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| The Collected Dialogues. Chang, Li-Hao Solo Exhibition |
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Plato’s Dialogues, in which Socrates appears almost in every occasion as the chief interlocutor, remains the paradigm of how philosophizing – whose aim is to arrive at the most abstract and universal truth and nothing but the truth – can be conducted in the form of daily conversation about concrete matters and particular individuals. Truth is revealed in action, or more specifically in speech acts which are surely more than mere exchange of words. In the same vain but closer to our age, Mikhail M. Bakhtin proposed that the essence of man is to engage with others, that is to say, to relate to others in a particular way – and that way is through language. Perhaps it may not too far to say that man is essentially a linguistically expressive being, either literally or metaphorically speaking, through words in print or spoken.
The images presented by Lihao Chang in here, however, constitute a series of dialogue in a different kind. Unlike his last exhibition titled as ‘La Possibilité d’une Rencontre’, there are no men and women encountering with each other in the pictures or to be encountered by the viewer in the exhibition. Indeed, they are basically images of things disconnected in time and space. Yet one can’t deny that their disconnections create a realm in its own where more ambiguities could be read into or out of those pictures. And this process of deciphering itself, not without hints in words provided by Chang though, is precisely what was meticulously designed by the photographer – to make the viewer to engage with the references of the images or, in other words, to have dialogues themselves. John Berger once remarked that one cannot take photos with dictionaries. Chang’s photos seem to serve as a footnote to that in a unique way.
Photography is an art of freezing one’s viewing or in another word ‘gazing’. What is special about Chang’s art of photography is that he freezes a particular slice of time and space while we must browse that slice in time and space. No doubt, browsing as such entails exercising our imagination to link items so distant in time and space, as if they were in dialogue. And the freezing and browsing together constitute a dialogue between the photographer and the viewer. Thus understood, what is involved in the experience in this exhibition is not only eavesdropping the whisper between images but also having a conversation with the photographer – thus spoken Chang as an interlocutor.
Source and Photo courtesy of VT Artsalon (非常廟藝文空間)
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