China Now (Camellia sinensis, The Red List), 2025.
'Camellia sinensis, The Red List, considers plants which have become vulnerable or extinct in during the lifetime of eleven children photographed in the project 'China Now (Deng Xiaoping's Children, 1982), 2025.'; the natural environment of 'Camellia sinensis', from which China tea is made, has become threatened in the wild; these are conceptual works that form a link between these concerns and the tradition of reading tea leaves to foretell the future through a suggested belief in the language of random tea leaves.
Researching 'Camellia sinensis, The Red List', began around the beginning of the new year 2025; I felt these humble works should hold some moral weight despite their physical size; it is sometimes better to speak softly and behave quietly.
01.01.2025, in a manner not dissimilar from reading tea leaves, I referred to the ancient oracle I Ching; the hexagram read 15. Ch'ien / Modesty; above: K'un, The receptive, Earth; below: Kên, Keeping still, Mountain; the I Ching often reaffirms what one already felt or knew to be the case.
China Now (Red Rust, 1982), 2025.
China Now (Red Rust, 1982), 2025. depicts experience translated through material structure; the reading of one event through another in a different time and place; the project suggests and takes the form of the 'outsider', - "Henceforth you are at home nowhere, and by the same token everywhere", - Breyten Breytenbach.
The street furniture, the street, manhole covers, are familiar subjects for me; the language that photography provides helped me feel at home in China, where I was culturally very removed; through the work today, I carry on those conversations; this proposition offers an abstraction of event and memory; the natural language of cast iron oxidation translated to the oxidation of photographic prints; an outcome where material and meaning co-exist; this can be read both ways, from original image to oxidised print and visa-versa.
Juan Muñoz described this when he said, “you just have one material world to explain another material world and the gap in between is the territory of meaning “.
China Now (Deng Xiaoping's Children, 1982), 2025.
1982, with the help of SACU (Society of Anglo Chinese Understanding), I visited China; my photographs, made more than four decades ago, form an historic document in their own right; in the course of this cultural trip I visited factories, communes, hospitals, rural herdsmen, and schools, and with the aid of Chinese guides I talked with workers and families; I made a photographic record of this. The children portrayed are also four decades older, their lives will have experienced the accelerated disintegration of traditional China as it momentarily was for me in 1982; they will have witnessed in their lives a huge cultural shift and an unimaginable economic growth of the new China.
The work moves back and forth in a timespan of 1982 to the present day; on one hand a historic analogue monochrome photographic record of China 'then', on the other colour, (found with the aid of ‘Google Earth’ online map's), colour found within the original photographic locations, colours codified in a landscape palette of China 'now'.
China Now (Woman with umbrella, Tiananmen Square, 1982), 2025.
Two versions of the same photograph (Untitled (positive 02A, Woman with umbrella, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1982), 2025. and Untitled (negative 02A, Woman with umbrella, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1982), 2025.), serve as a basis of abstraction from the making then and the memory now.
Any time you make a photograph and compose the structure of an image through a camera's viewfinder, you deny the existence of the world around you; looking again later at a negative or print, and maybe drawing out the photographic notation, all that was denied during the making of that photograph comes flooding back.