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VISUAL ARTIST: MICHAEL CHERNEY

"10,000 Li of the Yantze River: Animated Selection of 12 Images"

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Reflections Upon China's Contemporary Landscape


c. 2013 

Taking part in a practice stretching back to the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE), when images of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers in Hunan Province became a vital motif in Chinese ink landscape painting, Michael Cherney documents 42 scenes of the Yangtze (Yangzi) River, which flows from the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau to meet the East China Sea in Shanghai, nearly 4,000 miles to the east. While firmly ensconced in the tradition of using lyrical landscapes to reflect upon present-day reality, he expands its parameters by working with modern photographic technology. Cherney adopts a “granular” approach to his images, however, enlarging them to the edge of abstraction: the boundaries of earth, water and sky fade to assume the appearance of ink wash. His use of panoramic photography similarly recalls the long handscroll format of ink paintings, reminding us of the short distance in time and spirit separating contemporary and traditional views of landscape.

Born in New York, photographer Michael Cherney (b. 1969) was fascinated early on with Chinese language and culture, prompting a move to Beijing in 1991. There, adopting the name “Qiu Mai” or “Autumn Wheat,” he began to produce the lyrical images for which he is now recognized, mounted as albums, scrolls, and books. Through his fusion of these traditional formats with contemporary photographic technology, he blends East and West, present and past. His work features in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University, among others.

Landscape | Viewing Slideshows: 10,000 Li of the Yantze River: Animated Selection of 12 Images is one of three slideshows created by contemporary China-based artists for the 2014 China Onscreen Biennial. These commissioned pieces, all personal reflections on this year's COB theme of "landscape | viewing" (景观 ｜ 观景), are presented publicly before all COB film screenings.

Published: Wednesday, October 22, 2014