When we tried to translate the title of Patrick Zachmann’s exhibition into Chinese, we realized the different possible meanings it implied, so we asked him what he really sought to express by “So Long”, he said that he wanted to close a chapter, and put an end to his three decades of China photography. Therefore it should really mean bidding FAREWELL, ADIEU, to China. So we dropped the “long time no see” (Hao Jiu Bu Jian) and opted for the simple “Zai Jian” (see you again), which also in French AU REVOIR means both FAREWELL and SEE YOU AGAIN. Another meaning would be to “see again” the forgotten China.
Because one of Patrick’s constant themes has been memory and the peculiar characteristics of China’s fast and furious development is the consequential amnesia of the Chinese people, Patrick’s retrospective stands out then as a poignant reminder of how fast China has changed, his book has even a chapter titled “China Too Fast”.
This exhibition in Shanghai chose to focus on the turning point of the memory process that concerns the China of the 80’s and the 90’s, hence a selection of pure black & white photography.
There are three chapters in this limited-in-scale exhibition, one is cinema, another one is about migration a most important research theme of Patrick Zachmann, the last one is the event of 1989 that has been erased from the collective memory. But definitely everyone is struck by the narrative power of his “photos de plateau”.
It was thanks to a sinologist friend that Patrick first discovered and fell in love with old Shanghai films of the 1930’s. By 1982 China was progressively coming out of the shadows of the Cultural Revolution, so Patrick felt it was time to document the Chinese cinema revival. So he became one of the rare witnesses of this revival in the backstage of Beijing and Shanghai film studios, where he saw directors of third and fifth generations at work, producing art house movies with socialist flavor that formed the wave of Chinese films winning awards at Cannes or Venice or Berlin festivals. Three photos that have never been published nor exhibited before show famous Chinese actress Liu Xiaoqing (one of the most beautiful faces in China), arriving on the set all dressed up as the ambitious future empress dowager, her van was surrounded by a crowd of curious onlookers wearing Mao suits and liberation army caps, the window separating the actress and the crowd acts like Zachmann’s observation deck for the French photographer to peek inside an exotic world of which he does not speak nor understand the language. Except the subtle language of light, such as Hong Kong actor Tony Leung playing shadow puppeteer in the resting room of Liu Xiaoqing, all the art of Patrick Zachmann lies in his capacity to seize the intimacy of the moment despite the language barrier. By 1995 when Patrick returned to the Shanghai film studio, he captured one of the most beautiful portraits of actress Gong Li while filming “Temptress Moon” under the direction of Chen Kaige, in this unusual square format where an evanescent Gong Li emerges from a dreamlike shower of light.
Like the art of illusion Patrick has often found in China, such as in the use of real estate advertising billboards to masquerade construction site in the city, his cinema reportage can be so involved that the viewers can lose all senses of reality and fiction, in front of this tableau of men with Borsalino fedora hats (the film was about the assassination of a KMT politician of the 1920’s). These heads and fedoras fill up the 35mm frame with circles (the hats) and exclamation marks (the noses). What makes this picture so powerfully engaging is the gaze of the young man in the foreground, the only one looking up directly into Patrick’s lens, he is adjusting the collar of his men’s tunique, as if he was going to tilt his head and say: “are you coming?”
EXHIBITION
So Long, China
Patrick Zachmann
From May 14th to July 29th, 2016
Beaugeste Gallery
210 Taikang road, building 5, space 519
Shanghai 200021
China
http://www.beaugeste-gallery.com
