Portfolio Kylin CHIANG

Le Jardin sec Zhuofeng Jiang Creative Documentary and Photojournalism Magnum & SpĂŠos 2019/2020

Raja, I wish I knew the cause of that malady.

For years I could not accept the place I was in.

I felt I should be somewhere else.

A city, trees, human voices lacked the quality of presence.

I would live by the hope of moving on.

Somewhere else there was a city of real presence, of real trees and voices and friendship and love.

Czeslaw Milosz, ÂŤ To Raja Rao Âť.

Animism, this word occured to me when I was sorting these photos out. In these photos, the mountains and plants are withered, rigid or deformed. They compose a space to accommodate people to reside, move, watch, live and die. The space, we like to call it nature, the same nature accommodated people to thrive billions of years ago likewise.

However, it is always varying and becoming heterogeneous.

If we do not let go of a kind of habitual seeing, we cannot describe it in an era of

technological optimism: What is the relationship between man and nature? This habitual seeing refers to Kant's so-called a priori intuition of time and space. We are too used to intuiting them, the landscapes around us. There is an inherent connection, landscapeseeing, every time we see the landscape, we've known how to see them, we are

constructing the landscapes (natural/artificial) at the same time when seeing them.

We should start from re-seeing this kind of seeing. Only in this way, can we clarify the relationship between man and landscape. Images or photography are the best media at this time, because it is already a metaphor of re-seeing.

I tried to build this set of photos (not yet completed) into a rhizome text. It does not have a definite beginning or end. You could start anywhere and end anywhere, find your own path out. The narration is conveyed by the internal echo and intertextuality.

Zhuofeng Jiang, born in Sichuan, China in 1997. Graduated from Department of Philosophy, Tongji University in 2019. Currently living in Paris, France and undergoing

SpĂŠos & Magnum photojournalism program.

Website: https://jiangzhuofeng.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kylinchiang/ E-mail: xeempt@gmail.com