[...] Zheng Yaohua's bright daytime photographs seem straightforward indeed. Their captions also seem overly detailed and personal. According to Zheng, his series pointedly imitates Joel Sternfeld's On this Site, yet clearly the two projects are fundamentally different. Sternfeld's narratives have to do with collective memory of catastrophic events. Zheng, on the other hand, deals with personal memory of undane life. The former have clear references in viewers' minds and exist as fragments of history. The latter are private and effective only in personal terms. In this series, Zheng endeavors to use narrative strategies which we customarily associate with collective history in order to preserve or elevate personal memory. The result is naturally to reveal its unreliability and ineffectiveness.
We find that in Sternfeld's works meaning is a priori. That is to say, the viewer knows that there existed in the world a series of significant events, which we call history, before even seeing his images. The artist merely serves as a tour guide. When we arrive at these "historic sites", everything seems bland and unremarkable, History does not reside in the landscape. It can exist independent of reality. In Zheng's project, however, personal memory is dependent on reality, as the photographer puts it, "like pollen stuck to objects." What is paradoxical is that while memory represents people's ultimate ideal of eternity, physical objects are perishable and transient. How could we expect the former to depend on the latter? Perhaps that is the fundamental reason why personal memory as history cannot exist? In the story of Emily Kwong, the photographer even tells a paradoxical story of "a lost pearl". If the pearl is found, it might seem that one has found the evidence for the validity of one's memory and carrier of the significance of the event, but by the same token, the pearl would no longer be lost. If one fails to find the pearl, even though this might confirm one's memory of loss, without the pearl how could one prove one has lost the pearl? Which goes to show the unreliability of individual memory?
To push the argument even further, one might say that even if the photographer points insistently to some of the core objects in his personal life in order to assure us of the truthfulness of the events or memories and the clarity of their meaning, these core objects — a ailbox, a street front, a trash can, etc. &mdash appear insignificant in the images. In fact, they are almost squeezed out of the frames. This is like the stubborn but futile argument of a child, who points out some details that have been ignored by adults as proof for his case. For adults, however, this kind of roof is meaningless and invalid. In the end we realize that the problem does not lie with the evidence. Adults' discursive hegemony determines that the argument is over before it begins. Perhaps that is why the personal experiences in Zheng's narratives can never have the historical significance of Sternfeld's. It all boils down to two competing discursive systems.
From the above we have to admit the fragility of personal meaning, which can be submerged at any moment in collective discourses. People are somehow accustomed to this relationship between the individual and the collective. Many viewers may wonder why the photographer so meticulously documents "trivial" scenes that are without any "esthetic appeal", which of course reminds us of the given of photography's role in constructing meaning.
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The full version and its Chinese version, and the author's bio