Photo Exhibition
Artist: Vivian Huang (born in 1963, Chongqing, China, Freelance Photographer, Television Producer, Writer, Researcher)
Artist Statement:
Life belongs to us only once, and time does not stop for our laughter or tears. The value of life is nothing more than a complete blossoming in a short lifetime. There are few decades in a person’s life, and my best decade stayed in Tibet. The heavy memory is like a thin steel needle, deeply rooted in my heart, even a soft breath will burst out of my heart and lungs. I can only live with the pain until the afterlife. The preordained call connected me to each of the characters in the book, and gradually became a silent feeling of joy in life. Tibet — I have been fortunate enough to be on the roof of the world and to be able to enter the hinterland and meet the best of the Tibetan cultural elite. They are like blood, cells or viruses flowing through Tibetan culture, and all of this makes up the complete and authentic Tibet. I spent nearly a decade walking 100,000 kilometers across six scattered Tibetan regions in China, interviewing and photographing more than 300 Tibetan intangible heritage artists. They include Tibetan medicine, Tibetan opera, Tibetan dance, Gesar rap artists, tangka painters, and folk musicians who have documented a great deal of folk art that will soon be lost. These videos and texts will present the most complete set of documentation of the modern Tibetan visual ethnography. Some of these artists have become the most important friends in my life, and some of the older ones have even become my friends between generations. We walked into each other’s lives and shared each other’s stories — whether it’s happy or sad, accomplishment or frustration. But at the same time there also ensues a brutal enlightenment about life and death. Beautiful encounters are always fleeting and the truth of life is Saṃsāra. Some people passed away, one after another, and each was a major blow to me. But it is a baptism of the soul, a sense of life and death, a dislocation of body to soul. The dried tears will eventually be transformed into a strength that goes back to the heart, filling it up. My kinship with Tibet is both a destiny and a mission. For me, it was a great gift that made me understand the unbearable lightness of life.
