圆明园四十景，2022

《圆明园四十景》曾是乾隆皇帝令宫廷画师花费多年时间绘制而成的绢本。第二次鸦片战争圆明园罹劫时，这套彩绘孤本被掠走，至今留存在巴黎。横店影视城是中国最大的影视拍摄基地，位于浙江省横店镇，被称为“中国好莱坞”。横店的圆明新园以四十景图为蓝本，恢复了北京圆明园的建筑群。艺术家使用了19世纪的火棉胶湿版摄影法，在横店圆明新园的基础上创作了《圆明园四十景》。 2022年9月，美国皮博迪·埃塞克博物馆(Peabody Essex Museum)举办名为Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China的展览中，艺术家将四十景的湿版底片制成明信片，贴上邮票，寄到现场展出。横店的圆明新园是对北京圆明园的复刻，而艺术家的四十景图像是基于复刻之上的复刻：这些充满怀旧感的明信片，从一种缺席的视角，对历史叙事中的真实和虚构做出提问。

Forty Views of Yuanmingyuan, 2022

Pigment print from collodion negatives, ink, and stamps on paper

Inspired by the historic photographs of Yuanmingyuan, Shi Yangkun visited a full-size replica of the imperial palaces and gardens at Hengdian, one of the world’s largest film studios and a major tourist attraction in China. The film sets there were based in part on the Forty Scenes of Yuanmingyuan, a set of paintings commissioned by the Qianlong emperor and the only surviving visual record of the Chinese sections of the imperial palace complex. French troops seized the 40 paintings during the plunder and destruction of Yuanmingyuan in 1860. Today, they remain in Paris as artifacts of the gardens’ splendor.

Using a digital camera, Shi photographed the reconstructed Yuanmingyuan—eerily empty due to the current pandemic—and reclaimed the vistas from his own perspective. He rephotographed the images using collodion glass negatives, the labor-intensive method used by many of the 19th-century photographers represented in this exhibition. Shi then turned the images into postcards and mailed them to PEM staff. The resulting photographs of the Yuanmingyuan film set are surrealand uncanny, prompting us to question how histories are told and the gaps that may occur when knowledge travels over vast distances.