ASHES OF TIME
ASHES OF TIME explores the idea of harmony between Eastern philosophy and nature, through a surrealist approach to landscape photography, aiming to achieve a visual dissonance that questions human intervention in nature. At the same time, the project seeks to reflect the entangled relationship and similarities between human and nature as transient entities.
The project makes reference to Donna J. Haraway’s When Species Meet (1989). Haraway claims that human beings, as a species, depends on companionship. The pets, plants, and trees that accompany humans in life also in turn influence the position and evaluation of each person in society. As I emphasise through photography, humans and other natural species are essentially the same, mutually constituting and fulfilling each other, in a sense no different from insects, plants, and trees.
In Eastern philosophies, Tao advises people not to interfere with spontaneity, maintaining maximum balance to achieve harmonious co-existence with nature and the universe. I place prints of human bodies in real natural environments and then photograph them, reflecting the kinship between mankind and nature. The photographs also allow humans and nature to interact dimensionally and be ever-present, even if they are practically fleeting.
