One image contains many arrivals
Different moments of photographing share one plane, layering season, light and walking routes within the image.
07 / 07
Mountain Beyond Mountains
The origin of a structure of seeing
2012
- Year
- 2012
- Medium
- Photography, photomontage and large-scale image
- Role
- Artist
Hundreds of partial viewpoints are recomposed as landscape. The viewer moves closer and farther away, reading the work between detail and whole.
07
Project statement
Completed in 2012, Mountain Beyond Mountains was He Fa’s graduation photography work. Photographing, dividing and recomposing organize many partial images into a landscape; it forms a whole at a distance and separates into time, viewpoint and fragment up close.
Mountain Beyond Mountains — Red and White entered the CAFA Art Museum collection. The work also established a line He Fa would return to: looking organizes space, bodies and relations.
PROJECT NOTES
Mountain Beyond Mountains turns landscape from an object being seen into a structure left by the act of seeing.
The work recomposes many partial photographs. At a distance it produces the illusion of a coherent landscape; up close, continuity dissolves into different times, focuses, seasons and bodily positions. The viewer must keep moving between whole and fragment.
Perspective interrupted by partial sight
The image has no unified vanishing point. Each fragment retains its distance and angle, keeping the whole slightly displaced.
Distance and proximity contradict
Large scale requires bodily movement. Only distance reveals landscape; only proximity reveals how it was made.
WORKING PROCESS
Photograph repeatedly
Accumulate fragments across positions and times.
Remove the center
Refuse one photograph as the whole landscape.
Recompose
Connect similar textures while retaining seams of difference.
Require movement
Use scale to organize approach and retreat.
PROJECT DETAILS
A line through the work
If a landscape is made from countless incomplete views, do we see the mountain—or the way we look?
Next project / 01
Human Surrender Faction
A film grown from a lived collective