Beyond Cultural Eulogy and Temporal Elegy: Situating Zhang Kechun's Yellow River Photo Series in the Visual Culture of the Yellow River in the Post-Socialist Era

This essay conducts a case study centering on Zhang Kechun's award-winning photo series The Yellow River (2013) in comparative frame. The eccentric quality of Zhang Kechun's photography is his treatment of the cultural symbols and allegories associated with the cultural landscape and social nature, which weaves his work into a larger cultural and sociopolitical fabric different from that of the previous decades and his contemporaries'. The Yellow River has barely been seen at its ontological value in modern and contemporary Chinese history. In the wartime, it was personified as a mother to reinforce an imagined organic community and shared responsibilities; in the early reform era, it was associated with the past and tradition to form an imagined organic continuity and shared memory; in the marketization waves, it was under ethnological view as the to-be-preserved, romanticized fading rural scene. Zhang Kechun deliberately de-symbolizes the landscape by replacing the uplifting verticality in composition with the quiet, unaggressive horizontality; he alienates human activities from the scene; he shows the co-existence of the old and the new, the evidenced continuation of the traditional, and the constant creation of the new traditions; nevertheless, he refuses to take an anthropological point of view to elegize the imagined romance and the non-existing collective memory. Last but not least, Zhang Kechun's treatment of the Yellow River can extend to practice of many emerging Chinese young artists who were roughly born in the 1980s. To them, the glorified symbols, the self-sacrificing movements, and the romanticized past mean little.