of the scroll, the left side of the scroll, there’s a tiny little pagoda on top of the mountain. If you’re facing this scroll and you turn around 180 degrees in the exhibition, now you are facing the Da Fo Xiang [The Great Buddha] scroll. And so that’s actually me physically crossing the river to stand at that pagoda that we were just talking about and photograph back to where we were just standing before. So these two views are on opposite sides of the river facing each other. That’s why we put them across from each other in the show.
So if you travel just a little bit farther down the Min Jiang to the city of Yibin, this is where these two sources come together, the Jinsha Jiang and the Min Jiang. And if you look at this old scroll from the Freer, which had been kind of my inspiration, I guess at that time the name Ma Hu or something was a feature near there. The Ma Hu Jiang they called it. And so I used the name from the old scroll where these came together and called it Ma Hu Jiang He [Ma Hu Confluence].
It doesn’t feel like it, but that was in the summertime. It was extremely hot that day. I remember that. You know, often in the South, it tends to be misty. Winter you have mist for one reason, and summer you have mist for other reasons, from heat. But it being black and white photography, images tend to unify through grayscale, despite the season that they’re photographed in.
It doesn’t feel like it, but that was in the summertime. It was extremely hot that day. I remember that. You know, often in the South, it tends to be misty. Winter you have mist for one reason, and summer you have mist for other reasons, from heat. But it being black and white photography, images tend to unify through grayscale, despite the season that they’re photographed in.
As we travel farther east along the river, we’re jumping ahead quite far distances. But you can see many of the connecting spaces in the projection. It’s got all 42 scrolls. So to go from the Yuezhou scroll to the Kui Fu scroll, you’re passing Chongqing. And this site is very iconic because it's even been used in China's money, like the old 10 kuai, the old 10 yuan. It’s always an important feature on paintings or maps of this area.
This is a very interesting view because if you look in the bottom left corner, you can see Baidi Temple, right? If you look at an old painting of that temple, it would not require a bridge to get there. But because the water level has already risen from the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, which is still like 150 kilometers downriver from here, now you need a bridge to get there. The landscape has really changed quite a bit.
This is a very interesting view because if you look in the bottom left corner, you can see Baidi Temple, right? If you look at an old painting of that temple, it would not require a bridge to get there. But because the water level has already risen from the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, which is still like 150 kilometers downriver from here, now you need a bridge to get there. The landscape has really changed quite a bit.
So Fuchi , we’re already in Hubei province now. There is on that old Song Dynasty scroll at the Freer, there's a town called Fuchi, and that town still exists. And so when I looked at Google Earth, figuring out how could I get a high vantage point overlooking Fuchi to take the picture, I saw there was a mountain. And so I made instructions for how to get to that mountain. But then when I got there, it was this huge mining site. So if you look over on the left side of the scroll, the spot where I would have been standing was now gone. It’s all been mined away. And even the people working there were saying that this spot where I was standing will also be gone in a matter of days because they're mining there. This was a very lively construction site. I know a lot of the images look very quiet or silent, but they actually contain hundreds or thousands of people. This is actually, this Fuchi scroll is, I think, the only scroll where you can actually see figures. There’s a little bright rectangular roof. You’ll see a couple of really tiny figures.
Jiankang is the classical name of Nanjing. So now we’re already at the city of Nanjing. And this is the longest scroll in the series. It’s almost about 10 meters. Again, it looks very panoramic, but this is why it’s so grainy. It’s because it’s enlarged so much, a thin slice. At the very beginning is the bridge across the Yangtze River , one of the first to go across the river. I should even say in this series there are so many more bridges across the Yangtze River now than there were even when I was photographing this series. A lot of times photographing this series I had to take ferry boats to get from one side of the river to the other. But a lot of the scrolls in the series that we can see in projection, it shows bridges that are just kind of half-built, half like hanging over the river. So it was a very important moment historically, because once those bridges are up, they’ll be there for a long time.
This is an amazingly long bridge north of Shanghai that goes to Chongming Dao [Chongming Island]. We’re facing east as the river meets the ocean. You can see a little bit, the last little bits of land at either end. And if you look kind of towards the left edge, there are some boats off in the distance. And then right in the center, you have one last dredging boat kind of heading off towards that area. If there was any iconic image combining the whole series together, it would be a dredging boat. It almost felt like this last little... statement or period at the end of the series, one last little boat as the water reaches the sea.
