Even Us Even Me

When Sun Yanchu began taking photographs, his first project “Obsessed” captured the immediate environs of his home in Zhengzhou. The style is documentary in impulse, the images full of strange details that reveal his eye for observation. It is not one thing above all others: not a single topic or object; nor a person or a place. Sun’s obsession belongs to a state of mind. What he observed most keenly were those minutiae within the changing environs, which might be construed as an attempt to provide evidence of existence, but as often as not simply delighted in the ambiguity they implied.

This is exemplified in a second series, “Lost Souls”, begun in 2013. The photographs selected for this book are taken from what is a much larger series spread across three different photographic formats. A part of the works on display here were made using a large-format 6’x17’ camera, of a type that is somewhat obsolete today. Modern smart phone and digital cameras make easy work of capturing panoramic frames, but in the prior analogue age, this was not quite so easy.

The subject, or object, of “Lost Souls” can be loosely described as landscape, but it feels like much more. As through the evolution of “shanshui” painting in China, in this book, nature serves as metaphor or vehicle for conveying a state of mind. This may be the photographer’s state of mind, but equally that of his generation, the society in which he exists, or the general aura of the times. The choice of black and white produces a particularly melancholy air and, where there are showers of rain, mist rising over the land, or wind whipping through tree tops, it is hard to say where the elements end and Sun’s motion/emotion begins. With the photographer being in motion, the framing of a scene is rather random, too, intuited almost rather than taken. The blurring of forms erases the borders of a precise, definitive reality. Yet, our conscious mind is clever. Regardless of what our eyes see, it has a knack of presenting us with a seemingly coherent and predictable reality. Looking at these photographs, we recognize fields, trees, and expanses of land in the countryside. The beauty of the blur and the effect it has on our brain is similar to that of shanshui painting. We intuitively understand the connection between objects or elements that the painter has chosen to highlight for us within a composition.

A medley of “Obsessed”, “Lost Souls”and Sun’s latest work of “Ficciones”, the book “Even Us, Even Me” makes its strongest appeal through its underlying sense of confirming the existence of a world outside of ourselves. These quivering images draw us in. We feel the vibrations of elemental energy coursing through the panoramas, sweeping us along on its currents. We get lost in their motion, taken out of ourselves, while simultaneously recalling times when we have been out in the embrace of nature, bracing the wind and realizing how good, if hard at times, it is to be alive.