In a photograph by Feng Yan, a rock can gaze back at you. A chair is able to ask, “what do you want from me?” A swath of rough grass is capable of pushing you away. The things in these images meet our eyes squarely and then assert themselves. They stare at us as we look at them and in doing so they demand to be understood on equal terms.

Portraiture is the genre that most often insists on its own standing in the world. Pictures of people look at us with faces not too dissimilar from our own and so we grant them a presence similar to ours. But there are no people here in Feng Yan’s photographs, just rocks, corners of parking lots, and patches of earth. These are not majestic, awe-inspiring landscapes that aim to carry us to sublime emotions. Nor do they capture moments of human interaction that allow us the vicarious pleasures of experiencing another person’s life. Feng Yan does not photograph scenes into which we can wander. Instead, he asserts the presence of things.

That things should speak to us, or with us, is unsurprising. From simple anthropomorphism to more complicated psychological mechanisms like Freud’s fetish, Lacan’s mirror-stage, or Winnicott’s transitional object, we empower the things around us and even make things of ourselves, all in order to better understand, or obscure, ourselves. The modes of describing an object’s power to act with and on the human world are manifold. But to show the power of the things around us to assert that presence is another task, and this is the subject of Feng Yan’s photography. From his early series Power and Order to the later Monuments, Rockery, Tang Grass, and Psychedelic Bamboo, his work redirects our attention to the manner in which we both build and deconstruct our senses of being in the world by giving agency to the world of things around us.

Creating Presence

Getting a rock to assert itself is no easy task. The same is true for pure bands of light, a drawer of cleaning supplies, or a swath of wild grass. How then to make a thing seem intimate? How does a wall of granite look into us and ask us to spend time looking back at it? How do we hold each other’s gaze?

There are, of course, technical choices that lead to this sense that the photographic image has presence, and to the notion that we must accordingly treat it as something with which to have a conversation. The works of the Rockery and Monuments series often frame their objects using the conventions of portraiture. These monolithic stones and pieces of office furniture stand centered in vertical frames. There is just enough space to the right, just enough to the left, and a reasonable room above and below for us to comprehend the whole of the thing. Our own eye, the lens, is positioned at a height so that it appears that our viewing body and the object’s body stand facing each other. The broad, flat presentation side of each thing is oriented toward us as well, so that we seem to be face to face with these figures.

But just as often the stones of the Rockery series present none of these orienting features. Instead, pure slabs of granite texture expand beyond the frame of the image. The object is all surface, and the surface of the object is forced so far up into our viewing space that its boundaries become unclear. This is the same view we have of our pillows in the morning, or from the inside of a deep embrace. All the eye can comprehend is a texture, a pressure, a skin. By destroying the boundaries of the total object, we move into it and think from within it. Compressed into this intimate relationship, we begin to lose a sense of our own bodily boundaries.

In Tang Grass, similar strategies are in play, only at a tangent. Textures equally overwhelm the eye in these images. But they also offer a limited and important depth of field. Blades of different wild grasses push out toward us in broken parabolas, growing lighter as they reach closer. Their tangled growth patterns stand out all the more against the dark, dense soil behind the vegetation, the source from which these plants move up toward the sun. As we peer through the grass we are met with an impenetrable wall of earth, under which there is only what is buried and invisible to the light.

Feng Yan uses these techniques of spatial compression and immersive perspective to assert the presence of the things in his photographs. Limiting the tonal range of each image also helps. Reduced contrast and overcast light produce a timeless, dream-like space in which objects further merge with one another. As the eye searches for sharp differences in color and texture to demarcate the boundaries of form, it descends instead into an all-encompassing envelope of sensation as presence.

In the series Side of Paintings, Feng Yan takes advantage of two alternating strategies to create presence. Similar to the overwhelming surfaces of the Rockery and Tang Grass series, Feng Yan photographs tightly cropped sections of each canvas, honing in on a shallow depth of field that includes the space between the texture of the gessoed material support and the interplay of pigment applied to it. In the process, he obliterates any understanding of the painted image as a whole. An opposite strategy proves equally effective—stacking a dozen canvases with their image-bearing faces pressed front to back and turned away from us at a right angle. With no access to the faces of these painted images, we instead see only the edges, which are spattered with the ephemera of painting’s processes. Each thin border bears different evidence of the denied face of its canvas. From these glances, we can only begin to wonder at the images of each canvas, and that occlusion only increases our curiosity toward the thing being shown.

Such an orientation asserts the presence of the paintings as objects over their image-bearing capacities. Compressed into tight blocks, individual canvases are reorganized as a collective, dense monolith seen from the side and receding into the scene. Arrayed in this way, they hide their many faces from our view. To understand this incorporated whole would be to spend time prying apart each hidden layer of canvas, an impossibility in the stilled moment of the photograph. Instead, we are offered the enigma of a complex and intersectional presence that we are not able to fully comprehend, but which we know bears more depth than we can witness.

The ability of the photograph to assert presence is pushed to the limits in the series Electric Bamboo. In each of Feng Yan’s earlier series, the image is a record of light reflecting from arranged or found surfaces. But in these works, horizontal bands of neon bulbs produce their own illumination. Rather than being defined from without, emanations from within the photograph give us light as pure presence, as bands of cyan, magenta, burnt maroon, and spring bud green pulsing out toward us from the image.