So these images, they're really cropped to be viewed in the handscroll format. Some years ago, there was a curator of a film festival of Chinese film who had asked to show some of my photographs in between film screenings, I thought… it’s hard from a seat in a movie theater to see anything in a long skinny slice of a photo. And so my idea was, I'll just create a file where we pan across the scroll from one side to another, almost like the view of looking at the physical handscroll if you were unrolling it with your hands. Because it’s such a long series, it’s really impossible to show all 42 scrolls next to each other. I think it’s like 170 meters or something like that. And so this was a way where we could see the whole series together, for anyone that would like to sit and watch it. There’s no music, there’s no sound, but it's a very meditative way to just sit and enjoy seeing the river go by. I still would love and encourage anybody to take time and travel the length of the Chang Jiang, but—until then—you can do it in a much easier way by just sitting and watching the projection.
Yi Shan Kui [Yi Mountain Passages] is a relatively early work, but it’s quite important in that the subject matter is Huangshan— Yellow Mountain—which is iconic for scenery and painting. This is I think 2008, I went to photograph, 2008 or 9, went to photograph Huangshan. And a lot of the photographic images were almost too stereotypical. Like just exactly what people imagine when they envision Chinese landscape painting of rocks and pines. And so, I wanted to kind of break away from that a bit. It forced me to look more closely at details, which became very important to how I looked at works later on. And so it was an important trip.
I think if you follow a projection from the first image to the last image, they become a little bit more abstract as you look at them. More inky—like recognizable in the beginning and more like abstract ink towards the end. But at the same time, it’s also different scales of zooming in and out of the film frame. So this is a good piece for just kind of letting the eye play around with a feeling of scale and distance.
I think if you follow a projection from the first image to the last image, they become a little bit more abstract as you look at them. More inky—like recognizable in the beginning and more like abstract ink towards the end. But at the same time, it’s also different scales of zooming in and out of the film frame. So this is a good piece for just kind of letting the eye play around with a feeling of scale and distance.
This is my only piece of art that deals with photography under a microscope. And this just happened to be luck. It was my older sister who teaches in a primary school in New York, and they were just getting rid of some equipment from the school. And there was this microscope that was going to be dumped I think. So with my own daughter, I was kind of just figured we can look at some things under the microscope. And one of those things was salt crystals. Salt crystals have very sharp edges to them. And so I just wanted to see how they would change if we see them dissolve. And what happened was, unexpectedly, as these crystals dissolve, these little landscapes emerge. And as the light kind of reflects through the salt crystals, these blues and purples, these colors emerge. And so I photographed them. It's really nice to see how what we can call fractals or patterns of the larger landscape can be found reflected in microscopic images too. And I think the same thing applies when you look at large-scale images that we see from astronomy, too. These patterns recur at all kinds of scales.
My first ever pieces were these accordion fold albums, almost exclusively in the beginning. I mean accordion fold albums have a long history. And if you go to an art supply store now in China, it’s very common to find empty books like this, blank books, because it gives you flexibility. You can open one page, do something on that one page or two pages, or you could open the whole book. And so there’s no one correct way to look at it. So this is why for this particular work, we stood it up so you can get some distance up close or stand back to see the whole thing.
I remember the idea being I could stand on one side of the spirit road and photograph from one side, then walk around to the other side from the same distance and photograph the other side. So you kind of have the front and back of each statue. This is what, 2005, very early for me. And there were some farmers there like asking asked why are you photographing this? They've already just become part of the landscape. T hey're so used to them being there. There's these large statues. Some of them, their heads are missing because they've been stolen or smuggled, maybe for art smuggling. But for the most part, they're there. And so this is the spirit road, the tomb related to the Emperor Song Zhezong, who died in the year 1100.
And on one of the sides of the scroll where we see this motorcycle kind of coming into the frame, that's because the path that runs between these statues… I mean, there’s a path between the statues because off to the side, there’s a little man-made hill, a mountain, that’s the tomb of where they would bury the emperor or member of the imperial family. And then the spirit of the emperor would travel this path. And then these are the ministers and creatures that would escort his spirit to the next world. And so that path still exists and is being used by people now. And so I remember I took pictures without a motorcycle. And then I also heard that sound, “eeeee,” and this motorcycle coming up. And so I just waited for… it was crossing the frame and took the picture. And it really kind of... shrunk a big historical scale into one moment.
I remember the idea being I could stand on one side of the spirit road and photograph from one side, then walk around to the other side from the same distance and photograph the other side. So you kind of have the front and back of each statue. This is what, 2005, very early for me. And there were some farmers there like asking asked why are you photographing this? They've already just become part of the landscape. T hey're so used to them being there. There's these large statues. Some of them, their heads are missing because they've been stolen or smuggled, maybe for art smuggling. But for the most part, they're there. And so this is the spirit road, the tomb related to the Emperor Song Zhezong, who died in the year 1100.
