About Muge photography, by Louise Clements
Thousands of people from China each year migrate to the cities and beyond to find work but as the Chinese saying goes – even leaves return to their roots. What can you do if your home has been submerged and your family, culture and community fractured and relocated? Where do you go, when even the geography has changed? Two extremes seem to emerge in Muge’s images of deep sorrow and that of numbness.
Some may say that Muge’s images are filled with Saudade a German word meaning filled with longing, and in my understanding of it – for home and nostalgia for lost dreams. But I also believe them to be beyond longing reflecting the rapid changes in China as felt by the people. Representing the individuals swept along and those left behind literally by the tidal wave of progress from the Three Gorges Dam project and economic developments – the utopian future in spite of the present. Photography becomes a tool to turn memories into something tangible an attempt of remembrance, to keep one’s memories intact. The changes for many have been too hard to bear, longing turns to numbness where there is regret in that we no longer know what we long for, and if we ever did. In the words of Pink Floyd:
There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ships smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying.
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now.
The child is grown, the dream is gone.
I have become comfortably numb.1
He has an obsession with people and the vernacular, people and place. His are contradictory emotive pictures full of emotion and latent motive and they are truly wonder-full in their numbness. They are meaning rich and in looking at them, spending time with them you cannot help to feel that part of your memory has been etched with the people and places as seen through Muge’s eyes, that then become your own. Despite acknowledging the contradiction between the recorded image and the inaccuracies of human visual memory our dislocated biographies cannot help but become connected for a moment.
Within his photography lies a desire crystallised by the word ‘regarder’ a dynamic coupling of the act of looking (regard) holding in your mind and eyes; and preserving (garder) documenting and evidencing. This perfectly summarises the intent in the photographs. Muge’s images both preserve and reflect, poetic moments in time and in memory of the world that he inhabits. He wants the memories of his images to endure. Numbed and unconscious of the camera, recording pain and indifference for posterity the memory of those moments will have to cling to the pictures that remain. They are also an honest reflection of his unique view of his homeland, he has a special eye for the sublime and melancholic of the lost – perhaps a reflection of his own soul.. however to meet him you will understand that he, luckily, naturally prioritises joyfulness over sorrow. Muge has refined his technique to represent a sense of place that is greater and more compacted than the geography of everyday life, it is a transformative world beyond the facade. Dostoyevsky was known to have said that ‘Beauty will save the world’. To this end these images come from a desire not only to elucidate the incredible but also from an ambition to examine and find the transcendent, rather than represent the beauty of mere surfaces.
- Comfortably numb by Pink Floyd, 1979. [↩]