By hiding the faces of canvases, obliterating the sense of the object in micro-textural surface images, and staring into the dark of the earth, Feng Yan’s photographs bring us closer to the things they depict. Through the counterintuitive strategies of immersion and denial, they assert their presence. We want to get closer to these things we can only understand in glimpses or from a distance.

Ordinary Icons

Feng Yan’s photography also calls into question the capacity of any image, and photographic images in particular, to bear a message at all. Such questions occur especially when his images are of objects already overburdened with cultural messaging. Take for instance Security Check, from the series Power. As viewers, we are positioned looking down at a thin yellow ribbon unevenly bisecting the red carpet below it. The tape twists, contorting and diminishing its warning, “Security Check,” words that are reverse-printed, written in English on the side facing us, and upside-down in Chinese on the opposite side. The impact of the message printed here is as feeble as the cheap material onto which it is printed. These unstable words, tilted at such an angle, make us uncertain of our own standing as well as of what is being separated. Security Check underperforms as a barrier and signals even more poorly as a sign of secured space.

The hollowest of signs are often those that are most used, and this is the interest Feng Yan brings to the symbolic forms of China’s historical past. The pine trees, stones, and bamboo of his series Order, for instance, would seem to allude to the classical iconography of literati material culture. From the poetry of the Six Dynasties period (220–580 AD) onward, these natural objects began to accrue metaphorical value, mostly as metaphors for the scholarly nature of a true gentleman. Pines were revered for their ability to survive in harsh environments and to remain green when all other plants lost their colors. Stones were ciphers for endurance itself as well as objects of pure cosmic patterning and organization. Bamboo trunks grew straight and true without having to lean on their peers, and like the pine, they remained verdant through wintry times. Pines, rocks, and bamboo have been planted in Chinese gardens for millennia, and their images have been carved, cast, molded, and painted across all forms of Chinese visual culture.

So, what then to make of a common evergreen shrub planted in an ordinary parking lot and wrapped in a strand of white holiday lights, as in Pine and Car? What to do with the humble, squat, and artificial monolith of Zoo Pond, marooned as it is in an empty polished concrete fountain? When grand cultural iconography becomes supersaturated by the mediocrity of everyday exposure, what message can it continue to carry?

Inverted, this question might take the form of Inside Drawer, an image of the most ordinary household objects—two folded pink plastic kitchen gloves pressed together with linens and crockery—that becomes significant precisely through its commonness. Intimacy makes the commonplace powerful, a topic further expanded upon in works like Bathroom Mirror, where a shallow depth of field centers our attention in the mirror space on a towel, one that has presumably touched a body known to the viewer. This is a portrait of ourselves through the things that touch us. The daily encounters of the series from which this work comes, Order, would be melancholy if they were not made to appear so present. The feeling they repeatedly offer is of the meaningful role played by the everyday things that live around us and through which we live.

Although the series Power, Tang Grass, and Rockery are built around specific places and objects that carry the historical burden of broad cultural meaning, Feng Yan asserts the presence of these forms only by staging them as incomplete, empty, or impenetrable. In contrast, the quotidian iconography and day-to-day glances found in the series Order allow us to see the impact that everyday presences have on our constructions of identity. At the core of all of these photographs, then, would seem to be the question of how we think the possibilities of ourselves through the objects around us.

Empathy & Image

Throughout the various series of his career, Feng Yan’s photographs seem to suspend time indefinitely. These are not single, decisive moments of stilled action, but full epochs that somehow expand the space between being and becoming. Within the space of these photographs, we feel the presence of things that feel back at us, something that can only occur when we grant these things the rights that we grant ourselves—to act and to be with separate but equal needs. In these images, Feng Yan shows us that to want to know about a thing, to be curious about why it is as it is, means meeting it on its own terms and accepting that you cannot know it fully. Feng Yan’s photographs are therefore opportunities for empathy.

The word empathy was first coined at the turn of the twentieth century in English as a translation of the German word Einfühlung (“feeling into”), a term used in aesthetic philosophy to describe the ways in which viewers looked at artworks. Formal rhythms, surface textures, and scale in relation to the body were grounds for the mental projection of a viewer into anything from a carved wooden chair to a painted landscape. In describing this form of imaginative projection, writers were pursuing the question of why art has the power to affect our direct emotional reactions. Over the twentieth century, the term empathy mutated as it was adopted by psychologists, sociologists, social workers, therapists, and even neuroscientists. It began to be used primarily to describe how humans imagined the lives of other humans, or how they failed to do so. To be empathetic now is to try to understand someone’s needs and actions despite their difference from you.

But the roots of empathy’s early origins—of being able to imagine the inner life of an object that is not us—live on in works like Feng Yan’s. Alternating between the skin-to-skin intimacy of his textural images and the distant, closed-off portraits of stones, stacked canvases, or furniture, between the ordinariness of overburdened metaphors and the meaningfulness of everyday objects, Feng Yan has built a world in which the things we live with help us to live with ourselves. These are photographs about how we relate to and through the objects of our lives, and about how, through that process, we become closer to ourselves.