Amateur historian visits China exhibit

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

04/25/2010

Amateur historian visits China exhibit

WILLIAMSTOWN -- As an amateur photographer and historian fascinated by the Great Wall, Li Ju was searching for old photos of it on the Internet in China.
What he found would entwine him in a 100-year-old journey through the wilds of western China by a rich American art collector.
He came across the photos and writings posted on the Internet by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute about its founder, Sterling Clark, and his 1909 scientific expedition through the largely unsettled northwestern China territories.
Li was so intrigued by Clark's journey that he retraced the 2,000-mile route four times, all the while trying to recreate every photograph that came out of Clark's journey from exactly the same spot -- not a simple task. The result is a fascinating comparison of architecture, commercial development, landscape and culture separated by 100 years.
Read more at The Berkshire Eagle

Apr 25, 2010 8:17:25 PM | Culture, Current Affairs, History, Photography

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