And on one of the sides of the scroll where we see this motorcycle kind of coming into the frame, that's because the path that runs between these statues… I mean, there’s a path between the statues because off to the side, there’s a little man-made hill, a mountain, that’s the tomb of where they would bury the emperor or member of the imperial family. And then the spirit of the emperor would travel this path. And then these are the ministers and creatures that would escort his spirit to the next world. And so that path still exists and is being used by people now. And so I remember I took pictures without a motorcycle. And then I also heard that sound, “eeeee,” and this motorcycle coming up. And so I just waited for… it was crossing the frame and took the picture. And it really kind of... shrunk a big historical scale into one moment.
There are so many iconic steles in China that record important events. But many of them are not necessarily interesting photographically. And this one is one of the most beautiful photographically, because there’s so much going on. So this is the stele that was erected as memorial after the death of Wu Zetian, who was China’s really only female emperor, [for the] Tang Dynasty. So Wu Zi Bei means wordless stele, that no words were put on the stele, it was just blank when it was erected. But then over the centuries, inscriptions were added, and then through time, they also wore away, to the point where only a little bit of it is still legible today. It's not only this big, it's also very thick, like one and a half meters thick. It’s a very large stone. And so it’s this very heavy object that has been, almost through this artwork, has been translated into this light, thin piece of paper, almost like a rubbing.
It's a photograph, so technically it’s a rubbing of the stele, but a rubbing would be more legible because some of these words actually are legible. But through the process of shrinking this huge stele down into a 35 mm film frame and then reprinting it by enlarging it back to its original size at a one-to-one scale, it has been made illegible again. So it earns the right to be called Wordless Stele again. And so it’s kind of just playing with the idea of the weight of an object, the weight of history, the tradition of making rubbings from steles, and how photography is a kind of way of recording and rubbing, and how it becomes something frail, yet also has a lot of weight to it.
It's a photograph, so technically it’s a rubbing of the stele, but a rubbing would be more legible because some of these words actually are legible. But through the process of shrinking this huge stele down into a 35 mm film frame and then reprinting it by enlarging it back to its original size at a one-to-one scale, it has been made illegible again. So it earns the right to be called Wordless Stele again. And so it’s kind of just playing with the idea of the weight of an object, the weight of history, the tradition of making rubbings from steles, and how photography is a kind of way of recording and rubbing, and how it becomes something frail, yet also has a lot of weight to it.
I've been writing calligraphy since 2003, just for my own education. But I was always very hesitant to include it together with my fine art because I didn’t think it was good enough and didn't want it to be a novelty of the calligraphy of the Westerner. But only after COVID or actually the very start of COVID was the first time when I tried a little bit of including some calligraphy together with the photography. I write the calligraphy separately on a separate sheet of paper because it usually takes me many tries before I am happy with the result. And then I’ll scan that and then combine it with the photography together.
I started experimenting with some bilingual calligraphy pieces. And it resulted in… this was the most recent work in the show, just from less than a year ago, early 2025. We have two individual, completely standalone texts. One is a very iconic text: those that study Chinese art history would know this Su Shi, his “Latter Ode to Red Cliff,” where he's [at] this iconic site on the Yangtze River. He’s traveled to Red Cliff, and near the end of the trip, he’s on a boat, and he sees this crane fly overhead. And then after that at home, he dreams about it. It was written in the year 1082. And then the English text is by the American author, Henry David Thoreau… it’s from a book called A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, where he's traveling on a boat trip with his older brother, John. And right towards the end of this boat trip, he has these herons fly overhead. And he's describing his thoughts about that experience. And so it’s almost the same story separated by half a planet and about 800 years. But I just thought this is such a beautiful way of how the same aesthetic flows together in this similar story across time and space.
And so I took a long time to essentially lay out how the words would flow together, doing a little bit of math and figure[d] like for every four or five English words, I need to have two Chinese words. So roughly they start and end around the same spot. So it was just a matter of writing it often enough that I was happy with the result. And then the calligraphy is combined with an image of birds at Poyang Hu [Poyang Lake].
