After the Tang Master
Photograph
After the Tang Master
1942
Gelatin silver print
Image: 28.2 x 19.8 cm
Mount: 45.5 x 36.7 cm
Gift of Mary Ann Giglio, 2008
2008.0329.0004
Inscriptions recto: [stamp with Chinese character]
verso (printed label): After the Tang Masters (1942) / [text written in Chinese characters] / Description: - The Siao Sin Po at the left side of the Wenshu Temple, a very steep precipice with a flight of steps almost perpendicularly cut out of the rock itself, is so indescribably hazardous a place that visitors cannot help feeling afraid and uneasy. It is for this reason that it deserves the name of Siao Sin, which means "Take Heed.” This picture, strikingly resembling a painting of the artists of the Tang Dynasty, shows a number of perilous spots among which the Siao Sin Po is the most noted. / Comment: - "Chin-San Long, China's master of landscape photography, uses a large reflex type camera, a western medium, but his expression is pure Chinese, reiterating the delicte [sic] stylization of old masters of the brush of past dynasties. He uses the medium, exploiting paper negative methods and montage, but his creations are purely the expressions of memory and experience drawn from his rich heritage. His "After the Tang Masters," which is reproduced, has all the characteristics of brush work and is integrally Chinese, though a camera was used and the technique of the paper negative, which permits control, employed. Chin-San Long is a dreamer and his lyrical pictures set very often in a high key breathe delicacy and refinement. "Chinese artists have often been accused of doing their work from imagination," Long once observed, "but nothing can be further from the truth; they paint not from imagination but from memory. And with their art improve on Nature. With the camera as with my brush, I have endeavored to do the same and the composite picture technique (montage) helps to bridge time and space, to produce a picture called up by my visual impressions." All the composite pictures he has made" he went on to explain, "have been landscapes in the style of the traditional artists." - by Sam B. Tata in MARG. Magazine of Architecture and Art. XSp Vol. 3. No. 1 India. / Accepted & Hung at [list of 47 locations, from 1936-1940]
verso (printed label): After the Tang Masters (1942) / [text written in Chinese characters] / Description: - The Siao Sin Po at the left side of the Wenshu Temple, a very steep precipice with a flight of steps almost perpendicularly cut out of the rock itself, is so indescribably hazardous a place that visitors cannot help feeling afraid and uneasy. It is for this reason that it deserves the name of Siao Sin, which means "Take Heed.” This picture, strikingly resembling a painting of the artists of the Tang Dynasty, shows a number of perilous spots among which the Siao Sin Po is the most noted. / Comment: - "Chin-San Long, China's master of landscape photography, uses a large reflex type camera, a western medium, but his expression is pure Chinese, reiterating the delicte [sic] stylization of old masters of the brush of past dynasties. He uses the medium, exploiting paper negative methods and montage, but his creations are purely the expressions of memory and experience drawn from his rich heritage. His "After the Tang Masters," which is reproduced, has all the characteristics of brush work and is integrally Chinese, though a camera was used and the technique of the paper negative, which permits control, employed. Chin-San Long is a dreamer and his lyrical pictures set very often in a high key breathe delicacy and refinement. "Chinese artists have often been accused of doing their work from imagination," Long once observed, "but nothing can be further from the truth; they paint not from imagination but from memory. And with their art improve on Nature. With the camera as with my brush, I have endeavored to do the same and the composite picture technique (montage) helps to bridge time and space, to produce a picture called up by my visual impressions." All the composite pictures he has made" he went on to explain, "have been landscapes in the style of the traditional artists." - by Sam B. Tata in MARG. Magazine of Architecture and Art. XSp Vol. 3. No. 1 India. / Accepted & Hung at [list of 47 locations, from 1936-1940]
