Without eyes, there is no Real Image.
Wanting to look, wanting to see, wanting to see the real: this is the driving force behind making Real Image.
01
Being Seen
The first step in beginning the journey of Real Image
The black hole
Zhang Shaohua and I were classmates at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. We entered the School of Design together in 2008, and in 2009 we both entered the photography department.
But as early as 2007, one year before I entered CAFA, I had been shocked by a drawing hidden in Selected Excellent Entrance-Exam Drawings of CAFA. A "hanging mask" rushed toward me. Unprepared, I was gazed at by it. At the time I thought to myself: what kind of "perverse" person could make such an image? That puzzle remained with me until 2019, when the Real Image project began and the artist slowly told the story, finally undoing a question that had troubled me for years.
Shaohua had repeated a year of school. To take the CAFA entrance exam, one had to come to Beijing a year in advance for intensive drawing classes. When he arrived in Beijing in 2006, he had little life experience. Not long after arriving, he was cheated: after paying tuition, he was resold by the drawing-class owner, passed through several hands, and finally expelled. A high-school senior who had just been cheated out of tens of thousands of yuan did not dare tell his parents. But his dream of art did not collapse. With only a small monthly living allowance, he found the cheapest basement in Beijing at the time, lived there for half a year, and kept drawing. The "mask" became tied to that pain inside him.
The experience of living in a black, damp, windowless second-level basement may have been a fate Shaohua could not avoid. It settled and marked itself along his life journey. I think that black underground cave should be the first bead strung onto the necklace of Real Image.
The light at the mouth of the cave
Tao Yuanming's Peach Blossom Spring comes from a fisherman's discovery after getting lost. The text says: "There was a small opening in the mountain, as if there were light." Only by entering through that faintly glowing hole in the mountain does one discover the secret of the Peach Blossom Spring.
Only accidental getting lost can lead to discovery; conscious searching is often frustrated.
The "hole" is marvelous: it connects two spaces and makes passage possible.
"Light" is marvelous: it hints at existence and makes seeing possible.
During my first year of college, I happened upon a book on David Hockney and photography in the library. It split open my understanding of photography. From then on I walked down the road of photographic collage with no return. For four years in college I photographed obsessively, taking more than a million images. By graduation, after four years of collage, I made a triptych called Mountains upon Mountains, Rivers upon Rivers. After graduation, around 2012 to 2013, I made two more works and then decided to end my collage practice.
The fourth of those five collages was called Center. I placed a sun in the center of the mountains. During its creation I was inspired by a relief I had stumbled upon at the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum; the relief also placed the sun at the center of the mountains, which deeply struck me. In a camera frame the sun is always above the horizon. How could it be placed inside the mountains?
A circular "hole" at the center always stirred my curiosity and kept making me ask: what is the world?
Perhaps the scene of a baby's birth is somewhat similar: a life about to be born explores, in the dark mother's womb, a cave mouth giving off weak light. Under the mother's forceful pressure, an unknown new world is about to arrive.
A black box with a hole
In sophomore year, our teacher asked us to make a pinhole camera: find a sealed black box, drill a small hole in the center of one side, place photographic paper on the opposite side, and when we found the scene we wanted to shoot, remove the black tape covering the hole, expose the paper fully, then develop it in the darkroom. The image appeared this way.
Once a hole appears in the black box, light can enter and an image can form. In optics, this is called the principle of pinhole imaging; this image is also defined as a "real image." In nature, pinhole imaging is hard to notice. It is not as immediately visible as the sun rising and setting, or as water reflecting our own image. Like holding a key in our hand while looking for the key, the eyes with which we observe the world are themselves a black box, and the pupil is the hole through which light enters.
After graduating in 2012, Shaohua and I each went our own way. I started a 3D-printing business; he became an independent photographer. After a chance meeting after graduation, we again talked about photography. Unexpectedly, both of us were still unwilling to let it go.
