DoorZine: ou are a self-taught photographer and calligrapher. Your photographic work—mainly natural landscapes of mountains and rivers—is inspired as much by nature as by the history of Chinese art, which you have been exploring for nearly thirty years. For example, the series Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze River is inspired by a Song dynasty scroll (960–1279) preserved at the Freer Gallery in Washington, while Map of Mountains and Seas echoes a treatise on mythological geography from the Han dynasty (4th century BCE). Why did you choose these two works from the classical tradition?

Michael Cherney: Confronting these two vast subjects allowed me to deeply explore the interplay between the visible and the invisible—between what traditional Chinese painting calls gongbi (what the eye sees) and xieyi (what the heart sees). However, there are other ways to connect with tradition beyond the purely visual approach. In her book Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China*, historian Cong Ellen Zhang writes:

“Setting out on long journeys to the far corners of the country as a way of increasing one’s knowledge… a way of coming into direct contact with the cultural and historical heritage of the land. [By undertaking these cultural pilgrimages, the traveler] paid homage to famous sites and to the visitors who had preceded him there… The fascination exerted by these sites and the traces left there, along with the legacy of the pilgrims themselves, produced geographic knowledge and cultural memory for travelers who came later. Knowing intimately the tradition associated with these sites allowed the pilgrim to appreciate them more fully and to participate in their cultural memory.”

Art history plays an important role in all my work, both in terms of content and form. In approaching a subject, rather than focusing only on recent history (a few decades), I try to take advantage of the Chinese landscape, which allows for a contrast between recent history and ancient history.

DoorZine: In Map of Mountains and Seas, you give a photographic face to mythological, seemingly fictional places. In Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze River, on the contrary, you go in search of places that existed but whose traces have, in some cases, been lost. How did you choose and approach these locations?

The appeal of traditional Chinese landscape painting lies in the fact that the works are conceived merely as clues to what the real world can offer—the image exists in a state between manifestation and emptiness. Given this, how can a photographer overcome the apparent impossibility for photography to express the essence of traditional painting, if a photograph is the capture of a specific place and moment?

Since the vocabulary of brushwork that shapes Chinese painting is inspired by nature, it should be possible to find it directly in nature, hidden in its details. Some projects are undertaken simply because the qualities of a particular geography evoke classical painting; others because a specific subject has been an important theme in classical art. Inevitably, however, the strongest works combine both aspects.For the series Map of Mountains and Seas, I was inspired by writer Rebecca Solnit**:

“The world is so completely made that it requires not more making, but rather the opening of a crack to return to the origins of its process. ‘Unmaking’ is the primary metaphor and ‘backward’ the most meaningful direction: the act of creation then consists in undoing, in recovering the original rather than increasing the new.”

Map of Mountains and Seas is a photographic reflection on the Classic of Mountains and Seas, a text whose oldest version dates back to the 4th century BCE. The Classic of Mountains and Seas stands at the confluence of real and abstract geographies. Hundreds of mountains and rivers are mentioned, yet only a few of these places correspond to actually identifiable sites. Between these real locations stretch vast imaginary spaces, along with descriptions of flora, fauna, medicinal herbs, and the mythical creatures that inhabit them. Each photograph is a map, regardless of its degree of abstraction or precision in relation to the broader context of the world around it. Once the photographs in the Map of Mountains and Seas series are mounted, I inscribe the GPS coordinates and the azimuth (degrees from north***) on the margin or in the caption of the work. If you stand at that exact point on the globe and look in that direction, you will see this place—but beyond that, there is no further categorization.

The Taoist scholar Guo Pu**** wrote in the 4th century in his commentary on the Classic of Mountains and Seas:

“Contemporary readers regard the Classic of Mountains and Seas with suspicion because of its exaggerations, its absurd and extravagant assertions, and its strange and fanciful expressions. I have often debated this by quoting Master Zhuang (Zhuangzi*****):

‘What people know is less than what they do not know.’

This is precisely what I have observed in the Classic. Thus, who can claim to give a complete description of the immensity of the universe, the abundant forms of life, the benevolent sustenance of yin and yang, the countless distinctions between things, the mingling of essences that overflow and clash, the wandering spirits and strange divinities that take form, migrate toward mountains and rivers, and adopt the beautiful appearance of trees and rocks? Yet,

Harmonizing their distinct tendencies,

They resonate like a single echo;

Perfecting their transformations,

They merge into one image.

Some call things ‘strange’ without knowing why they name them so; they call things ‘familiar’ without knowing why either. What is the reason? A thing is not strange in itself; making it strange depends on me.”

Guo Pu 郭璞

The use of photography as a tool to unmake the world—to open cracks and ways of seeing that seemed set in stone—can be summarized by these six small words from poet Octavio Paz:

*Cong Ellen Zhang, Transformative Journeys : Travel and Culture in Song China, University of Hawaii Press (2010).

