Photography Friday: Wang Wusheng

Wang Wusheng's (汪芜生) landscape photographs offer a timeless journey through sacred mountains, such as the Mount Huang also known as the Yellow Mountains. Located in Anhui province in central China, this mountain range famous for its steep peaks has been standing at the center of Wang’s works for over four decades. When he climbed the mountain for the first time in 1974, he felt a strong feeling that he described as the following: “Far from earth, yet at the heart of the universe. My mind had never been so wide open before. For five to six hours I stayed on the mountain, forgetting all my troubles. In the silence, there was a kind of sound. That is the source of my inspiration."

Wang’s photographs plunge the viewers into scenic views of crab-like pine trees and sea of clouds swirling around mountain peaks. “I’ve never been to Huangshan,” explained the photographer and curator Rong Rong, “but the first time I saw Wang Wusheng’s work, I was drawn in by his imagery -- his skill of portraying Huangshan in photographs. It is not easy to use photography to express a place made famous by its association with traditional landscape painting.” Mount Huang has indeed been a recurrent subject matter in Chinese pictorial tradition for centuries, and Wang’s photographs connect with this long lineage.

Wang Wusheng was born in 1945 in the city of Wuhu in Anhui Province and graduated from Anhui University’s School of Physics. He left his hometown to study in Japan in 1984 and since then he has been living between Tokyo and Shanghai. His photographs are collected in numerous public and private institutions, including the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection in Berlin and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna amongst others.

Photography Friday is a regular feature from Shanghaiist in association with Photography of China, Marine Cabos's fantastic platform about photography and photographers in China.

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