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West Meets East
To enter the world, for world it is, contained in the photographs of Serge
Clément is to venture into a realm of shimmering reflections and
phantasmagoric perceptions. Made in Hong Kong and Shanghai during three
sojourns between 1995 and 1999, this collection momentarily stills on the
surface of the paper the thrumming energy of two cities in rapid transition.
It is often night in these photographs, but it is rarely quiet, for Chinese
urban nights are filled with shifting shadows and glimmering motion.
Avoiding overt theatricality, the fugitive effects of light that Clément has
glimpsed, then grasped, have something of the unsettling surprise produced
when the magician flourishes the ace of spades plucked from the lady1s ear.
There is perhaps a rightness, an inevitability in the result of the card
trick and so also these pictures have a happy finality, have become justly
frozen balances of light and dark.
When a photographer from the western world sets to work in an Asian city
one might expect the results to record the picturesque, to dwell on cultural
difference. Instead, these pictures are less windows on the east than
mirrors or refractions of the western world, not because of the inherent
culture-bound limitations of the western eye, framing the new in terms of
the familiar, but because the two worlds are now so closely coming to
resemble each other. However, like all good bodies of photographic work,
this moves beyond the actual circumstances of its production to invent a
place of its own.
Modern or modernizing Chinese cities have expanses of glass-fronted
storefronts and office buildings. Clément's remarkable ability to exploit
the potential of plate glass to merge interior and exterior, to blend what
is within with what is behind and beyond, gives many of these photographs
their uncanny charm and haunting force. Their mixture of the penetrable and
the opaque sometimes bring to mind Atget's studies of Parisian shop fronts,
but here the results are less fortuitous accidents than careful
premeditations. In the photograph, "Vitrine," made in Shanghai in 1999,
there is a semblance of a self-portrait, but the silhouette on the glass of
the photographer1s elbows holding up his camera merge into the forms of
laborers working in the interior of the space, their shapes outlined against
a yard with hanging laundry beyond them. To add to the complexity, the
surface of the window also reflects pedestrians unconcernedly striding
behind the photographer. (New York and Los Angeles are famous for deleting
their architectural histories, but Shanghai's excessive process of change
surpasses North American erasures as skyscrapers efface older structures and
new boulevards cut violent swaths through the urban fabric.) The facial
characteristics of passersby, the streams of moving headlights, and, in one
memorable image, vertical rows of graffiti in Chinese characters tell us
that we are not in Atget's Paris of 1910. These neatly ordered graffiti,
with a foreground shadow that suggests their maker, perhaps in flight, seem
less like the spontaneous markings of a passing hand but more like a
devotional text, recalling the intricate charts of the genealogies of
European royal houses that appeared on the subway walls near Columbia
University in the middle 1960s.
Because of the preponderance of nighttime scenes we are closer to being
in Brassaï's Paris of 1935, but Clément's photographs are darker, more
concerned with elusive and incidental light, and with activity one normally
associates with daytime hours. For example, in one picture construction
workers from the country labor by floodlight on rising towers while the
daytime shift sleeps, presumably fitfully, on lower, completed, floors. In
another, a reflected board room conference table is empty but Hong Kong and
the farther shore glitters beyond, implying perhaps that the corporate
powers govern even the nighttime hours.
In addition to the wonderful disjunctures caused by mirror/window play,
there are also depictions of unexpected curiosities, but what is
occasionally exotic to the western eye is not quaint or antiquarian in
nature, but contemporary. Among such are the images of the albino head of a
figure on a sidewalk, blurred as if shrouded in a silk stocking; the mock
Louis XV gilded armchairs in a store window, the surface of which also shows
a striding Chinese worker; a pop poster cutout of Chairman Mao used to
advertise, in English, in Hong Kong, a clothier1s fall/winter collection;
and a lady whose face becomes a chandelier. Nearly incidentally, there are
records of cultural transpositions, as when a Parsee cemetery has been
transformed into a commercial nursery. I might note here that no process of
reproduction can quite do justice to the silken subtleties of the prints
themselves.
But these photographs are mostly marvelously about light, an astonishing
variety of light. In one photograph, light as filtered through plastic
sheeting, as if coming from fireworks, scintillates on the surface of the
water in Hong Kong harbor. There is also light raying down through ascending
sidewalk steam, and light unseasonably sparkling like falling snow on
branches of leafy potted trees. Pinpoint lights at night sizzle from tall
apartment buildings viewed from a rising elevator. Daytime light shows a
trio of blind women in single file, an anomaly nearly as odd as if a camel
train were passing through a city street. Harsh light, soft shadow; soft
light, harsh shadow; black white; white black. There are, of course,
mediating grays, but sharp contrast is more often the rule. Unfathomably,
there is light suffusing through a patterned curtain, outlining an electric
fan in an interior while simultaneously illuminated pedestrians appear on a
sidewalk somewhere below. Similarly, in another image a room with a sliver
of staircase beyond that looks like that in Kertèsz's study of Mondrian's
studio, a cane-seated armchair is mysteriously overlain with the pattern of
an Oriental carpet. Puzzling out how these photographs could have been made
without the use of two negatives (and they were not), what it is exactly
that they show, is a wholesome part of their entrancement, but whatever
their means, their sheer visual delight is the principal pleasure.
Clément's film noir obsession with the substance of shadow is one of the
sources of strength of these pictures, but they move beyond a cinematic
ambiance to arrive at greater complexities of vision, ineluctable elisions
of surfaces and light, and a haunting poetry of their own. And all the while
reflecting the increasing permeability of cultures, the ways in which the
world increasingly reflects itself.
-Gordon Baldwin
Department of Photographs
The J. Paul Getty Museum |
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