NOICE is a photography publication and community for photographers that have a meticulous eye for form, beauty, symmetry, novelty, and humour.
Name
JingChao Su
Title ︎︎︎ GAME · ZEN · POSTMODERN
Perhaps it is because of the ethos of worshipping of Buddhism in the southern Fujian area where I live, or it may be due to a certain destiny, when I go out to photograph, I seem to have been able to meet Buddhas all the time in the past few years. Especially when I organize my own photos, I can more and more feel that the Buddha is everywhere in various forms and shows itself at random.
The year before last, Xiamen held the International Buddhist Supplies Exhibition. The square of the Convention Centre was magically lined with statues of Buddha waiting to be loaded and unloaded. I stood in the strong wind and waited until midnight, just to see how the solemn Buddha was hung in mid-air on a swing. In this situation, the Buddha is no longer as sacred as I imagined, it seems that it is just a commodity waiting to be moved at any time. There is a passage in Han Bingzhe's book: "After entering a modern society, despite getting rid of the ruling institutions, religious discipline does not lead to freedom. Freedom and restraint were born almost at the same time. In a faulty social situation where people are prone to anomie behaviours, a new value system has happened to be formed -- people belong only to themselves, and people are racing to seek self-realization.”
We seem to run, dance, and play in the wilderness, but this "self-realization" is now dominated by capital and big data. Neoliberalism is disguised as poetry and distant places, but at the same time it reduces human’s body to a machine as the nomads of contemporary capital. We are still suffering from the impermanent.
In real life, huge, beautiful installations in shopping malls emerge one after another, projections and screens are more advanced, and desire spaces are woven more abundantly. Refer to the American drama "American Gods", we are accelerating the construction of our new mythological system. These bizarre urban landscapes have caused me to think. Living in such an era of obscure beliefs, huge Buddha statues can be hung at any time, and the meaning of things can be suspended at any time. What kind of sustenance do we live on? When consumerism has penetrated into the minutiae of our lives ubiquitously, can it still be effective enough if we still talk about commodity fetishes and cultural fetishes from single critical perspective.
It's better to abandon the various concepts floating outside of your own body, return to the original appearance of photography, and use our own eyes to capture the recognizable fragments of reality that are actually happening in front of you. The title "Game, Zen, Postmodern" comes from the cover of a book shared by a friend on Instagram. It was quite funny for me, and there was a kind of black comedy. At the same time, I noticed that the nested imagination between these three words fits the images I took at some extends. Through such a shooting and editing identity, I seem to have entered a game of manipulating reality slices.
There is a character named Sakya in the Taiwanese movie "Big Buddha Plus". His daily life is to walk around. In the film, he only has a Hokkien line, "Wander around." As far as my photo creation, the " Unfettered behaviour" of Sakya makes me break out of the current situation and avoid more empathy. Sakya was selectively aphasia, and the photo also kept silent, but it could also declare a certain sound to me which like the voice of dharma. To some extent, I get nourishment from what I watch, which provides me with a space to escape from the performance society.
Mr. Huang Yongping's "Xiamen Dada——A Postmodern?" --The manifesto-style article mentioned: " Zen is Dada, Dada is Zen, and postmodern is the modern revival of Zen. Zen regards a wood carving as a Buddha and a piece of wood that burns fire. Regarding it as "Buddha" is to connect with the world of life and treating it as "wood" is to transcend the world of life." In order to avoid falling into the archival archetype’s routine, I did not intend to find the gods and customs in southern Fujian to record. What I tried was to use the interactive experience indicated by these words to create a metaphor about the Buddha's appearance and manifestation. People who focus on the game and the field of the game also feel that being in this environment (game) can temporarily get rid of the shackles of the system, and to a certain extent dispel the seriousness brought by religion.
The year before last, Xiamen held the International Buddhist Supplies Exhibition. The square of the Convention Centre was magically lined with statues of Buddha waiting to be loaded and unloaded. I stood in the strong wind and waited until midnight, just to see how the solemn Buddha was hung in mid-air on a swing. In this situation, the Buddha is no longer as sacred as I imagined, it seems that it is just a commodity waiting to be moved at any time. There is a passage in Han Bingzhe's book: "After entering a modern society, despite getting rid of the ruling institutions, religious discipline does not lead to freedom. Freedom and restraint were born almost at the same time. In a faulty social situation where people are prone to anomie behaviours, a new value system has happened to be formed -- people belong only to themselves, and people are racing to seek self-realization.”
We seem to run, dance, and play in the wilderness, but this "self-realization" is now dominated by capital and big data. Neoliberalism is disguised as poetry and distant places, but at the same time it reduces human’s body to a machine as the nomads of contemporary capital. We are still suffering from the impermanent.
In real life, huge, beautiful installations in shopping malls emerge one after another, projections and screens are more advanced, and desire spaces are woven more abundantly. Refer to the American drama "American Gods", we are accelerating the construction of our new mythological system. These bizarre urban landscapes have caused me to think. Living in such an era of obscure beliefs, huge Buddha statues can be hung at any time, and the meaning of things can be suspended at any time. What kind of sustenance do we live on? When consumerism has penetrated into the minutiae of our lives ubiquitously, can it still be effective enough if we still talk about commodity fetishes and cultural fetishes from single critical perspective.
It's better to abandon the various concepts floating outside of your own body, return to the original appearance of photography, and use our own eyes to capture the recognizable fragments of reality that are actually happening in front of you. The title "Game, Zen, Postmodern" comes from the cover of a book shared by a friend on Instagram. It was quite funny for me, and there was a kind of black comedy. At the same time, I noticed that the nested imagination between these three words fits the images I took at some extends. Through such a shooting and editing identity, I seem to have entered a game of manipulating reality slices.
There is a character named Sakya in the Taiwanese movie "Big Buddha Plus". His daily life is to walk around. In the film, he only has a Hokkien line, "Wander around." As far as my photo creation, the " Unfettered behaviour" of Sakya makes me break out of the current situation and avoid more empathy. Sakya was selectively aphasia, and the photo also kept silent, but it could also declare a certain sound to me which like the voice of dharma. To some extent, I get nourishment from what I watch, which provides me with a space to escape from the performance society.
Mr. Huang Yongping's "Xiamen Dada——A Postmodern?" --The manifesto-style article mentioned: " Zen is Dada, Dada is Zen, and postmodern is the modern revival of Zen. Zen regards a wood carving as a Buddha and a piece of wood that burns fire. Regarding it as "Buddha" is to connect with the world of life and treating it as "wood" is to transcend the world of life." In order to avoid falling into the archival archetype’s routine, I did not intend to find the gods and customs in southern Fujian to record. What I tried was to use the interactive experience indicated by these words to create a metaphor about the Buddha's appearance and manifestation. People who focus on the game and the field of the game also feel that being in this environment (game) can temporarily get rid of the shackles of the system, and to a certain extent dispel the seriousness brought by religion.
Click ︎
