傅文俊 Fu Wenjun

苏珊·桑塔格(Susan Sontag)在《论摄影》里，认为摄影是“一种追魂的艺术”，她指出就摄影的本质而言，“它是一种拒绝联系和连续性，但又赋予每一刻以神秘性质的世界观”，并强调“以照片的形式看待某件事物乃是与一件极有魅力的潜在事物相遇。”傅文俊“双园记：当惊世界殊”里的摄影作品所提供的就是这样一种相遇的可能性——表面上，它们所聚焦的是两个不具备时空连续性的建筑群(圆明园和世博园)，但这两个建筑群已被傅文俊的镜头语言赋予了强烈的历史和文化关联，因而，当我们观看这些作品的时候，与我们的视线相遇的不再是建筑本身，而是潜藏在图像表征之下的历史的大道周行。

Susan Sontag, in On Photography, regarded photography as “a ghost-haunting art.” She pointed out that, in terms of its essence, photography embodies “a worldview that refuses connection and continuity, yet endows each moment with a mysterious quality,” and emphasized that “to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a highly seductive latent object.” The photographic works in Fu Wenjun’s Twin Gardens: When the World Is Astonishingly Transformed offer precisely such a possibility of encounter. On the surface, they focus on two architectural complexes that lack any continuity in time and space—the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) and the World Expo Park. Yet through Fu Wenjun’s visual language, these two sites are endowed with an intense historical and cultural interconnectedness. As a result, when we view these works, what meets our gaze is no longer the architecture itself, but rather the great avenue of history, circulating and recurring beneath the surface of image representation.

众所周知，1860年，入侵北京的英法联军焚毁了不仅是中国更是世界文化宝库的圆明园，1900年入侵北京的八国联军又对包括圆明园在内的已遭摧残的西郊诸园再施劫掠，使得圆明园彻底沦为一座废墟。一百多年来，圆明园已经成为中国民族伤痛的一个醒目的提喻(synecdoche)，园中那些残余的石料就像瓦尔特·本雅明(Walter Benjamin)笔下脸朝着过去、背对着未来的“历史天使”。

As is well known, in 1860 the Anglo-French Allied Forces that invaded Beijing set fire to the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan), destroying not only a treasure of Chinese civilization but also a cultural repository of global significance. In 1900, the Eight-Nation Alliance once again invaded Beijing and carried out further plunder of the already devastated imperial gardens of the western suburbs, including the Old Summer Palace, reducing it irrevocably to ruins. For more than a century, the Old Summer Palace has stood as a striking synecdoche of China’s national trauma. The remaining fragments of stone scattered throughout the site resemble Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”—with its face turned toward the past and its back toward the future.

而2010年的上海世博园则是另一个同样有表现力的提喻——中国民族自信心的提喻。在中国已经和平崛起为改变世界的一个举足轻重的“活力场”的今天，200多个国家和地区来到上海世博园搭建他们的场馆，借助中国这个世界“活力场”激活他们经济与贸易的任督二脉。一百多年前曾以八国联军这样极端暴力的方式闯入古老中国的八个西方国家也位列其中，只不过，这次他们是开放的当代中国的友好的客人。

By contrast, the Shanghai World Expo Park of 2010 constitutes another synecdoche of equal expressive power—a synecdoche of China’s national self-confidence. In an era in which China has risen peacefully to become a pivotal “field of vitality” reshaping the world, more than 200 countries and regions came to the Shanghai World Expo to construct their pavilions, seeking to activate the channels of their economies and trade through China as a global “field of vitality.” Notably, the eight Western nations that, more than a century earlier, had forcibly entered ancient China through the extreme violence of the Eight-Nation Alliance were also among the participants. This time, however, they arrived not as invaders, but as friendly guests of an open and contemporary China.

傅文俊以敏锐的艺术直觉和宏阔的艺术抱负把握到了圆明园和世博园这两个提喻之间的巨大张力，并以装置的方式，对他自己原先拍摄的摄影材料进行了形式重构。这种重构并非简单的跨时空并置(anachronical juxtaposition)，而是一种极富历史对话意味的空间再生产：在展场里，无论是圆明园还是世博园的图像都走出了照片的边框，打破了摄影的瞬间凝固性，相互参契着、激发着，震荡出一片远远长于瞬间的历史表意空间。

With keen artistic intuition and an expansive artistic ambition, Fu Wenjun grasps the immense tension between the two synecdoches of the Old Summer Palace and the World Expo Park, and, through installation, carries out a formal reconstruction of the photographic materials he originally shot. This reconstruction is not a simple anachronical juxtaposition across time and space, but rather a spatial re-production rich in historical dialogue. Within the exhibition space, images of both the Old Summer Palace and the World Expo Park step beyond the confines of the photographic frame, breaking photography’s instantaneous fixity. In doing so, they resonate with and activate one another, generating a historical field of signification that extends far beyond the moment itself.

“双园记：当惊世界殊”源自作为诗人的国家领袖毛泽东想象力惊人的预言性诗句“高峡出平湖，神女应无恙，当惊世界殊”，以这句诗来命名傅文俊的展览无疑具有双重的阐释视野：其一，傅文俊的“双园记”所展示的历史表意空间与毛泽东诗句中的历史预言性有着隐秘的共振关系;其二，毛泽东这句诗所畅想的“未来主义三峡”在今天已成为重庆的现实，而傅文俊恰好是一个重庆艺术家，“当惊世界殊”在重庆的展出不仅意味着百多年前的北京圆明园与当今的上海世博园之间的“殊”，更意味着正在西部昂然崛起的重庆已孕育出与以往的闭塞迥然不同的人文气象，傅文俊作品中的北京、上海与他的重庆身份三者之间构成了一面引人深思的地缘文化三棱镜，从这面三棱镜里折射出来的历史与现状、民族与世界将呈现出更加意味深长的美学光谱。

Twin Gardens: When the World Is Astonishingly Transformed takes its title from the poetically charged and prophetic line by Mao Zedong: “From high gorges emerges a level lake; the goddess should be well—how astonishingly the world will be transformed.” Naming Fu Wenjun’s exhibition after this verse clearly opens up a dual interpretive horizon. First, the historical field of signification revealed in Fu Wenjun’s Twin Gardens resonates subtly with the prophetic historical imagination embedded in Mao Zedong’s poem. Second, the poem’s vision of a “futurist Three Gorges” has today become a concrete reality in Chongqing. Fu Wenjun himself is a Chongqing-based artist, and thus the exhibition of When the World Is Astonishingly Transformed in Chongqing signifies not only the “difference” between the Old Summer Palace in Beijing a century ago and the Shanghai World Expo Park of today, but also the emergence of a distinctly new humanistic landscape in Chongqing—a city rising with confidence in western China, fundamentally unlike its once-closed past. Within Fu Wenjun’s work, Beijing, Shanghai, and his own Chongqing identity form a thought-provoking geo-cultural prism. Through this prism, reflections of history and the present, the nation and the world, are refracted into a far more resonant and nuanced aesthetic spectrum.

关于作者：胡续冬，诗人、北京大学外国语学院副教授。

About the Author: Hu Xudong is a poet and Associate Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Peking University.