KENNA, Michael - One Sunday in Beijing / 北京

Background information

"When photographing Beijing, Michael KENNA was far less interested in the pollution or the ravages of market communism, than in the perfection of the forms he observes at length until they take on a profoundly spiritual dimension. Far from seeking to depict the reign of need and the many constraints in the era of market totalitarianism, the artist takes the scenic route of the sublime, to re-establish the lost unity between man and his environment. His sensitivity, at times close to the melancholic eye of an Eugene ATGET, tends to elicit a brutal, impossible reality, the archetypal lines of a first world where the structuring forces of an impeccable geometry create scenes of utmost tranquillity. The general impression here is one of power emanating from an invisible tension between tranquillity and noise, stasis and speed, nature and politics, piety and paganism, the vernacular and the contemporary, memory and amnesia. So his photography can be thought of as a celebration of the human condition made up of a set of sacred forms, whether we recognise and feel it, or not, this is the whole of his artistic ambition. He doesn't photograph people, not out of a hunger for cold distance or irony, but because the contemplation of nature involves looking at buildings rather than builders, the stabilised action rather than the contraction of muscles and effort. The temples he approaches are not manifestations of religious fanaticism, but living pillars where refuge can be found from the deafening roar. An inner silence beneficial to damned souls emanates from his images. Rejecting the delights of heartbreak, Michael KENNA builds his work as a space of reconciliation, a land of peace where we can finally drop our emotional armour. The diptychs of 'One Sunday in Beijing' are arches of welcome for the lost." (Fabien RIBERY)
"A lavish setting is needed to promote intense concentration among visual artists. Following in the footsteps of Pieter HUGO, Guy TILLIM and Claudia JaAGUARIBE, a new international artist has been enjoying the hospitality of the Chinese people. Residing at the luxury Rosewood Hotel in Beijing throughout his photography project, Michael KENNA has been able to give his utmost attention to a city which is as hectic and multifaceted as it is pure and archetypal in form. Tinged with a spirituality that is at the same time gentle and powerful, his images paint a picture of a sacred land where the signs of the human condition are a set of structures that offer mysterious, yet soothing, views. Speaking beings may seem absent from the space of contemplation, but let us make no mistake, [there is] every sound of invisible presences and of words unspoken. The abstract scenes which the British photographer loves to create are invitations to meditate on the dual nature of our appearance in the general order of animal species, between grace and ponderousness, the pictorial beauty of the scenes represented seeming to redeem every evil intention, fulfilled or not, past or future. In his aesthetic imperative there is a way of reordering the visible according to a paradigm of elevation, like an objective alliance between the Doric columns of our time, the architectonics of grandiose constructions, and the intimacy of prayer, like an ever-possible ecstasy, of the standing stone, the plant or the praying figure. Michael KENNA envisages eternity as an arrangement of lines brought together by the power of inspiration demonstrating a very high level of civilisation, the vernacular joining the contemporary in a vast symphony of forms seized by a profound feeling of unity. So the artist turns politics into a panorama of events dilutable in the sublime of an untouchable nature despite the violence of that which wounds it. The yuan rockets, or the euro, or the dollar. Cycles of disappearance accelerate in the Anthropocene era. What is left is a delight in the present, in full awareness, for whoever feels the moment as a desirable and breath-taking point in time." (Pierre BESSARD, in: Photography as an Art of Peace)

Additional information

'One Sunday in Beijing' is the result of an 'Artist in Residence' stay in Beijing, China, as Pieter HUGO and Guy TILLIM have already done on behalf of the publisher followed by two Bessard publications, 'Flat Noodle Soup Talk '(HUGO) and 'Edit Beijing' (TILLIM).

Thus, the yellow-bound volume wears the cover Statue and a Monument, and at the end of the book contains the color print The Bridge; the red volume comes with A Statue and a Monument as a color print and has The Bridge as cover picture.

About British photographer, Michael KENNA (b.1953)

Photo books by as well as with works by Michael KENNA