In Beijing, at the home and studio of the artist, portrait painter and graphic designer Chen Man

“Hòu! Hà! Hèi!” (2022): la foto è stata scattata nel monastero di Shaolin, noto per essere la culla del Kung Fu, per “Cosmopolitan China” (10.000 $).

At a certain point, however, her hyper-constructed style encounters resistance. In China, she explains, the public struggles to accept images that are too elaborate, too far removed from reality. And perhaps that is as it should be. Because, beneath the polished surface of her works, Chen Man has always held a very clear conviction: ‘Perfection is not of this world. Humanity is, by nature, made up of flaws. I learnt this through my contact with the world of fragrances: essences, in their concentrated form, often have a pungent, almost unpleasant smell. And yet it is precisely from there that perfume is born. It is the same with images and with people: what truly moves us is often that which is imperfect.”

Provino del servizio fotografico a Ryūichi Sakamoto (2018).

Chen Man then decided to change her approach and leave the studio to work in the physical landscape of the country, moving from the Great Wall to Tiananmen Square, from temples to parks, creating images orchestrated down to the smallest detail, yet rooted in the real world. This gave rise to projects such as Long Live the Motherland (2009), in which models dressed in red become almost archetypal figures, set against the country’s most iconic landmarks. Years later, around 2011, the philosophical heart of her work emerged. She returned to technology, but with a broader, existential, almost lyrical scope. ‘In Taoism there is a fundamental book, the I Ching: it says that everything is constantly changing. My work stems from this principle. During the pandemic I couldn’t photograph people, so I began to frame ancient tea trees, some over three hundred years old. I am fascinated by the way they endure through time. Around the same time, I was invited to one of the oldest Zen temples in Kyoto: the abbot asked me to paint a golden screen, giving me complete freedom. It was there that I felt this connection between everything – trees, architecture, people – most clearly.”

“Long Live the Motherland” (2009), realizzata per “Vogue China” a Pechino, in uno degli storici vicoli noti come hutong.

One of his signature styles is dressing models in a blend of traditional Chinese attire and haute couture: hanfu, armour, imperial silks and couture styling, demonstrating how tradition is not a static concept, but a fluid aesthetic language to be continually revitalised. Burgundy red, sage green, midnight blue: his colours are intense and enveloping, the contours sharp and calligraphic, the quality cinematic. Some editorials, featuring famous Chinese actors for Vogue China, evoke the aesthetic of Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers, where colour forms the narrative structure. Others feature children, already skilled in martial arts, immersed amongst three-dimensional AI-generated artefacts and Chinese ritual objects made of copper. In her images, one seems to sense the earth shaking off its leaves, the whistling of arrows through the air, the water of a waterfall in the distance, the smile of the Tao. Chen Man shows that, just when you think you’ve understood China, its identity has already moved on. ‘Look, for example, at this piece.’ She points behind her to a painting in phosphorescent colours. ‘It’s a photograph that I’ve reworked with paint. It’s the same approach I use in my portraits. I start from memory. I always ask two questions: if you could keep just one memory on earth, what would it be? And what colour is that memory? I follow whatever emerges – be it pain, love, complex moments… Then I build a brick of ice, a fragile structure that I paint and photograph as if it were an abstract image. I’ve called this project Memory Brick’.

On the subject of memory and identity, in 2012 Chen Man shot twelve covers as part of her long-standing collaboration with the British magazine i-D, for the Pre-Spring issue no. 317. This is one of the most iconic projects of her career, celebrated for its ability to capture the complexity of beauty in contemporary China. Instead of relying on the usual supermodels, Chen Man chose twelve young women from various Chinese ethnic minorities, including some Tibetan students. She captures them all with one eye closed and the other open – a stylistic hallmark of the magazine (the logo is a graphic representation of precisely this). ‘One eye on the future, the other on the past,’ she tells me, as the late-afternoon light in the studio begins to fade. As we speak, she pauses to look at another shot taken from above, depicting two actors draped in fabric – one in white, the other in black – dancing in a spiral that evokes the Yin and Yang symbol. It is an image that embodies cinema, painting, dance and even the ancient art of Chinese calligraphy, which Chen Man has been practising for years. ‘In that image there are two bodies, two men, but to me they are like the lions and dragons I used to see as a child. Yin and Yang, masculine and feminine, good and evil: different energies that are not mutually exclusive, but complement one another, because within each there is always a trace of the other.’

“Dragons Rising Tigers Leaping” (2022), con la nota modella cinese Du Juan per “Cosmopolitan China” (10.000 $).

When I ask her if there is a portrait that has stayed with her, she replies without hesitation: ‘Ryūichi Sakamoto. I had the opportunity to work with him on an NHK documentary. It was one of his last projects. I asked myself: how do you photograph someone who has already been captured in every possible image? If I intervened in post-production, it would be excessive; if I imposed my own oriental-style approach, it would be out of place. So I decided to work with different exposure times, to capture the master in different moments: a thousandth of a second, a hundredth, a second, ten seconds, up to a minute. He arrived on set after two operations, looking very thin, in a matt black shirt, his white hair neatly combed at the sides, wearing large-framed black glasses. I set up a shot of him, but he smiled and asked me to change it. I chose some Chinese guzheng. He closed his eyes and listened in silence. It was March 2018. We took photographs until evening. Before leaving, he whispered to me: “Don’t forget to look at the moon in the sky tonight.”