Rosemarie Zens

Confusion
‘What a strange thing time is!’ I said. ‘I once lost a love. It’s a long time ago now. But, still, that does not alter the fact that I lost a love.’ (1)
On my first trips the vistas of landscapes in a predominantly agrarian, multi-ethnic state and the quotidian scenes in urban and rural settings reminded me of pre-modern times in the West. As if I were watching scenes that I knew from historical depictions and portrayals in which, accompanied by political power and exploitation, population growth and even decreasing poverty, socio-political and economic developments proceeded over centuries. A kind of historical mirror and at the same time a kind of tableau, on which time seemed to stand still.

… at times the memory of things I must have experienced flutters about me – how otherwise could I remember them! You said so yourself, that things we believe to be memories are in fact the present … It’s convincing. But then it confuses, too. For it snatches the time, utterly, away from the things we encounter, and often I no longer know where I am in my life. (2)

Estrangement
The following visits to China extended my view: somehow it should be possible to capture in one life span what is at the mercy of the expanding and accelerating world, if it is not to lose all significance for the individual life itself. I perceived the vanishing of realms of experiences – rural communities with their market places, tearooms and nearby street food vendors – as a sudden loss.

Whenever we are uncertain as to how the things of life connect, we always say: first, and then, later. A place in the calendar! The place in our hearts would of course be quite otherwise: things there that are millennia apart may well belong together; indeed they may well be closest to one another while a yesterday and a today, or perhaps even the occurrences of one and the same breath of air may never encounter one another. Everyone knows it. Everyone experiences it. An entire universe of emptiness lies between them. (3)

It was an odd situation, as if time was more alive in me than I was in time. World-time and lifetime intersect in an unusual way. Hence the alienation, and the assumption that the life awareness of people with a much older, far more distant culture must be a profoundly different one in terms of their experiences today.

Coherence
The simultaneous existence of the seemingly untimely with the timeliness of a mere extension of the present had such a profoundly disconcerting and disquieting effect that I began to capture in pictures the restructuring of a society characterised by the ever more, the ever larger, and the ever faster. It included new mass construction schemes and the remains of ancient residential quarters, the changes in infrastructure and the circumstances of internal migration, as well as the digitisation of daily life, the surveillance and the social credit system.

Picture by picture, that which was disparate yet somehow coherently connected through visual correlation began to occupy a space of its own. These are projections from the past and from the present. Perhaps also from a future in which autonomy and responsibility as well as privacy and distance come to the fore. A narrative that deserves to be told. One day.

We condensed the process of urbanization within four decades. Everything was like collage and montage together in space and time. Actually, I feel I experienced this kind of ‘spatial fracturing’ and ‘temporal desynchronization’ since my early childhood. I was born in a small city of Guandong province, where ancient beliefs and the latest technological devices were both parts of our daily life. At that time, and now even more, the pre-modern, modern and post-modern way of life seemed to co-exist. (4)

Reflection
Initially I went in search of traces of ancient China’s wisdom and philosophy. Occasionally, in Taoist symbols, I was able to divine the idea of continuous transition and, in attitudes to life, the conception of a cosmology that also underlies our pre-Socratic philosophy of nature: that beyond all earthly, interdependent and complementary relationships of beginning and end, of coincidence and necessity, of leave-taking and new beginnings, transformations and changes are vital features of nature; and that the idea of emptiness understood as pure potential is timeless in its duration, while as soon as something specific emerges it succumbs to the processes of change, of becoming, and of passing. However, nature and the environment are increasingly created by man, driven by the homogenising power of science, technology and the global market; and, in China, that is compounded by an ever more westernised way of life. A way of life whose precarious aspects in various fields reflect our own approach to the world.

After my last trip I came back with the thought that our challenges are how we handle our fragility and mortality and how to approach our capacity to create meaning. Where else but in myths, legends and images do our human experiences find their vivid expression.

In Chinese traditional culture, humans are not the rulers of the world but part of it. Master scholars like Confucius emphasise that humans need to become more like animals, since they are seeking the humble and animals are very humble. We forgot a lot about our humble, animal part … whether it is a hare or a monkey or a horse, when you’re looking at it, you are looking in the mirror. (5)

When composing my pictures, they were arranged once more by selection, framing and sequence. However, the enigma of visibility is not solved in pictures, but doubled. What we see is itself invisible, a game with time. And a reflection of ourself. Of that which is lost, the images remain.

About the legend of the moon rabbit
In many cultures the hare, the lunar animal, is considered to be a sign of fertility, vitality and desire. As a Christian symbol it stands for sacrifice and resurrection. In Buddhism it signifies modesty and rebirth. In Ancient Chinese culture the moon rabbit or hare symbolises transformation and change, while it relates to our experience of time, as duration in alternation, likewise continuity. As long as we recognise the legend of the hare in all its facets in other cultures, it remains alive. Life begets life, and therein lies change.

© Rosemarie Zens, in: Moon Rabbit, The Chinese Journey, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2020

1 Max Frisch, Bin oder die Reise nach Peking (1944), 5th ed. (Frankfurt, 1962), p. 38
2 Ibid., pp. 22–3
3 Ibid., pp. 36–7
4 Chen Qiufan, „Waste is Changing Our Society and Living“, Interview von Allesandro Scarano, 17.05.2019, in: domus online, https://www.domusweb.it/en/opinion/2019/05/17/chen-qiufan-waste-is-changing-our-society-and-living.html (accessed on November 27, 2019)
5 Shao Fan, Interview von Kathleen Bühler, in: Chinese Whispers. Neue Kunst aus der Sigg Collection, Exhibition-Cat. Kunstmuseum Bern, München 2016, S. 50–55