Interview with Shi Yangkun
C: The works presented in this exhibition reflect a significant shift in your practice—it feels as though you are moving away from your earlier direct photographic approach, embracing greater diversity in both method and medium. What has driven this new direction in your work?
S: The first project I completed after graduation was Retrotopia (2018–2021), which was rooted in direct photography—walking and observing the real world with a camera. In 2022, after leaving my job at a newspaper, I received a commission from a U.S. museum. That prompted me to try something different, which led to the creation of Forty Scenes of the Yuanming Yuan. That project was more conceptual in nature and marked a turning point in my artistic development. In 2024, thanks to an invitation from my friend Ming Ye in Berlin, I participated in a residency there. During that time, I continued developing my image-based work while also organizing several meaningful public activities. For example, while Gropius Bau was hosting Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exhibition, the museum provided us with space in the lobby to run a food workshop where we made baozi with Berlin residents. We specifically chose to use pagoda flower as the filling—a conscious reference to the historical German presence in Qingdao. These experiences over the past two years have given me the courage to explore new directions. I’ve grown more interested in what remains invisible behind images—whether it’s power relations, ways of seeing, or historical narratives. On this level, I’m able to develop my own conceptual stance—one that is not merely about medium specificity, but one that actively engages with my own reality and history. That is what fascinates me now, and it’s also the starting point of the new works in this exhibition.
C: This diversity in method and medium has, in fact, brought the underlying threads of your practice into sharper focus. Starting from China’s modern and contemporary history, your works often carry a kind of documentary soliloquy. As a creator, why have you remained so consistently engaged with history and archives?
S: My courses of BA and MA are in journalism and photography, and after graduation, I worked as a reporter at a newspaper for five years. When I first entered university, one of my professors often reminded us: “Give strength to the powerless, and hope to the disheartened. Today’s news is tomorrow’s history.” I feel somewhat ashamed mentioning this now, because I haven’t lived up to his expectations. But as a journalism student at the time, it felt natural to pay attention to reality and seek to understand history—though that understanding remained mostly theoretical back then. During my years as a reporter, I often had to confront the struggles—sometimes even the hopeless situations—of people in the real world. I’m deeply grateful for these experiences; it showed me how harsh and complex reality can be, and how essential it is to hold onto empathy. I have to admit, I was “a failed journalist”—in the end, I chose to leave the profession. But certain scenes still linger in my mind, and certain questions continue to trouble me. Perhaps it’s these that have led me to look for answers in history.
C: Do you believe artistic creation can substitute for being a "failed journalist"? Or are your aims as an artist the same as they were when you were a reporter?
S: That's a thoughtful question, and a somewhat complicated one for me. Many of my close friends are excellent journalists, and when I left the field, it felt a bit like desertion. I might sound cynical, but I believe it's difficult for art alone to significantly shake the foundations of the real world today. In a way, making art is also destined to be a process of failure. Yet, artists are like builders who, day after day for decades, construct houses on shifting sand—only to see them swept away by the storm, then start again somewhere else. This act persists regardless of the external world or the artist's personal circumstances. A journalist’s work brings to mind a saying by Lu Xun: “The boundless horizons, the countless people, all have something to do with me.” For an artist, however, the work is more like: “I have something to do with them.” Journalism carries a stronger public mission, while art carries a stronger sense of subjectivity. Their purposes may intersect in certain places—for instance, in helping us understand ourselves anew and live with courage.
C: From your early Late Spring series in Wuhan, to Retrotopia evoking memories of China's collectivist era, to the historical contexts in this exhibition—the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, the Battle of Qingdao, World War II—moving geographically from Beijing during the Anglo-French invasion, to colonial Qingdao, and 1930s Shanghai penetrated by Western modernity—your perspective has grown both broader and deeper. Such contexts may lead viewers to wonder: Are you advocating a form of political correctness? Just as our exhibition is titled At Present, could you share how your focus connects to the here and now?
S: Regarding "political correctness," I think the emphasis may lie less on "correctness" and more on how an individual understands their "politics." What is seen as correct differs across contexts and political perspectives. Reality is often intricate, and historical dislocations and personal limitations have always existed—such as Marx's misinterpretation of the Taiping Rebellion, for example.
I believe artists can express their own "political correctness," so long as it comes from a place of genuine personal conviction. But beyond that, the power of art lies more in its ability to loosen politics—in its subjectivity and ambiguity. In an increasingly polarized time, preserving this independence in art is profoundly valuable. As for history and the present, how we narrate history reflects how we understand the present. There's a well-known saying: "All history is contemporary history." One interpretation is that history is not the past itself, but our present-day understanding and interpretation of it. Moreover, I believe the traumas of history are transmitted through various channels and ultimately manifest in our bodies and memories, here and now. On a personal note, I was born and raised in a small city in Henan. As a child, I often heard my father and grandmother share their experiences—usually as a form of "recalling past bitterness to savor present sweetness," a common practice in Chinese family education. That kind of storytelling quietly influenced my practice. Later, through my studies and career, I continually grappled with how to narrate my own experience and history, facing completely different questions, perspectives, and contexts abroad versus within China.
C: History serves as the backdrop of your work, yet you actively "distort" its outcomes through diverse methods and mediums—as in The Nightmare of Felice Beato; you pose open-ended questions in works like Diana; you reimagine the past within contemporary settings, as in Light,Heat,Power; and you weave interwoven national narratives across time through archival material, as seen in Word List. What is the personal impetus behind this deconstructive and reconstructive approach?
S: Historians adhere to rigorous academic standards when studying and invoking historical materials. Artistic practice, however, allows more room to start from the self and create new connections. I once read historian Luo Xin’s remark that “the work of a historian is to turn the unfamiliar into the familiar.” I think the role of an artist may be the very opposite: to make the familiar strange.
Given my educational and professional background, I have long been interested in the relationship between violence and images. In many contexts today, violence has been transformed into a kind of spectacle—from war-themed TV dramas to reenacted battlefield tourist attractions. But such visual narratives, built upon collective suffering and violence, profoundly hinder our understanding of one another.
As Byung-Chul Han noted, “Violence is turning inward, as people exploit themselves—where the perpetrator is also the victim.” That was a starting point for my work The Nightmare of Felice Beato. As a photographer on the winning side of war, Beato moved corpses to compose the perfect shot. In that moment, he may have been rational and self-assured. But I wonder whether that rationally enacted violence returned to haunt him in the stillness of the night. In this exhibition, I also appear in two works. In Light, Heat, Power, my faint silhouette is captured through long exposure in a nighttime scene. In Word List, I read aloud English words that belong to specific historical contexts—terms I see as deeply intertwined with the present I inhabit.