Form Within

Curatorial Preface for Observing Traces: A Photo Journal by Ding Haochen

Dialogue between Space and Time-Color and Emptiness–Ding Hao Chen’s Solo Photography Exhibition

Text: Dr. Sophia Kidd

While Buddhist images evoke universal values of transcendance and non-attachment, Ding Haochen’s photographic plates serve as a kind of emotional writing focused on social and cultural implications of Buddhist material culture. In viewing Ding Haochen’s Observing Traces series, we read a document of decay and ruin that feels not only tragic, but strangely hopeful.

In his book A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture(2012), University of Chicago professor Wu Hung writes about the development of huaigu 怀古 (nostalgia) poetry from the Wei-Jin period (220-420) through the Tang (618-907) and beyond, as exemplifying an aesthetic experience that embodies complex emotions which center around erasure and the “poet’s realization of a vanished historical reality.” 

Indeed, Observing Traces presents emotionally complex images which reveal a vanished historical reality, while also alluding to a presently vanishing contemporary moment. In Ding’s writings about Observing Traces, the Sichuan University professor of photography laments the end of “decades of economic and cultural integration between the East and West,” as they decouple and “once again go in opposite directions.” While there is a tone of pessimism and resignation throughout Observing Traces, the ultimate emotional note is one of hope and optimism, as humanity faces its troubles head on. Ding’s willingness to focus on the decay, erosion, deformation, oxidation, and destruction of an otherwise beautiful subject reveals his message as one of honesty and courage in the refusal to mythologize or to bypass the truth of our actual human situation.

In Northern Song Buddha Eroded by Flowing Water, the photographer has employed a high key contrast image in black and white printed on acrylic plate. The choice of high contrast in black and white calls attention to the trace of trickling water stemming down from the Buddha’s left eye, as if the deity has been weeping, and we are allowed a glimpse into the god’s inner world here on earth. The emotions evoked by ruins remind us of the permanence and impermanence of life, something these gods must, too, experience in their iconic form. They now, like we humans do, suffer from interaction with natural elements such as water, wind, and earth. The choice of acrylic plate for a printing surface evokes the transparency of glass, but is much less fragile. This has both practical implications for logisitics and presentation, but also tactile ones for the viewer. The sight of an image on copper or iron differs from the same image on a plate of acrylic, with the metal absorbing more light, giving the image a heavier feeling.

I have mentioned the affective complexity of Ding’s photographic pallette and, indeed, these nuances of feeling find the photographer using the camera lens as writing implement for what he terms “emotional writing.” Ding’s photographic study of neglected Buddhist statues highlights a uniquely affective dimension of Buddhist cultural heritage as he reinterprets Buddhist images from a uniquely personal perspective. 

For example, there is an inner doubt playing out across his images, a self-dialogue articulated in relatively uncropped images, impactful angles, and compositional enhancements. We are struck with a simplified photographic language attempting to remove divinity from its subject matter, focused rather on a description of suffering as revealed through the mind’s eye of the artist. The use of eye-level shots, symmetry, and standard lenses conveys a meeting between viewer and subject.

The dialogue in Observing Traces between nature and culture occured over days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, and millenia. Nature’s main forces of destruction are wind and water. The former, in tunnels and caves or out in the open, transforms shapes and color, sometimes beyond recognition. Water, in its flow as surging rivers or as exposure to rain acts upon shape, color, and texture of objects. 

Further agents of erosion and transformation include salt and alkali, moss and algae, incense smoke, rock formations seeping cinnabar, oxidation of lead-containing paints, as well as forrest overgrowth of vines, branches, and roots. This performance of neglect develops gradually, leaving behind traces of interaction between our human realm of culture and nature’s elemental realm of elements.

Let us delve a bit more deeply into the affective element of Ding Haochen’s work. For it is only through materiality that we “catch feelings” from Ding’s series. First focusing on traces left by material forces upon these relics of material culture, the photographer then selects the material upon which he will use a process to print his image. 

Choices include aluminum plastic panel, acrylic, aluminum plate, iron plate, glass mirror plate,  aluminum plastic plate in micro relief, gypsum board, barium sulfide photographic paper, and silver cardboard yield a textural experience of the image from which the astute viewer derives a new set of sensory data, from which feelings generate. 

Ding’s choice of metals, glass and stone for printing surfaces over choosing the usual medium of paper serves as a shout out to tradition, to 19th-century Daguerreotype technology, first widely used in the 1850s and 60s. 

