DODO JIN MING
Michael Hoppen, SW3
IT IS TEMPTING to speculate whether Dodo Jin Ming’s upbringing in China as the daughter of intellectuals during the insane brutalities of the Cultural Revolution had a darkening effect on her later work as a photographer.
The daughter of two violinists, Jin Ming was bought a first-class violin when she was still in her mother’s womb. At 4 she began to play and within two years she had won a place at the Central Academy of Music in Beijing.
When Mao’s Cultural Revolution closed the college, her father continued to train her in private. She grew up accepting her predestined life as a professional violinist and as a young adult moved to Hong Kong, where she taught the violin and played with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra until an art exhibition changed the course of her life completely.
Jin Ming’s cultural world was so exclusively focused on music that she claims she had never been to an art exhibition. When she wandered into a show of drawings by Joseph Beuys, she was so overcome that she decided to give up playing the violin and become an artist. She was 33. She began by drawing sunflowers, and then the same year she taught herself to take photographs, develop them and use an enlarger. Wanting to tone her own pictures, she started making her own toner from a diluted solution of cyanide, which she used for several months before discovering how dangerous it was.
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Her work turned out to be every bit as idiosyncratically personal as her production techniques and has been exhibited in major shows across the United States, where she now lives. Photographs from two of her recent series, Free Element and Behind My Eyes, at Michael Hoppen Gallery in London, offer two distinct bodies of work, both of them highly intense and almost operatically overwrought.
Behind My Eyes, her large sunflower diptychs, are printed as toned black and white negative images, giving them undercurrents of extreme ghoulishness. She took these photographs in horticultural testing fields in France and America, where white hoods are placed over the individual flowers to protect them. With Jin Ming’s reversal of normal printing techniques, the hoods appear as dark shrouds under ominous black skies. The results look like panoramas thronged with silent, windblown widows or black robed religious extremists, tramping slowly, heads bent low, across a ruined post-nuclear land. With her reversed values, trees gleam and skies brood, and in several of the photographs the horizon is dotted with telephone poles, which gleam like spindly crucifixes in the silvery lunar light.
This treatment of sunflowers — her first subject as an artist — exaggerates their otherworldly qualities. Somehow sunflowers are over-large, too yellow and too raspingly dry. They are stark and extreme, riotous and profuse, their luxuriant surfaces ready to cut you at your touch. Their combination of pleasure and pain appealed to Van Gogh, too.
In Free Element, Jin Ming again turns nature into an artificial construct, this time the boiling waters of turbulent seas, made to look like fire, their manifest opposite. In Jin Ming’s vision huge waves seethe and burn as if on fire, her vast compositions glowering with an apocalyptic energy. Like Turner, who strapped himself to the mast of his ship, Jin Ming straps herself to jetties to take her photographs. And the results contain some of the glowering power of Turner ‘s luminous seascapes.
The seascapes refer also to the work of Gustave Le Gray, the mid-19th-century painter who turned to photography, whose seascapes became the prototypes for all other photographs of water. To get the right amount of detail and atmosphere both of the water and the sky, he combined two negatives. Jin Ming adopts this technique, but in her case not for more truthful versions of the sea and sky, but to project a greater and more intense emotion.
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Her seas rage and roil to such a fiery extent that it is hard to imagine anything surviving on them at all. These seas are of course heightened fictional creations, but to my mind they are much more convincing than the tramping ghouls of her sunflowers.
Her work seems to be a very personal view of the violence of nature, rather than an old and threatening memory of her Chinese past. Her seas remind us of our instinctive view of the sea as a place of all-encompassing power, a primordial metaphor for the vastness of nature and the insignificance of the human beings who live in it.
The recent tsunami in South-East Asia offers proof of this. A selection of photographs by British press photographers of this catastrophe and its aftermath can be seen at Air Gallery. It is a powerful corrective for human beings in danger of losing their humility.