In Photography and Liquid Intelligence (1989), Jeff Wall proposes an alternative genealogy of photography based on what he discerns to be the medium's liquid affinities. While seemingly opposed to the 'optical,' that is, the technically calculable, rational, or what Paul Virilio has elsewhere described as the 'logistical' character of the photographic image, Wall's notion of liquid intelligence flows past easy binaries encompassing a range of terms that are hard to think together and whose historical and discursive locus of intelligibility continues shifting. These include: the 'dry' apparatus and 'wet' chemical postproduction; the technological and organic nature; the grid and curve; the formalisable and contingent; the instantaneous and metamorphosis; the cool and hot.
Drawing inspiration from Wall's provocative thesis, Reflections, a new exhibition by Shanghai based photographer Simon Song, presents a personal exploration of the material, thematic, and representational fluidity of analogue photography through the optic of nature. Reflecting the artist's keen sensitivity to the materiality of the photographic process as a space of creative and experiential negotiation, the work on display aims to allow the relatively rarified 'dry' domain of photographic technique to converge with the formal and phenomenological qualities of the natural world. For example, traces of the artist's signature work in the darkroom and resin finishing technique are translated into a wide-ranging aesthetic engagement with water. If liquid stands as the basis of all photochemical action in the darkroom, with developers and washes being required to chemically 'fix' the photographic image, it provides Song with a productive material and representational substance with which to reflect and reflect upon the physical process of analogue photography as akin to the moving spectacle of nature. Thus, marks left by water at different stages of the image 'development' process remain as mobile surface elements that are likened to visual details of organic life in the image with which they rhyme and merge. Similarly, resin, a clear substance used to 'seal' the photographic print off from elemental damage, has been applied by the artist imperfectly to produce an uneven surface whose rippling disturbances and reflective qualities produce an echo between the responsive planer surface of the image and that of a living body of water. Elsewhere, optical enlargement, a technique conventionally used to isolate and clarify hidden details in nature, such as with the microscope, is used be Song to dissolve and obscure the solidity of natural forms, transforming them into haptic fields of colour and texture prized for what they reveal about the sensory as opposed to purely epistemic aspects of our visual experience of the world.
Broadly speaking, then, Reflection's interplay between form and content, process and product, clarity and opacity, stillness and movement, recapitulates what the artist considers to be an intimate connection between living nature and the photographic medium. Rather than something to be described or dominated by the camera, the alterity of nature is treated in the manner portrayed in the classic Qing dynasty fantasy novel Flowers in the Mirror as the entrance into a space situated in the reflection between self and the world. Reflected in the mirror of nature's visual forms the photographic image becomes a portal rather than a window, a gently flowing conduit into the inner landscape of the viewer.
—Text by Daniel Cohen, Curator.
Press release courtesy Studio Gallery.
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