The translation of Chang’an Chang’an in Chinese is from poet Lu You, “Walking across the bridge where I had broken my heart, I saw the spring water was still green, in which it seemed that I could still find your beautiful shadow as I had enjoyed before.” The poem describes a picture that the past memory reflects on the surface of the lake, but just in a flash, the reflection disappears. So I tried to look for the relics and traces of Chang’an (The old name of Xi’an) in modern life to find the appeal and aura of history, constructing a bridge between the present and past. Just like Bergson’s definition of time is its duration. Everything is flowing. Only when we emerge in the object can we acquire an inner experience that connects us with the past and future.
In fact, photography has both progressive and perfect tense, so it has the power to travel back. Roland Barthes said at the end of Camera Lucida, “the spirit of photography will be that-has-been.” Time is the most impressive part of photography. Walter Benjamin also defined “aura” from the perspective of time, which is “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however, close it may be.” The waving branches under the sun and the profiles of distant mountains can convey the uncanny appeal at that moment and raise audiences’ experience connecting to the past and reality.
I combined the particular phenomenon of aura with the concept of "cun(皴)" in traditional Chinese painting, which implies the texture of objects, such as the skin of bark and the form of rain. Photographs of the city's surface revealed the hidden history of the reconstruction. The final project was shown as a scroll. Audiences can see it on the wall or hold it in their hands, looking at it from right to left with the movement of steps. The scroll has three chapters, and there are no apparent divisions between each chapter because time itself is an indistinct container. Entering history from an abandoned village and temple, the viewers wandered around the uncertain period, and then gradually, humans appeared. The line between past and reality can't be told with human's continued modification of society. At last, everything disappeared, except the silent trees still growing in the pitch dark.