The mountain peak and river heads mean walking with the greatness and fetching water at the headwaters; The magnificence is a kind of sublimation of certain taste and concept after the superposition of reality and illusion.Many years ago, in a discussion about Chinese landscape painting and its spirit at the China Academy of Fine Arts, I mentioned the road in the world of mountains and rivers, is winding, deep, turning and flowing; At the foot of the mountain, with the water curling, I reached the platform and looked far away. In my opinion, this journey through mountains and rivers brings us into a timeless context and a prelude to the constant twists and turns of time. This is actually a spiritual journey of Chinese people interacting with heaven and earth.
In today's world, global information discourse and geopolitical landscape coexist, and the trend of artificial intelligence and the tangled network society further separate life from daily life; The reality around us is trivial and boundless, the concepts of heaven, earth, and human beings are chaotic and difficult to distinguish, and daily life is also placed in some unpredictable situation. The trend of art seems strange and off topic. Faced with such a situation, how contemporary art can return to the origin of intellectual perception and physical action seems to be an unavoidable proposition for us.
Although Li Zhi's works involve painting and poetry, photography remains the core power of his works, and he hopes to return to a simple and substancial soul through photography. His series "Honggu" is still impressive. It is a wandering scene about the seclusion of Jing Hao in the depths of Taihang Mountains that lasted for several years. He has experienced Honggu's four seasons of vitality eight times and catched moments of light and shadow. I once wrote that "in today's numerous landscape photography, most of peaple only leave behind scenery or wonders, but Li Zhi's" Honggu " let people see some kind of mountains and rivers that touch their hearts. His unique way of viewing nature and condensed language fully demonstrate his cultivation of photography and precise handling of the technic." In fact, photography, as a product of the technological revolution at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, on the one hand, visualizes history and reality; On the other hand, it is also changing our daily experience of time and place. As Benjamin exclaimed,”The camera imparts a fleeting tremor of reminiscence”. It makes the instant reality reappear, and photography is also the source of the Art Nouveau movement. Especially in today's era when digital technology can instantly create images, it makes the mystery of traditional photography completely disappear in the time flow. This also triggers us to constantly question the essence and significance of photography as a medium.
As a representative and independent emerging photographer in contemporary times, Li Zhi's works undoubtedly responds to these issues to some extent. After 'Honggu', Li Zhi created 'Xishan' series. In recent years, Li Zhi has always been observing in the winding paths and mountains of art, both for the purpose of visiting mountains and taking photos, and as an artistic gesture of deeply exploring the mountains, rivers and land. Even earlier, he had a poem "Waving sleeves turn the mountain green into clouds, West Lake shows a cup of charming green", which is a lament for the carefree years he spent on the banks of West Lake in his early years, and also the beginning of a traveling life of art creation and poetic conceptual wandering. Li Zhi's childhood cultivation in poem undoubtedly gave him a unique poetic sensibility and a way of staying in touch with nature. At the same time, his backtracking on Chinese and Western painting and his experience in photographic technology also enabled him to filter out efficiently the excess residue of vision and image on the conceptual level, and bring photography, a relatively ration controlled technical field, into a more free and sharp process and sensitive moment. This is actually evident in his series “Shanxing” before "Honggu" and later "Xishan" series, where the real landscape and subjective sensitivity blend and collide with each other, and the instantaneous image and spirit reconstruct in a process of movement, thereby expressing the artist's concern for life and free emotions.
Whether it's the cold mountains and trees, winter mountain shadows, snowy illusions, or the distant high land scenery and magnificent rock formations, everything carries the emptiness of both the timeless universe and the eternal silence, as well as a sense of seclusive loneliness. Of course, all of this is not a superficial creation of nature and nostalgia for the past. The artist's sensitive gaze at reality through photography is actually a resonance between individual nature and the vast world. Li Zhi's work not only explores the true essence and temporal texture of the landscape, but also reveals a certain existence that transcends the vision with his constant spiritual questioning. Here, there is both a macro blueprint for chanting the ups and downs of nature, as well as individual artists' lamentations and inquiries about the progress of modern civilization. It creates a mental image and conceptual vision that transcends the real experience of nature.
Although the experience of the mountains and rivers opened up his artistic work, Li Zhi's photography is not a general record of the objective time and space. He always can visualize the memories of the faded past, recording the artist's current psychological frequency and experience of nature, and reflecting a certain life texture of the objective landscape and the subjective will. He is always searching for the point where mountains, rivers, forests, and springs intersect with his inner memory and conceptual spirit, awakening the deep consciousness and dark scenes that stir his soul. In his view, "the clever changes in manipulation are ultimately small trick, while the clarity of the soul is fundamental”. He, attempting to shuttle through the spatiotemporal images of mountains and rivers, re-embodies the inscriptions of time and the dimensions of thought in scenes and objects that have been overlooked by the times. He reviews the aesthetics hidden behind images, reconstructs a world of pure tones above the hustle and bustle of daily life, and ultimately seeks spiritual solitude. Here, the interaction between objects and artistic conception overflows. Photography is not only a means of visual expression and viewing object, but also a landscape that emerges in the flow of time, becoming a condensed time monument. This is actually a posture of a contemporary artist, from an individual perspective, to solve various difficulties caused by modernity issues. It alienates the group trend and cultural imagination of the mass, and is also a self construction when facing the landscape experience and object cognition. Li Zhi transforms this tacit understanding of natural scenes and images into a poetic isomorphism of life perception and cultural concern. In a sense, it is also a cross temporal response to Duchamp's concept of "mirror regression".
It can be said that Li Zhi repeatedly meets in secret with the eternal vitality in his classic landscape "Honggu", "Xi Shan", and "Gu Shan Xing Lu" and his individual nature comprehends with the instantaneous nature, in order to resist mundane objects and time experiences, and to topology the time texture and existence clues polished by history. Obviously, photography is not just a medium here, but a method and worldview. It reconstructs new insights and experiences, and attempts to stir up spiritual echoes hidden in the gaps of time and space. It not only opens up the ancient world of mountains and rivers, but also constantly reaches the present, updating its relationship with reality, especially the critical stance and conceptual consciousness of facing reality directly. For Li Zhi, "everything has settled and everything seems to start”. The joyous journey in the magnificence of mountain peaks and river heads is always at an unknown moment.
May 2023 at Hangzhou Garden