I started experimenting with some bilingual calligraphy pieces. And it resulted in… this was the most recent work in the show, just from less than a year ago, early 2025. We have two individual, completely standalone texts. One is a very iconic text: those that study Chinese art history would know this Su Shi, his “Latter Ode to Red Cliff,” where he's [at] this iconic site on the Yangtze River. He’s traveled to Red Cliff, and near the end of the trip, he’s on a boat, and he sees this crane fly overhead. And then after that at home, he dreams about it. It was written in the year 1082. And then the English text is by the American author, Henry David Thoreau… it’s from a book called A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, where he's traveling on a boat trip with his older brother, John. And right towards the end of this boat trip, he has these herons fly overhead. And he's describing his thoughts about that experience. And so it’s almost the same story separated by half a planet and about 800 years. But I just thought this is such a beautiful way of how the same aesthetic flows together in this similar story across time and space.
And so I took a long time to essentially lay out how the words would flow together, doing a little bit of math and figure[d] like for every four or five English words, I need to have two Chinese words. So roughly they start and end around the same spot. So it was just a matter of writing it often enough that I was happy with the result. And then the calligraphy is combined with an image of birds at Poyang Hu [Poyang Lake].
Inspiration for the Yangtze River Series
I was in an exhibition at Princeton University in 2009, where they asked the artists to create a piece of art inspired by something in their collection. And they have this very important set of paintings of the Xiao Xiang Ba Jing [潇湘八景, Eight Views of Xiaoxiang], that’s in Hunan. The Xiao Xiang Ba Jing was a really important theme in painting back in the Song Dynasty. And so it became a kind of a little quest, a challenge for me to try to find real sites that evoke the spirit of those classical paintings and poems.
And I thought at the time it was a very challenging thing. But it actually, it ended up being really just a training project for the Chang Jiang [Yangtze], which was a much larger scale project. Because there are so many iconic works in classical Chinese painting that represent the Chang Jiang. It’s a very intimidating subject. And so there’s many iconic paintings, but the one that was most helpful to me was this one particular painting in the collection of the Freer—this is the National Gallery of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. There’s a scroll. It’s by an anonymous artist, but it’s assumed to date from the late Song dynasty because of the names. So it’s a painting of the Yangtze River, but it includes many labels of towns and temples and other sites along the river.
I used that scroll almost as like a starting point to try to translate that into a real-world geographical understanding of the river. And so you look at the scroll, and other artworks too, then look at online satellite imaging and figure out some of these places still exist, some have disappeared, some have become big cities. Many of them have been renamed. And so just start planning out: okay, here’s this site. Now, is it possible for me to get there? Or is it possible to get there, get pretty close and then can I somehow make my way to find a particular site? Or if there’s no mountains, how can I get some vantage point where I can see the river from somewhere? It was important to prepare like several options for each location because sometimes it looks okay on a satellite image, but then when you get there, the view may be blocked, obscured by foliage or just things have changed and there’s no way to get there. And this is 2010, 11, 12. A lot of the photography was those few years. And then after that, 2013, 14, 15 was mostly mounting the photography.
And really looking back to China at that particular time, it was like the whole country was being transformed. Looking back now, it was a really good time to choose to do that particular project because it represents this moment of great change.
And I thought at the time it was a very challenging thing. But it actually, it ended up being really just a training project for the Chang Jiang [Yangtze], which was a much larger scale project. Because there are so many iconic works in classical Chinese painting that represent the Chang Jiang. It’s a very intimidating subject. And so there’s many iconic paintings, but the one that was most helpful to me was this one particular painting in the collection of the Freer—this is the National Gallery of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. There’s a scroll. It’s by an anonymous artist, but it’s assumed to date from the late Song dynasty because of the names. So it’s a painting of the Yangtze River, but it includes many labels of towns and temples and other sites along the river.
I used that scroll almost as like a starting point to try to translate that into a real-world geographical understanding of the river. And so you look at the scroll, and other artworks too, then look at online satellite imaging and figure out some of these places still exist, some have disappeared, some have become big cities. Many of them have been renamed. And so just start planning out: okay, here’s this site. Now, is it possible for me to get there? Or is it possible to get there, get pretty close and then can I somehow make my way to find a particular site? Or if there’s no mountains, how can I get some vantage point where I can see the river from somewhere? It was important to prepare like several options for each location because sometimes it looks okay on a satellite image, but then when you get there, the view may be blocked, obscured by foliage or just things have changed and there’s no way to get there. And this is 2010, 11, 12. A lot of the photography was those few years. And then after that, 2013, 14, 15 was mostly mounting the photography.
And really looking back to China at that particular time, it was like the whole country was being transformed. Looking back now, it was a really good time to choose to do that particular project because it represents this moment of great change.