**American writer, historian, and activist born in 1961. Rebecca Solnit writes on a wide range of subjects, including the environment, politics, feminism, geography, and art.

***Azimuth is the angle formed by the vertical plane passing through a given point and the meridian plane of that location, measured counterclockwise from the south in astronomy and from the north in geodesy. (It is one of the two horizontal coordinates, the other being the zenith distance.)

****Guo Pu 郭璞 (276–324) was a Chinese writer and philologist. Considered in his time to be a diviner and a specialist in the theory of yin and yang, he is regarded as the founder of geomancy (feng shui). His best-known works include the Poem of the Immortals in Roaming (Youxian shi), inspired by Taoism, and the Fu on the Blue River (Jiang fu), which offers an encyclopedic description of the flora and fauna of the region. His commentaries on the Classic of Mountains and Seas and on the oldest Chinese dictionary (the Er ya) remain authoritative references.

*****The Zhuangzi is the most important classic of Taoism after the Book of the Way and its Virtue (Daodejing) by Laozi. Its title, “Master Zhuang,” refers to its author, Zhuang Zhou, a Taoist philosopher of the 4th century BCE who lived in the Yangtze River basin, in the Kingdom of Chu..

DoorZine: Do you consider that the kind of photography you practice is a continuation of what painting was in earlier times? What connections does your photographic art maintain with traditional Chinese landscape painting in ink (shanshui, “mountain and water” painting)?

Imitating nature and the masterpieces of great masters is an essential part of the learning process in Chinese landscape painting. Photography is certainly a form of imitation. But it also requires a particular quality of observation. My explorations take place after an initial period of absorbing classical works. While walking, a moment eventually arrives when a visual “click” occurs that pushes me to press the shutter—sometimes even unconsciously. After traveling, once back in my studio, my work consists in searching for qi* within the frame. Over time, photographers have used montage as a way to approach the aesthetics of classical painting, but my intention has always been to use photography as an intermediary toward nature—toward a world that can be touched. Altering the image would go against this approach, so I avoid it.

“Only nature can exaggerate.”

Henry David Thoreau**

Many tools remain at our disposal, such as cropping, masking, enlarging, and folding. My ambition is to imbue photography with a sense of the birth and disappearance of the ten thousand beings***. Photography also has the ability to take the viewer on a journey through the depth of a work, integrating a return through the realization that what is seen is in fact light as it existed for an instant in the physical world. It thus offers a feeling of connection between the viewer, the physical world, and its essence.

DoorZine: Your photographs take as their starting point the Chinese pictorial tradition while also using modern tools such as Google Earth and GPS technology. Can you tell us about your “method” and the tension between tradition and modernity at the heart of your work?

For the series Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze River, in order to integrate past and present, I began with references to classical paintings of the Yangtze River—particularly the sixteen-meter-long scroll preserved at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington. This scroll was painted by an anonymous artist and is believed to date from the Song dynasty (960–1279), largely because it includes around 240 names of cities, geographic locations, and temples scattered along the river that can be compared with other historical sources.

Taking these ancient place names as a starting point, I adopted a completely contemporary approach: using Google Earth, geolocation, and travel photography websites, I determined from home the GPS coordinates of these places and of viewpoints that would allow for more interesting photographs than the limited perspective from the river’s surface alone. Even with such preparation, making the images was complex, but I was rewarded by the beauty of wandering through unexpected places. Although this advance preparation is rather laborious, it allows for a geographic understanding of the sites by anyone—Chinese or Western—which in the past would have been impossible for those not living there.

*The Franco-Chinese writer and academic François Cheng (born in 1929) translates qi as “breath”: “Chinese cosmology is founded on the idea of Breath, which is both matter and spirit. From this idea of Breath, the first thinkers developed a unitary and organic conception of the living universe in which everything is interconnected and held together. The primordial breath that ensures original unity continues to animate all beings, linking them in a vast network of interrelations and generation called the Tao, the Way.” (François Cheng, Five Meditations on Beauty, 2006, pp. 74–75).

**Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). In this travel narrative, the writer and philosopher Thoreau (1817–1862) recounts his journey by canoe with his brother John along the Concord and Merrimack rivers. The writing of this account followed his spiritual retreat at Walden Pond, which would later give rise to the work Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854).

***Reference to Chapter 16 of the Book of the Way and its Virtue (Daodejing) by Laozi, which begins with these words: “He who attains the utmost emptiness holds firmly to stillness. The ten thousand beings arise together; then I watch them return. After flourishing for a time, each returns to its origin.” (translation by Stanislas Julien, Imprimerie nationale, 1842).

Interview conducted by Victoria Jonathan & Bérénice Angremy.

Read the full interview with Michael Cherney in the bilingual French–Chinese catalog of the exhibition Flowing Waters Never Return to the Source available for purchase starting July 15, 2020 on the Bandini Books website.

To learn more about Michael Cherney’s work:

Website: qiumai.net

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