Act V. A Russian View: China | The Humans v.21 | Roman Adler

ACT V. RUSSIAN VIEW. CHINA

Often in China I was asked: “Do you love China?”

I would answer: “Look at my photographs and ask yourselves—do you love China as I love it?”

I study people. In various life situations, circumstances, and conditions. In times of peaceful life and in times of wars and cataclysms.

China, for most people — not only for Russians — is a different and incomprehensible civilization.

I study it like one who, for the first time, opens a very ancient book that is new to him, despite the hundreds he has already read. Turning the old pages very carefully and reverently.

Slightly paraphrasing Lao Tzu, I will say:

We shape clay into a vessel. We think this is the goal, that this gives our existence meaning. But it is the emptiness inside that makes it useful.

So it is with photographs. The goal of the project is not in them. But in that almost infinite stream of fates that they absorb.

Each person will have their own meaning. Because each of us is a separate window into the world. And what each sees in it is only his own.

My shots are not what I put into them. They are that silence, that space I left inside. The emptiness in which meaning reveals itself. I do not create reality. I allow it to be.

Neon and old temples. A cage of reeds next to an electric bike. A street vendor, unhurried, drinks tea during a break.

I look at Chinese cities and villages, streets and markets — and I see another civilization, living by its own laws. Laws that were written over millennia. Laws that are still unknown to many.

In this endless stream of neon and speeds, I seek that very water. Quiet, deep, life-bearing. I seek the “uncarved block” — original simplicity, in which all power is hidden.

Each frame of this chapter — like the previous acts — is part of someone’s story. Part of someone’s fate, torn by me from the context of an individual life and woven into the canvas of a painting called “The Life of Humanity, 21st Century Version.”