Tuotuo River and Min Mountains
So at the start of the exhibition, we’re looking at the two sources of the river. In painting or maps-slash-paintings, the traditional representations of the Yangtze River, they usually depicted the source as the Min Jiang [Min River] in Sichuan province. Now we know that if you follow connecting waterways, you can actually follow much farther into Qinghai province, going all the way through this Tuotuo He, the Jinsha Jiang, Tongtian He. And because I’m doing something based on art history, I felt it was important to photograph both sources. It’s hard to follow the whole series geographically in one line because it's really shaped more like a Y, a capital Y. Eventually they merge together and become the Chang Jiang. So we’re placing the two disparate sources of the river next to each other, even though those two places are far apart geographically. So the Tuotuo He scroll shows [the] scientific farthest away point where the Yangtze River starts. It’s actually just after passing thunderstorms, so that’s why the sky looks a bit dramatic. Right next to the Tuotuo He we have the Min Shan [Min Mountains], the traditional source of the river.
Tiger Leaping Gorge
The Hu Tiao Xia, the Tiger Leaping Gorge scroll, was the only site along the river where I had such a wide, unobscured view of the river from one horizon to the next. So you’re really thinking about 180 degrees, so wide it’s impossible for your eyes to see both ends of it at the same time. And so as long as there’s enough of the negative that repeats, photographing one little part to the next, I can just line those up and we get the whole view. But what happens is the image gets distorted. And so many of the scrolls in the series are really just one slice of one photo. They may look panoramic, but they’re really not that panoramic, because it’s just a matter of me centering the river flowing across a film frame and then just cropping away the foreground and the sky. But this was so wide that it took several photographs to kind of stitch it all together. It’s almost like you imagine yourself looking straight down into it, like you’re standing on the cliff. Imagine like a really strong wind. It’s a little scary. And if you tilt your head to the left, then you can see how the left side gets kind of aligned. Then if you tilt your head to the right, you could see how the right side aligns and you look straight down into it to see the valley.
And listening to the audio guide, people can see there’s a picture on their phone. That was my travel companion, A Ge, who took a picture of me standing on the edge of this cliff, looking down into the river. It was a little hard to get to this spot. There was even a landslide right around that time. But I survived, so it was okay.
And listening to the audio guide, people can see there’s a picture on their phone. That was my travel companion, A Ge, who took a picture of me standing on the edge of this cliff, looking down into the river. It was a little hard to get to this spot. There was even a landslide right around that time. But I survived, so it was okay.
Jiading Fu and The Great Buddha
If you’re looking at the scroll called Jiading Fu, and right at the start of the scroll, it looks almost like mountains, but those are actually high-rise tall buildings that were pretty new. So then it kind of flows into this a little windswept island. Off towards the end of the scroll, the left side of the scroll, there’s a tiny little pagoda on top of the mountain. If you’re facing this scroll and you turn around 180 degrees in the exhibition, now you are facing the Da Fo Xiang [The Great Buddha] scroll. And so that’s actually me physically crossing the river to stand at that pagoda that we were just talking about and photograph back to where we were just standing before. So these two views are on opposite sides of the river facing each other. That’s why we put them across from each other in the show.
Ma Hu Confluence
So if you travel just a little bit farther down the Min Jiang to the city of Yibin, this is where these two sources come together, the Jinsha Jiang and the Min Jiang. And if you look at this old scroll from the Freer, which had been kind of my inspiration, I guess at that time the name Ma Hu or something was a feature near there. The Ma Hu Jiang they called it. And so I used the name from the old scroll where these came together and called it Ma Hu Jiang He [Ma Hu Confluence].
It doesn’t feel like it, but that was in the summertime. It was extremely hot that day. I remember that. You know, often in the South, it tends to be misty. Winter you have mist for one reason, and summer you have mist for other reasons, from heat. But it being black and white photography, images tend to unify through grayscale, despite the season that they’re photographed in.
It doesn’t feel like it, but that was in the summertime. It was extremely hot that day. I remember that. You know, often in the South, it tends to be misty. Winter you have mist for one reason, and summer you have mist for other reasons, from heat. But it being black and white photography, images tend to unify through grayscale, despite the season that they’re photographed in.
Kui Fu
As we travel farther east along the river, we’re jumping ahead quite far distances. But you can see many of the connecting spaces in the projection. It’s got all 42 scrolls. So to go from the Yuezhou scroll to the Kui Fu scroll, you’re passing Chongqing. And this site is very iconic because it's even been used in China's money, like the old 10 kuai, the old 10 yuan. It’s always an important feature on paintings or maps of this area.
