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Postcard: A Snapshot of Chinese Banality
Diana Freundl
Postcard reveals a population with a boundless appetite for images, in which children and adults eagerly surrender themselves to the camera.
Fascinated with Chinese vacationers who prefer to capture themselves in-front of the monumental view rather then the view itself, Rodney Evans was motivated by the inability to isolate a frame without people, and in return focuses his lens on the tourists, encapsulating them in their environment.
Exploiting the imperial rights of his camera to observe, record and exhibit, anyone and anything, Postcard offers new insight regarding tourist photography in China. The series of portraits and landscape narratives set in popular leisure destinations throughout China demonstrates how Chinese tourists have used photography to declare ‘I am here’ while
empowering anonymous viewers to make the experience of others intensely personal.
Echoing realists from the 1850s, Evans highlights situations and locations that are interesting and amusing, yet mostly mundane. His collective time-depicted works provide a social statement on an emerging culture of leisure in China similar to the classical rendering of everyday characters and situations by the realist painters.
Emphasis on sport and physical fitness has been a prominent feature in Chinese society since Mao Zedong developed a national fitness program in 1952, which lead to a National Fitness Day in January 2009. Increased interest in personal recreational activities, however, has only more recently appeared among the general public. With Expo just around the
corner, domestic holiday travel has radically increased during the last 10 years (300% from 1996 to 2007, according to the China Nation Tourism Administration, CNTA, 2008 statistics).
Such growth is readily seen in the number of tourists turning up at popular historical landmarks and holiday resorts, such as the Statue of Deng Xiaoping nestled inside the leafy sanctuary of Lianhuashan Park overlooking Shenzhen or Sandouping, site of the Three Gorges Dam. Assembled for an audience, these ordinary and often banal antics of Chinese tourism are a testament to an emerging middle class with a disposable household income and a newfound craving for individual pastimes.
Underlining photo-realist conventions, Evans takes into account a creative process of documentation that minimizes manipulation in digital imagery utilized by the Hyperrealists of contemporary painting and photography. Rather then subvert the ‘real’ in a separate medium he exposes his subjects in the traditional medium of photo-journalism, a process that allows viewers to connect authenticity to an image, rather then a simulation of reality.
Nestled within amusement parks or public facilities, Park Stories canvases urban narratives with fragmented motifs and icons as ephemeral as the environments they depict. Images of Mothers photographing their children with mobile-phone cameras at amusement parks and wildlife reserves illustrates both the proof of, and methods used to record, history.
The visual renderings of Tourrorist take a more cyclical look at the nature of Chinese humility. From the proud ice athletes in Harbin to the service personnel and ‘happy’ monks in random tourist locations, there is unchallenged display of eager models, whose confidence in front of the lens is bold without being narcissistic.
As an account of popular culture during the early twenty first century, Postcard’s landscape narratives and public portraits present timely commentary and ethnographic value of a period of transformation in China’s evolution of fun-seekers.
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