While the process does not directly transfer images from initial light source to a light-sensitive surface, as the true Daguerreotype does; it appropriates some of this affect, in a nod to tradition, yet one more lament over thoughts, skills, and objects that have perished. 

The affect of this type of printing is especially eye-catching in a lower light, with transparent colors and rich details, allowing CMYK colors to show the vividness of RGB. Ding also uses a rare 2.5D relief printing technology to enhance the texture of his photos, maximizing the effect of materials he chooses for printing.

Wind-eroded Statue of Song Dynasty Mahasthamaprapta Bodhisattva, printed on aluminum plate, is also a black and white image. This choice to forgo color in favor of high key contrast allows impactful angles and compositional enhancements to tell a story. 

This tale is one of unique perspective, for Ding had to climb a tree in order to gain this angle, allowing for a diagonal from the lower left edge of the frame to extend to the Bodhisattva, appearing to support the chin and allow a moment of reprieve from ages of withstanding the winds which have so eroded the deity. 

There is another buddha seated at the forehead of this Bodhisattva, and the winds have almost completely eroded most of its features, leaving traces of a cruel abstraction that is ambivalently beautiful. 

The choice of aluminum as a printing surface imparts a sense of levity to the image, being not as heavy as other metals Ding works with, such as copper and iron. It also imparts a softness of light to the image, lending to it an overall silvery wash. We know that human care and concern brought these Buddhist statues into being, and that apathy that destroyed them. 

Images that envision other forms of corrosion, such as moss and algae, incense smoke, salk and alkali, oxidation of lead, and forrest growth are less straight forward, bringing more use of color into the composition, color, tone, and affect.

In Moss-covered Song Dynasty Common Girl Statue, we view a surprisingly full palette of colors ranging from touches of a pastel purple on the girl’s outer robe to pops of red on the wall adjacent to her left elbow. Humidity and moisture has soaked this girl for over a thousand years. Like common people today, she is completely exposed to the vicissitudes of time, and her visage changes accordingly. 

In Rock Formations Containing Cinnabar Seep Into Song Dynasty Buddhist Statues, we come across damage caused both by human vandals, as well as a special natural element-cinnabar. Cinnabar is a mystical material in Chinese tradition, imbued with alchemical powers. 

Red is attributed to the Southern direction, and to mythical vermillion bird who resides in this vector of the heavens. Buddhas in a Dense Forrest is a whimsical tableau, revealing sinuous roots and vines that seem to hold these gods captive in the bosom of nature. An ecological statement, we learn how nature reabsorbs all human culture, both material and intangible back into itself, eventually recycling and repurposing that which was once sacred in a transcendental sense.

Ding Haochen’s Observing Traces highlights not only affective but also ecological dimensions in his subject. While the photographer dwells at length upon the affect of natural forces upon material culture, as a metaphor for the ways in which historical forces transform our societies; he also reserves a good deal of space for discussing how humans treat non-human objects, especially in the case of iconoclasm. 

Ding Haochen assiduously documents the presence of ambivalent violation. Enter human beings who, far from caring enough to erect religious statues, left their mark on them in the form of graffiti, vandalism, and looting. Some vandals acted randomly, in emotional bursts of destruction.

Others were intentional and systematic, spurred on by idealism, as in the Cultural Revolution, when Buddhist statues took the blame for destroying a great nation, as one of the “four olds” of old customs, culture, habits, and ideas.

In the moving example of Song Dynasty Buddha Statue Damaged in the Cultural Revolution Movement and Naturally Weathered, we see only the discoloration of scant remains left over after two Buddha statues were ravaged by revolutionaries. While the key interaction in this history is between two social factions withing a single culture, this form of symbolic violence was perpetrated upon an immovable and non-human object. 

This enmity, malice, ambivalence, and neglect by humans upon nature, animals, and non-living objects is a key ecological question. It is important to ask why humans act in this manner, and equally important to wonder whether there may be another way to exist in the world. 

In this photograph by Ding Haochen, the truly affective element, aside from the powerful image of absence, and the sulfer-like pigmentation (sulfer is equated in alchemical lore with the devil), are the candies left as tribute by people who still adore and believe in the deities represented by these statues. That is, as cruel as those who disrespected and mutilated these statues were, there are others still today that respect, and revere these statues, caring enough to leave tribute and make prayer to their presence.

— April 15, 2024, Dr. Sophia Kidd, Chongqing, China