Text by phil zheng cai

If a photographer takes a photo of the Chinese national flag*, they would have already shot the Vietnamese national flag or generated multiple versions of it. Zooming in on their corresponding social landscapes, Vietnam and China provide a fascinating case study of social topologies - how properties can remain unchanged under continuous transformations. If we re-apply this mathematical terminology in a historical setting, had the photographer taken photos of various moments in both histories, the outlook would look eerily similar, with almost identical snapshots that correspond to one another in a delayed or foreseeing manner.

Both China and Vietnam went through lengthy colonial periods and with significant overlaps. Geographically, the Soviet Union’s communist ideologies graduated into Vietnam via China, contributing to a stark North-South differentiation within the country. Interestingly, China exhibits an identical North-South divide internally even though less drastic than it is in Vietnam. In both cultures, the South is understood as more liberal and open whereas the North is more traditional, conservative, and prone to governmental control. With regards to the roles played on the global scale, China’s self-alienation and overcapacity in recent years ushered Vietnam in its replacement as the new World’s Factory, replicating the golden age of the Chinese economy, more or less reliving China’s 90s and early 2000s.

Photographically, the most significant event that repeated itself amongst the two neighboring countries was the abrupt opening-ups. China’s Open Door Policy and Vietnam’s Doi Moi economic reforms resulted in both countries' exposure to the world in an abrupt fashion, metaphorically resembling a shutter release, allowing a sudden overflow of Western art materials that would otherwise be inaccessible. Vietnam’s opening up followed its northern predecessor by a mere eight years, prompting a more calculated and informed exposure, or even a “double exposure,” because China’s opening provided an archetype for this otherwise unprecedented reform.

Following these “shutter releases”, the art scenes were forced to be instantly projected onto the global screen. Theorists working in both countries attributed the unique characteristics of modernity in Vietnam and China to this suddenness of exposure. Natasha Kraevskaia, founder of one of Vietnam’s first contemporary art establishments, Salon Natasha, wrote that artists in Vietnam felt obligated to “consume all the different styles and tendencies in the arts without context or theoretical backgrounds.” Art historian Gao Minglu theorized China’s speedy modernity based on the country’s obligation to immediately merge characteristics of all periods that had naturally progressed in the West over a long period. With speed comes a shock. Both art worlds were subsequently divided into governmental art that continues to promote a traditional Soviet (partially French in Vietnam’s case) education and aesthetics system; orientalist art which caters to Western audiences seeking exotic decorations; and independent experimental artists. The three categories are rarely integrated and crossed over.

In these environments, photography evolved nimbly thanks to its versatility in understanding, capturing, integrating, and reproducing concepts of topology both from a technical and societal standpoint, channeling qualities from all three aforementioned worlds. That is the reason why photography in Vietnam and China never clearly followed its orthodox development of sub-categorisation into photo-journalism, commercial photography, fine art photography etc., offering a more all-encompassing quality of the medium.

With historical versatility, Chinese and Vietnamese contemporary artists understand and utilize photography more vertically, informed by a bird's-eye viewpoint of treating all mediums with similar connectivity and interchangeability rather than defining themselves as medium-based artists (photographers by its traditional definition).

Daniel Buren raised the proposition of a studio being a frame, and arguably any artist’s first frame, which aids the working process as much as limits its presentation. Historically, photography has been defined as a medium-specific stand-alone art form, falling victim to forever being framed, metaphorically and literally. Due to its follower base (photo collectors and photo lovers) and institutional infrastructure (alienated as a stand-alone department), the “frame” of photography had been more or less intact until the recent rise of new photographers such as Paul Sepuya Pagmi who, quite literally, shattered the “frames” for both a photograph and a photo studio. A new generation of Chinese and Vietnamese artists, on the other hand, often diasporic and prepared by the nimbleness inherent to the two cultures, have been ready to question photography as a subcategory of contemporary art bounded by its frames.

The moon is traditionally known as a literati object throughout China’s history of art and literature, and here it poses as the unchanging element in Fang Daqi’s topology in an aesthetically-supporting but conceptually protagonistic role. In these photos, the moon, even though portrayed under different depths and clarity, acts as a constant, backgrounding a fluid and romantic worldview rendered by bodies in motion cast under multicolor flashlights. In three of the five prints, bodies perform physically in front of the moon’s gaze, whereas in the other two photos, the artist attempted direct physical interactions. These attempts to “touch” the moon, one with a hand and one with a bubble, are futile in reality but striking compositionally.

The extreme accessible and the extreme inaccessible resolve harmoniously in Daqi’s photos thanks to his ability to utilize nature’s organic darkness like a controlled but not fully controlled studio. In photo “003,” the photographer hints at a topological space connection by allowing two faint light sources to self-announce near the bottom of the print in forms that both resemble the moon and reveal reality.

In the artist’s preferred installation, the photos were hung in horizontal juxtapositions where the moons in every photo physically lined up conspicuously. Everything depicted in these prints is life-size. This creates a different type of constant, provided by its approximation to reality, contradicting the visually apparent constant - the repetitive occurrence of the moon as a motif. This dilemma is core to Daqi’s practice as a queer photographer working between China and New York when he tries to hold on to a reality that is impossible to grasp, whether it’s in the form of the moon or his true identity.