Peering at Peering
Night is the opposite side of the world, and also the other part of people’s life. If daytime is a rational and orderly world, night is an emotional and cathartic one. In the dark of night, a person takes on his or her own true face, with sex, intoxication and nudity. Night is also the dream of desire. A spirit depressed by day is able to obtain release in a dream, and the illusion of a dream provides people with free enjoyment, enabling a person to fantasize without restriction in the unlimited darkness. The dark night also create fear and crime; vampire legends have long been a nightmare in the West, while “Ghost World”, an ancient Chinese novel written by Pu Songlin depicts Chinese people speaking via a ghost to express their romantic dreams of free love. Under the temptation of the dark of night, human evilness seems to accelerate. Therefore, artists and writers use the dark night as a metaphor for the motifs of psychology and social crimes.
Brassai shocked France with his first photography book, “Paris by Night”, published in 1924. In this book, Brassai disclosed the darkness of Paris. He shot almost every corner of Paris, including laborers working hard, homelessness, drunkenness, homosexuality, drug dealing, prostitution as well as the places loved by the upper class elite. Night provides Paris with a different face; Brassai used these photographs to show another perspective of the Paris known for its glamour and affectedness by day. So it is, the Yin and Yang of Paris, just like everything else in this world. In Brassai’s photographs, Paris at night is not only a city covered in darkness, but also a spiritual world. Paris, like flesh, carries the body and soul of the people. “Paris by Night” by Brassai enlightened countless photographers to the practice of shooting at night and capturing the other side of people.
Wu Qi, a photographer and an artist, published a photographic series entitled “The Night You Don’t Understand at Daytime”. It allows the dark night to serve as a kind of spatial language contemplating mankind’s secrets. The night by Wu Qi is totally different from that of Brassai, as Brassai recorded the mysterious Parisian night as an observer, while Wu Qi is peering at those who peer at night. Such peering is restricted to Zhengzhou, the city in which he resides, a traditional agricultural town now in the process of transforming into a modern city; this city provides a background for his works, a swirling, changing background. It looks like a stage, a metaphor for a show. The background is simple: a street, a hutong, a modern milestone building, the woods on the city’s outskirts, or the ruins of areas being torn down. Under such changing environments, the main theme of his works concentrates on the relationship between man and woman peering at each other, and mainly on man peering on woman. Wu Qi tried to imply that there is a similarity between man and night. In these works, the female image appears helpless and unprotected, while the male is active and party to the peeking. These people are either on the street or in a dark place; movements are rather vague, as if a group of spirits are surrounding the woman. Such peering exists everywhere in these rotating scenes, and is quite oppressive. It appears that Wu Qi has tried to convey man as conqueror of the world, with the world filled with male power and desire. The peering is often rather obscene, even threatening, communicating an intense relationship between man and woman; gender status is constructed amid such intensity.
So does Wu Qi’s work highlight the status and conflict between the two genders? What else does his work tell us? Does he just illustrate the lack of balance between the two genders via symbolism and a theoretical perspective? The answer is no – his works tell us much more. Through his photographic works, we can see a shadow of the psychoanalysis of Freud and Jacques Lacan, as well as Wu Qi’s “peering”, this peering is not reflective of Freud’s gender focus, but rather goes beyond it. His works depict the ghetto hutong for those in low-class poverty, as well as the villa symbolic of the rich. Nevertheless, his main focus is on the peering on the opposite gender. Therefore, the subtle relationship between the two genders also has significance in terms of class and fortune. Wu Qi is trying to show that gender is also a category of historical, cultural and economic relationships, and it cannot escape the border of society. Hence, gender drives our fundamental human existence. This might be why Wu Qi chooses to peer at those who peer at night, and is also what distinguishes is work from that of Brassai.
Bao Kung
2007-6-11