Both of us had drawn since primary school. We liked drawing, loved drawing, kept drawing, and later entered the School of Design at CAFA. Then there was no drawing to do. When it came time to choose a major in sophomore year, we thought: let's do photography; it is still close to art. Before, we had pursued making paintings look like photographs. Now we would learn how photographs are made.
In 2009, digital photography was at a peak. The Canon 5D Mark II swept everything before it; photography had already fallen from its altar. Two years later, the iPhone was almost catching up with the DSLR. Photoshop retouching had become miraculous. A beautiful photograph could be made without complex technique or expensive equipment. Photographers were jokingly called magicians, and the equipment carried by tourists made me blush with embarrassment.
Photography as a major had become marginalized, amateurized, and turned into a hobbyist fever. When people mentioned photography, they associated it with wedding portraits, travel shoots, image styling, retouching, advertising, even pornography. Photography had been surrounded, bombarded, and replaced by "images". In short: a fake, eye-pleasing cover.
Our dissatisfaction with reality made us immediately agree: we wanted to continue exploring what photography is.
The painted-over "virtual image"
The disgust with the "fake" came from a disgust with the "real". The seemingly contradictory sentence came from Shaohua's complaint to me at the time: "I resist this state very much. Whenever I pick up the camera and face models, they immediately become unnatural: stiff, wooden, or deliberately posing in a 'fake' way. Then they tell me I must retouch the photo until it is especially beautiful. How am I supposed to work like that?" After more than a year in the profession, Shaohua had had enough of stereotyped photography.
Indeed, digitalization has thoroughly taught the market that a portrait has to go through a series of operations, such as skin grinding, poaching, liquefaction, etc., and an empty template with a personal face like ashes, devoid of identity and anger, which disgusts Sauhua, who has just entered the industry.
When I was interested in the "collage" in college, I "regulated" the commercial "photography", and Sauhua's complaints have given me a fresh thought to the difficulty of filming people. At the same time, we have developed new practices as we have had more and more in-depth discussions on "real" and "false", "subjective" and "objective".
The "acting a non-acting" was the consensus and outcome of our first phase. And we found that a picture is definitely not just the state of the model itself, that the photographer behind the camera is an absolutely important role, but that the scene is one of the conditions necessary to get both sides into the state. It is by no means an emotional pose, but a natural display and appearance based on the equality of two people, respect and mutual trust, so that the inner self can be shown, the tentacles opened and the trajectory of their lives released. Sauhua borrowed a small classroom from students who were studying at the beauty complex and began a two-year exercise.
At a time when the psychology of exploring people's hearts slowly emerged from our research, Sauhua then applied for advanced theoretical knowledge to graduate students of North Great Psychology. Let's get to the point, remember, when we did a psychological test for a MBTI 16th personality, and it was interesting, I'm INFJ, I'm INTP, and each has a name for an analyst and an architect. More interestingly, INFJ is the rarest of the sixteen and the rarest among men, with only 0.25 per cent. The analysis of personality formation has also given us greater interest in exploring self-discovery, with certain unexplored secrets that must be hidden in the photography, and our own interest stems from its own mystery.
P4 Theater "Big Black Box"
Fifteen years ago, I learned that there was a big studio in Tunnel, so I asked Sauhua to rent it. After considering two days, he decided to begin the design drawings and construction renovations. At the time, I discussed with Sauhua how to design it, and it was not possible for the traditional studio-column-wall programme to be brought up by Sauhua, when the beauty-dance friend frost gave a "theater" programme, which was approved by all at once, and P4 Theater began to design, build, hard-dress, soft-clothes, and was not configured until the first half of the year.
I was in charge of the design of the logo, and the "p" and "4" in the logo were like two little dancers who rotated and attracted each other, and that's what P4 Theater built. Photographers and models on stage and in light are no longer opposing and unequal, but are the whole of each other's performances, and are created by action, performance and dedication.
P4 Theater was designed at that time, half of the black area was staged, and half of the white area was work and audience area. Now it looks like half a room in Ming, half a dark room, like a giant camera. When the black curtains on the stage came up from the white area, the entire space was black, as if it had entered the camera, entered the eye, entered the dream, entered the womb, immediately followed by a light coming out of the hole, and "Real Image".