This is a very interesting view because if you look in the bottom left corner, you can see Baidi Temple, right? If you look at an old painting of that temple, it would not require a bridge to get there. But because the water level has already risen from the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, which is still like 150 kilometers downriver from here, now you need a bridge to get there. The landscape has really changed quite a bit.
This is a very interesting view because if you look in the bottom left corner, you can see Baidi Temple, right? If you look at an old painting of that temple, it would not require a bridge to get there. But because the water level has already risen from the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, which is still like 150 kilometers downriver from here, now you need a bridge to get there. The landscape has really changed quite a bit.
Fuchi
So Fuchi , we’re already in Hubei province now. There is on that old Song Dynasty scroll at the Freer, there's a town called Fuchi, and that town still exists. And so when I looked at Google Earth, figuring out how could I get a high vantage point overlooking Fuchi to take the picture, I saw there was a mountain. And so I made instructions for how to get to that mountain. But then when I got there, it was this huge mining site. So if you look over on the left side of the scroll, the spot where I would have been standing was now gone. It’s all been mined away. And even the people working there were saying that this spot where I was standing will also be gone in a matter of days because they're mining there. This was a very lively construction site. I know a lot of the images look very quiet or silent, but they actually contain hundreds or thousands of people. This is actually, this Fuchi scroll is, I think, the only scroll where you can actually see figures. There’s a little bright rectangular roof. You’ll see a couple of really tiny figures.
Jiankang
Jiankang is the classical name of Nanjing. So now we’re already at the city of Nanjing. And this is the longest scroll in the series. It’s almost about 10 meters. Again, it looks very panoramic, but this is why it’s so grainy. It’s because it’s enlarged so much, a thin slice. At the very beginning is the bridge across the Yangtze River , one of the first to go across the river. I should even say in this series there are so many more bridges across the Yangtze River now than there were even when I was photographing this series. A lot of times photographing this series I had to take ferry boats to get from one side of the river to the other. But a lot of the scrolls in the series that we can see in projection, it shows bridges that are just kind of half-built, half like hanging over the river. So it was a very important moment historically, because once those bridges are up, they’ll be there for a long time.
Haimen
This is an amazingly long bridge north of Shanghai that goes to Chongming Dao [Chongming Island]. We’re facing east as the river meets the ocean. You can see a little bit, the last little bits of land at either end. And if you look kind of towards the left edge, there are some boats off in the distance. And then right in the center, you have one last dredging boat kind of heading off towards that area. If there was any iconic image combining the whole series together, it would be a dredging boat. It almost felt like this last little... statement or period at the end of the series, one last little boat as the water reaches the sea.
Ten Thousand Li of Yangtze River (Video)
So these images, they're really cropped to be viewed in the handscroll format. Some years ago, there was a curator of a film festival of Chinese film who had asked to show some of my photographs in between film screenings, I thought… it’s hard from a seat in a movie theater to see anything in a long skinny slice of a photo. And so my idea was, I'll just create a file where we pan across the scroll from one side to another, almost like the view of looking at the physical handscroll if you were unrolling it with your hands. Because it’s such a long series, it’s really impossible to show all 42 scrolls next to each other. I think it’s like 170 meters or something like that. And so this was a way where we could see the whole series together, for anyone that would like to sit and watch it. There’s no music, there’s no sound, but it's a very meditative way to just sit and enjoy seeing the river go by. I still would love and encourage anybody to take time and travel the length of the Chang Jiang, but—until then—you can do it in a much easier way by just sitting and watching the projection.
Yi Mountain Passages
Yi Shan Kui [Yi Mountain Passages] is a relatively early work, but it’s quite important in that the subject matter is Huangshan— Yellow Mountain—which is iconic for scenery and painting. This is I think 2008, I went to photograph, 2008 or 9, went to photograph Huangshan. And a lot of the photographic images were almost too stereotypical. Like just exactly what people imagine when they envision Chinese landscape painting of rocks and pines. And so, I wanted to kind of break away from that a bit. It forced me to look more closely at details, which became very important to how I looked at works later on. And so it was an important trip.
I think if you follow a projection from the first image to the last image, they become a little bit more abstract as you look at them. More inky—like recognizable in the beginning and more like abstract ink towards the end. But at the same time, it’s also different scales of zooming in and out of the film frame. So this is a good piece for just kind of letting the eye play around with a feeling of scale and distance.
