To look at Wang Ningde’s latest photo exhibit at SF Camerawork, you’d think all of China is sleeping. “Some Days” is a series of images in which people are going about daily activities—taking a train, riding a bike, playing cards, standing in a garden—but they are all somnambulating, eyes closed, deep in slumber.
I didn’t know the premise of Ningde’s work, so with the first image I looked at, I wasn’t sure why the man and woman were standing, heads tilted sideways, eyes closed like sleeping birds. Wandering from photo to photo, the thread became clear—the subjects were all slumbering, faces empty of expression. Their bodies seemed lifeless, present but not present; limbs moving while minds bathed in reverie.
The same characters make appearances in more than one image, like actors in a play. The little school boy in shorts and a black and white striped shirt. The woman in the flowered dress. The men in Mao jackets and caps with faces powdered and cheeks lightly rouged. The figures are almost archetypal, the man, the woman, the child, each playing their carefully defined role. The men in Mao jackets seem like throwbacks to another China. The woman in her delicate dress seems dreamily innocent.
With the tumult and change going on in China right now, Nindge’s portraits provide little islands of calm forgetfulness—sleep as an escape from the rush and chaos of the present, dreaming of another moment.
