'Chance favors the prepared mind': the landscape photographs of Zeng Yicheng

These series of homages constitute Zeng's most tradition-conscious and, arguably, most accessible efforts. But they form only a portion of his oeuvre, serving as a point of departure for explorations of more unfamiliar territories. Those adventures include his "Dachau" suite, a set of hallucinatory images made in the haunted spaces and artifacts of an infamous Nazi concentration camp; "Exchange," in which, within an exhibition space, he photographed himself performing a series of actions that evoke the exquisitely designed Zen gardens in Japanese temples such as that of Ryōan-ji; "wedding," which describes two symbolic actions he undertook to celebrate the marriage of friends; "We Never Had Travelled Hand in Hand," where pairs of black &white small-camera images bearing cryptic captions reverberate against each other; and "flower in mirror," distinctly postmodern, directorially staged, brightly colored scenarios.

In some of these the connection to contemporary performance art and conceptual art becomes inescapable. Yet Zeng has rooted them all in the spiritual precepts that underpin his practice, and has furthermore ensured that -- unlike the merely recordativepictures that document so much of performance art and conceptual art -- his accounts of these actions resonate as independent works in and of themselves. Zeng's images do not simply annotate and illustrate his ideas; instead, his ideas resolve as images.