I think if you follow a projection from the first image to the last image, they become a little bit more abstract as you look at them. More inky—like recognizable in the beginning and more like abstract ink towards the end. But at the same time, it’s also different scales of zooming in and out of the film frame. So this is a good piece for just kind of letting the eye play around with a feeling of scale and distance.
Saltscape
This is my only piece of art that deals with photography under a microscope. And this just happened to be luck. It was my older sister who teaches in a primary school in New York, and they were just getting rid of some equipment from the school. And there was this microscope that was going to be dumped I think. So with my own daughter, I was kind of just figured we can look at some things under the microscope. And one of those things was salt crystals. Salt crystals have very sharp edges to them. And so I just wanted to see how they would change if we see them dissolve. And what happened was, unexpectedly, as these crystals dissolve, these little landscapes emerge. And as the light kind of reflects through the salt crystals, these blues and purples, these colors emerge. And so I photographed them. It's really nice to see how what we can call fractals or patterns of the larger landscape can be found reflected in microscopic images too. And I think the same thing applies when you look at large-scale images that we see from astronomy, too. These patterns recur at all kinds of scales.
The Northern Song Spirit Road
My first ever pieces were these accordion fold albums, almost exclusively in the beginning. I mean accordion fold albums have a long history. And if you go to an art supply store now in China, it’s very common to find empty books like this, blank books, because it gives you flexibility. You can open one page, do something on that one page or two pages, or you could open the whole book. And so there’s no one correct way to look at it. So this is why for this particular work, we stood it up so you can get some distance up close or stand back to see the whole thing.
I remember the idea being I could stand on one side of the spirit road and photograph from one side, then walk around to the other side from the same distance and photograph the other side. So you kind of have the front and back of each statue. This is what, 2005, very early for me. And there were some farmers there like asking asked why are you photographing this? They've already just become part of the landscape. T hey're so used to them being there. There's these large statues. Some of them, their heads are missing because they've been stolen or smuggled, maybe for art smuggling. But for the most part, they're there. And so this is the spirit road, the tomb related to the Emperor Song Zhezong, who died in the year 1100.
And on one of the sides of the scroll where we see this motorcycle kind of coming into the frame, that's because the path that runs between these statues… I mean, there’s a path between the statues because off to the side, there’s a little man-made hill, a mountain, that’s the tomb of where they would bury the emperor or member of the imperial family. And then the spirit of the emperor would travel this path. And then these are the ministers and creatures that would escort his spirit to the next world. And so that path still exists and is being used by people now. And so I remember I took pictures without a motorcycle. And then I also heard that sound, “eeeee,” and this motorcycle coming up. And so I just waited for… it was crossing the frame and took the picture. And it really kind of... shrunk a big historical scale into one moment.
I remember the idea being I could stand on one side of the spirit road and photograph from one side, then walk around to the other side from the same distance and photograph the other side. So you kind of have the front and back of each statue. This is what, 2005, very early for me. And there were some farmers there like asking asked why are you photographing this? They've already just become part of the landscape. T hey're so used to them being there. There's these large statues. Some of them, their heads are missing because they've been stolen or smuggled, maybe for art smuggling. But for the most part, they're there. And so this is the spirit road, the tomb related to the Emperor Song Zhezong, who died in the year 1100.
And on one of the sides of the scroll where we see this motorcycle kind of coming into the frame, that's because the path that runs between these statues… I mean, there’s a path between the statues because off to the side, there’s a little man-made hill, a mountain, that’s the tomb of where they would bury the emperor or member of the imperial family. And then the spirit of the emperor would travel this path. And then these are the ministers and creatures that would escort his spirit to the next world. And so that path still exists and is being used by people now. And so I remember I took pictures without a motorcycle. And then I also heard that sound, “eeeee,” and this motorcycle coming up. And so I just waited for… it was crossing the frame and took the picture. And it really kind of... shrunk a big historical scale into one moment.
Wordless Stele
There are so many iconic steles in China that record important events. But many of them are not necessarily interesting photographically. And this one is one of the most beautiful photographically, because there’s so much going on. So this is the stele that was erected as memorial after the death of Wu Zetian, who was China’s really only female emperor, [for the] Tang Dynasty. So Wu Zi Bei means wordless stele, that no words were put on the stele, it was just blank when it was erected. But then over the centuries, inscriptions were added, and then through time, they also wore away, to the point where only a little bit of it is still legible today. It's not only this big, it's also very thick, like one and a half meters thick. It’s a very large stone. And so it’s this very heavy object that has been, almost through this artwork, has been translated into this light, thin piece of paper, almost like a rubbing.