The dream must be black, and P4 Theater was built for it.
02
Yeah.
Real Image
Two-person drama.
I left Beijing in the middle of 16 years, and at the end of 18 I went home from America to take care of my parents. In the years I spent in the United States, Sauhua also completed a post-graduate course in psychology. He came to me from Beijing to talk about P4 Theater's future, and by early March of 19 we had another phone call and talked about ideas. Decides to continue our previous plans.
My mother was unexpectedly ill in early 19 when she was taken care of at the hospital, and was unwittingly exposed to Lacan's theory, which was very exciting this time and inspired me so much that I was also brought to the psychoanalytic door. Of course, Sauhua has also been exposed to psychoanalysis in psychological studies, and we have suddenly realized that the relationship in psychoanalytic consultations is very much in line with the methods we've been exploring before. The "Real Image" project was formally launched in June.
At the same time, we named the experiment at P4 Theater "Real Image" when we thought that Real Image was real, it was real, it was real. This was followed by the recruitment of volunteers from the soybean petals. I have worked hard on the theory, structure and framework, as well as the interpretation. As more and more people are involved in Real Image, we also continue to receive a great deal of experience and feedback from the film, and in early 2020, after many discussions and consultations, we finalized a concrete programme for the Real Image practice at P4 Theater and called it "Real Image - eight and a half" and called the exit sign "Drama for two, just to see you again". Moreover, we have set a target of only 1,000 participants to experience the project, and when the experience of the 1,000 people is over, the project will end and never be restarted.
Real Image -- eight-and-a-half, "Bye-bye" wonderful journey.
The most important of the eight-and-a-half units is a series of eight "dramas", where the drama specifically refers to the "drama of two people" that took place in P4 Theater, in which only two players, the "intruder" and the "separate", were involved. "Eight Dramas" are divided into "four seasons", each of which is divided into two upper and lower, one, three, five and seven single series dominated by filming and two, four, six and eight even series dominated by vision and expression. Each season revolves around a major dimension, and each is unique and well-designed. And the last half is hidden from us and will be told when the eighth is finalized.
"Eight-and-a-half" sounds a little bit like a tribute to Ferrini's film, but our original purpose was to get Real Image's experience deep enough to be enriched and elevated in terms of the dimensions of the experience, and to leave enough room and time to think about each chapter and the next.
I, See, you.
I see you the theme of the film Avatar, "I saw you," and I put a comma between three letters, and I deciphered it into three layers: I see, I understand; I see you, I see you; See you, See you. The fact that the English language is so rich that it is not just seeing, seeing, visiting, understanding, conceiving, ensuring, experiencing, clarifying, escorting, is just an indication that the meaning of what is seen is too much, and we finally decided to translate it into "see you again".
"Goodbye" is a flashback of light and fire? Was it the awkwardness of a child when he met? Is it an old man's will to stay away from each other? Or do you think it's a thousand feet deep?
And who would you be?
It's like drinking water. It's warm.
Look, act, shoot the triad.
Real Image's structure is divided into three dimensions: watching, acting, filming, which means our Real Image drama. It must be about work in these three dimensions, and one direction is impossible.
Light, stage, Camera as Device
(a) Interactive mind, common sense, action performance
(b) Emission, inter-temporal condensation, photocooperative
Quiet friend, unformed, missing.
We use these 48 words to describe settings, experiences, feelings, results in Real Image. Seeing, acting, filming, interwoven, penetrating in every detail and supporting the entire eight and a half frame. The four words that we have adopted as P4 Theater's philosophy, pursuit of goals and our own mission, always urging, monitoring and pressing ourselves to move forward, not giving up, not discouraging and not bowing down.
03
Bye.
Where's the end of Real Image's journey?
A dream.
