Images of Identity and Territory: the Photography of Gao Yuan
Gao Yuan is a fine art photographer who uses photography to probe and search the surface of appearances. There is, within her extensive oeuvre, a consistent thread of preoccupation with the way a surface holds visual meaning, that is the psychological and social meanings below visual appearance and aesthetic arrangement. In this recent selection of work two sets of images predominate, those of the tattooed bodies of Japanese gangsters and the surfaces of walls from the hutongs. These are apparently unrelated spaces and locations but there is a direct connection, the subjects are bound by the common thematic agenda of identity and its relationship to the marking of territory.
The first and most fundamental territory that we inhabit is the territory of our own body. The way we adorn the body is emblematic of personal and social identity. The activity of patterning the surface of our body has a dual function of both obscuring and proclaiming, masking vulnerable identity and marking individual status. There is also a contradiction in the act of tattooing as it asserts difference but also the willingness to subsume individual identity within a sub-group. By proclaiming allegiance to a group this also brings a sense of identification with a collective power, the power of the tribe. The tattoo is a token of loyalty and commitment to a sub-culture which operates outside of the norms and conventions, the tattoo literally pierces the skin to leave an indelible mark, it is a radical gesture of allegiance.
The surface of the body and the surface graffiti of walls bespeak social and cultural identities. The surfaces reveal the emotional and social dynamics within the space they bound. With the accretion and accumulation of marking the surface becomes the very embodiment of identity.
Both tattooing and graffiti fulfil complex functions, It is a way of �tagging� and claiming ownership of a space, it is a proclamation of identity, calling attention to and reminding the viewer of the identities contained within the bounded space. Both activities of tattooing and graffiti are a form of transgression� a radical invasion, on the one hand of the private space of the body and on the other hand of the collective public space.
Graffiti can be an anti social gesture of transgressing the anonymity of public space but there are other more sociable and poetic functions for placing images and text on a wall. It can be the simple need to give information, to transform a space into a notice board, to socially educate through well meaning propaganda. It can also be the last act of desperation to communicate to the wider community, an expression of loss, of grief or longing, the proclamation of love, or the unrequited desires of an anonymous or jilted lover. In this sense the surfaces of a wall becomes a site of public poetry.
Gao Yuan�s photographs are portraits of cultural phenomenon, portraits of the prevailing milieu that her human subjects live and move in. In photographing these spaces of proclamation and transgression Gao Yuan reminds us of our human preoccupation with identity and the relationship between identity and visible appearance. The French philosopher Lacan theorised the development of a sense of self as developing out of the ability to see a mirror image in a reflection. The photograph is like a mirror reflecting back to us our social identity.
In relation to the images of tattooed bodies Gao Yuan deliberately crops out or draws the viewer�s attention away from obvious clues to personali ty. Rather her compositions direct the viewer�s gaze to the cultural context of the body and its representation in physical and cultural space. She focuses on details that give subliminal clues to identities.
These images are evidence that Gao Yuan is first and foremost an accomplished studio photographer, trained in the art of orchestrating visual meaning through the arrangement of subject and context. These images are improvised compositional arrangement in controlled conditions. Kao Yuan�s training is in fine art but her subsequent practice is imbedded in the iconography and practice of commercial and fashion photography. This is the strength and currency of this imagery in that it reflects the ongoing symbiotic and contemporary relationship between mass media language of advertising and the more rarified cultural language of fine art photography. Her photography bridges the cultural spaces of commercial and Fine art photographic practice.
A survey of Gao Yuan�s images taken over the span of her career, are a kind of litmus of the times. Her images register her stylistic influences and preoccupations over the time of her photographic practice. Her oeuvre is also a comparative narrative of different cultural environments of Taiwan, Japan, China and most of all her place of work, New York. Living and working in New York her imagery inevitably registers the evolution of aesthetic influences in studio photography and the subtle aesthetic shifts that have occurred in photographic convention over the past 20 years. What is compelling in her work is to see the way in which these stylistic preoccupations highlight the process of cultural and aesthetic overlay onto subject. It is in the overlay of a New York photographic sensibility onto a non New York environment of a Chinese city or Japanese tattooed body which generates the creative tension in the readings of the images. In this sense the photograph always transcends documentation.
Matisse�s aphorism that: �form is of the spirit and colour is of the senses�, is equally applicable to the use of black and white and colour photography. The current selection and juxtaposition of Gao Yuan�s earlier black and white imagery with her colour photography brings into play a dialogue between these different modes of representation and their potential in photography. The stark form of high definition black and white photography amplifies the sculptural readings of mass and texture while equally asserting the abstract formation of positive and negative shape arrangement. There is in effect a tension in the simultaneous reading of the image as an illusionistic three dimensional space and as a two-dimensional composition.
The selection and installation of Gao Yuan�s work serves two purposes, one a justifiable celebration of her skills and fidelity to the craft of photography and secondly an opportunity to reflect of the relationship between image, identity and territory.
Michael Wright � October 2007
Michael Wright MA is Co-Programme Leader of Fine Art and a senior lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He is a consultant on publications for Dorling Kindersley in association with the Royal Academy of Arts and has authored a number of arts publications on photography.
His fine art research is focused on the interface between drawing, photography and time based practices and a concern with methods of intervention in spatial and narrative sequences.
He has exhibited internationally and participated in symposia in Britain, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Finland, Germany, Holland, China and the USA.
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