It's a photograph, so technically it’s a rubbing of the stele, but a rubbing would be more legible because some of these words actually are legible. But through the process of shrinking this huge stele down into a 35 mm film frame and then reprinting it by enlarging it back to its original size at a one-to-one scale, it has been made illegible again. So it earns the right to be called Wordless Stele again. And so it’s kind of just playing with the idea of the weight of an object, the weight of history, the tradition of making rubbings from steles, and how photography is a kind of way of recording and rubbing, and how it becomes something frail, yet also has a lot of weight to it.
It's a photograph, so technically it’s a rubbing of the stele, but a rubbing would be more legible because some of these words actually are legible. But through the process of shrinking this huge stele down into a 35 mm film frame and then reprinting it by enlarging it back to its original size at a one-to-one scale, it has been made illegible again. So it earns the right to be called Wordless Stele again. And so it’s kind of just playing with the idea of the weight of an object, the weight of history, the tradition of making rubbings from steles, and how photography is a kind of way of recording and rubbing, and how it becomes something frail, yet also has a lot of weight to it.
苏•Thoreau
I've been writing calligraphy since 2003, just for my own education. But I was always very hesitant to include it together with my fine art because I didn’t think it was good enough and didn't want it to be a novelty of the calligraphy of the Westerner. But only after COVID or actually the very start of COVID was the first time when I tried a little bit of including some calligraphy together with the photography. I write the calligraphy separately on a separate sheet of paper because it usually takes me many tries before I am happy with the result. And then I’ll scan that and then combine it with the photography together.
I started experimenting with some bilingual calligraphy pieces. And it resulted in… this was the most recent work in the show, just from less than a year ago, early 2025. We have two individual, completely standalone texts. One is a very iconic text: those that study Chinese art history would know this Su Shi, his “Latter Ode to Red Cliff,” where he's [at] this iconic site on the Yangtze River. He’s traveled to Red Cliff, and near the end of the trip, he’s on a boat, and he sees this crane fly overhead. And then after that at home, he dreams about it. It was written in the year 1082. And then the English text is by the American author, Henry David Thoreau… it’s from a book called A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, where he's traveling on a boat trip with his older brother, John. And right towards the end of this boat trip, he has these herons fly overhead. And he's describing his thoughts about that experience. And so it’s almost the same story separated by half a planet and about 800 years. But I just thought this is such a beautiful way of how the same aesthetic flows together in this similar story across time and space.
And so I took a long time to essentially lay out how the words would flow together, doing a little bit of math and figure[d] like for every four or five English words, I need to have two Chinese words. So roughly they start and end around the same spot. So it was just a matter of writing it often enough that I was happy with the result. And then the calligraphy is combined with an image of birds at Poyang Hu [Poyang Lake].
I started experimenting with some bilingual calligraphy pieces. And it resulted in… this was the most recent work in the show, just from less than a year ago, early 2025. We have two individual, completely standalone texts. One is a very iconic text: those that study Chinese art history would know this Su Shi, his “Latter Ode to Red Cliff,” where he's [at] this iconic site on the Yangtze River. He’s traveled to Red Cliff, and near the end of the trip, he’s on a boat, and he sees this crane fly overhead. And then after that at home, he dreams about it. It was written in the year 1082. And then the English text is by the American author, Henry David Thoreau… it’s from a book called A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, where he's traveling on a boat trip with his older brother, John. And right towards the end of this boat trip, he has these herons fly overhead. And he's describing his thoughts about that experience. And so it’s almost the same story separated by half a planet and about 800 years. But I just thought this is such a beautiful way of how the same aesthetic flows together in this similar story across time and space.
And so I took a long time to essentially lay out how the words would flow together, doing a little bit of math and figure[d] like for every four or five English words, I need to have two Chinese words. So roughly they start and end around the same spot. So it was just a matter of writing it often enough that I was happy with the result. And then the calligraphy is combined with an image of birds at Poyang Hu [Poyang Lake].
UCCA Beijing
Open Today, 10:00-19:00 (Final entry: 18:30)
798, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Beijing
Tel: +86 10 5780 0200
Fax: +86 10 5780 0200
UCCA Dune
Open Today, 9:30-18:00 (Final entry: 17:30)
Aranya Gold Coast, Beidaihe
Tel: +86 335 7522 652
UCCA Clay
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West Entrance, Creative & Cultural Ceramic Avenue, Dingshu Town, Yixing City, Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province
Tel: +86 0510 8767 9989