Sauhua told me about a dream he had had at the beginning of the Real Image practice, where he was lying silently on the ground, where there was a force to pull him up, and suddenly, when a piece of diamonds took off from his body, he began to have a lens of diamonds, which flew out to a crowded market, which ran backwards in pedestrians and traffic flows, fast, but he could see the faces of everyone through the market, their joy, their rhetoric, and even the movement of fine facial muscles. In his surprise and wonder, the diamonds flew out of the city to a forest, moving through the trees above the forest, flying over every kind of leaf, with unique texture, rich detail, and after a long period of time, faster, blurred visions, and slowly realized that the diamonds were leaves, not leaves, but the whole of leaves. All of a sudden, looking at the diamonds floating in the air, awakening, understanding what love is, the whole thing is love. When we're talking about love, we're always expressing the desire for me, the imagination of me, not the essence of love itself, or me. "I" is a whole, and the square that is the whole leaf is love.
A museum.
We will build a museum as the most sincere record of 1,000 Real Image experientials, both historical and forward-looking. Everyone will have their own storage space, where there are traces of what they left behind in P4 Theater, where the film they filmed will be stored. We'll collect
An object that everyone cannot abandon but does not want to see - emotional "remnant"
It's what they say about their past or their future.
It's not like they're having a dream or a Real Image script.
A Real Image certificate
There is also an agreement with P4 Theater, a power of disclosure as determined by the participants.
This "Real Image Museum" consists of 1,000 black boxes and 1,000 keys, which connect two worlds, one white and one black.
Let's not exist.
Born to die, to exist, to be absent, to congesterate the moment into eternity, to experience the experience of writing, to accumulate the layers of experience, to suddenly erupt, to be inspired, to rise and fall, to be rewritten, to be rewritten, to be written. Letting "not exist" be a journey that will never end, and we are the passers-by and writer of history, from the "active" to the "active" to the "passive" to the "active" to the "active" to the "active" to believe that one's future and past will end up in a wonderful necklace, a moving story, a wonderful journey.
Ask again: what is Real Image?
Q: Why must eyes be created?
A: To look, to see, to see the real.
The evolution of the eye is an extremely complex history. Even Darwin, the originator of biological evolution, was deeply troubled by it. He confessed: "Every time I think of the eye, I am shaken." In On the Origin of Species, in the section on "organs of extreme perfection and complication," he wrote directly that the eye's design for adjusting focus, admitting different quantities of light, and correcting spherical and chromatic aberration is unmatched. He frankly admitted that the hypothesis that the eye could have been formed by natural selection seemed absurd in the highest possible degree.
Even Darwin, who founded the theory of evolution, had to doubt his own theory because of the eye. This marvelous pinhole image is indeed an indispensable key leading us toward a new world. Laozi's Daodejing speaks of "mystery upon mystery, the gateway to all wonders," and I cannot help connecting that to this "hole." Eyes not only allow light to be sensed; they also allow a clear, concrete two-dimensional image to appear. "Light" and "hole" cannot be separated. The hole is enveloping, dark, safe, comfortable. It is our mother's belly, the place where life begins, the most originary site.
But let the light enter, take us apart, let us go, let us be ourselves, let us connect to everyone to be a new person, go from one world to another, walk out again and again, and be born in person to find out why, to find the source and to say goodbye to ourselves.
One time I had a chat with Sauhua about why it was decided to name our project "Real Image - eight and a half", and I didn't know why it felt good.
I looked at these words and suddenly I hit my thigh and laughed
"You see how this word is made up of the head of a cap, which symbolizes protection, shelter, house, home, and below which the head symbolizes people, faces, portraits, self, which is the black house that protects our box, seals itself up, like we did in P4 Theater all these years."
And as to why it's called eight and a half, I drew two more of them under the cover of the actual words, saying, "You see, it's a cave, give your head up, see you!"
"Ha ha ha ha."
Let the light go through the hole to protect our black box, and the upside-down Real Image shows up again, and let's go together and see that reality and move on to that real person.
♪ And dream into reality ♪
Two men's play.
Goodbye.
"I'm watching."