Transcendence: Awakening the Soul
Griffin Museum of Photography
67 Shore Rd.
Winchester, Mass.
Through Jan. 7, 2024
It’s often said that photography is one of the hardest art forms by which to create anything original. Nature photography has always felt to me as particularly hard hit by this phenomenon. There’s so much beauty inherent in nature that it seems especially difficult for a photographer to avoid trite, overseen tropes, lend a unique perspective, or tell a story that hasn’t already been told. As anyone who has ever tried to photograph a landscape can attest to, attempting to convey the vastness and wonder of nature into a flattened, limited frame, stripped away from all other sensation, almost invariably leads to disappointment.
Xuan Hui Ng’s exhibition, “Transcendence: Awakening the Soul,” on view at the The Griffin Museum of Photography until Jan. 7, manages to breathe some of the life back into nature photography – if that’s even the best categorization for the poetic, often abstract impressions Ng’s work conveys. While her photographs are of nature, they manage to feel much more like scenes from a personal diary, imbued with the weight of memory and recognizable personal emotion, rather than solely conveying an external reality.
Ng notes in her artist statement that she began photographing as a form of self-therapy as she was grieving the loss of her mother. She describes plunging into a world of grief until a chance encounter with the vastness and wonder of nature set her onto a path of recovery. Her drive to photograph comes from her desire to prolong these moments of awe. “Its vastness gave me a sense of perspective,” Ng writes, “while its majesty reignited a sense of wonder and adventure… I hope these photographs of the natural world provide a brief reprieve from life’s harsh realities, by reminding us of the beauty in all things delicate and fierce.”
All of her images are single-exposure images made in camera as Ng searches for beauty in the mundane and chances upon otherworldly scenes. Ng, who is from Singapore and currently living and photographing in Japan, often takes her photographs at intense moments, such as during snowstorms, and describes the feeling of being a co-creator with nature: “The Chinese idiom “天时地利人和” speaks to the importance of fortuitous timing (天时), favorable conditions (地利) and the human resolve (人和) to our endeavors. I think this is especially true for my photography because my images are a collaborative effort with nature.”
The result is a series of photographs which are emotional, open to interpretation, and manage to side-step the expected images of nature. Specular dots of light and moisture splatter create beautiful and abstract shapes over landscapes which otherwise feel cold or barren, and the result is breathtaking and almost fantastical, like images sent from a parallel magical fairy realm hinting to the ephemeral hope and transcendence that Ng refers to in her artist statement.
Water is photographed at extremely long shutter speeds until it becomes just the idea of motion, serving instead as meditation on the passage of time and drawing out eternity. Nothing here is separate. Snow, light, petals, sky, and water all layer each other, becoming reduced to patterns and shapes before offering the viewer the chance to build them back up into a coherent world.
The Griffin Museum of Photography plays a perfect host for Ng’s work, providing a quiet gallery within a cozy library, plenty of photo books, and a view of a lake just out of the window. Ng’s prints are displayed on heavy matte paper which feels like a welcome diversion from the sharp, bright reflective surfaces I’m used to seeing in galleries, and adds to the muted, abstract quality of the work. The overhead lights seem to illuminate just the right points in Ng’s work, mimicking the kind of celestial, otherworldly light present of many of her images and translating them back into a third dimension. A video loops with scenes of a snowfall – Ng’s images brought to life – trees and flurries performing the role of purifying visual white noise while soft music fills the entire gallery with a peaceful tone.
Ng’s photography reminds us that our internal states are so large that they often reach beyond our own boundaries, and yet at the same time that the world is blissfully larger than ourselves. These photographs come from the artist’s own unique emotional journey, but the emotions they speak to are universal and truly transcendent.
