Taiwan Today

Photography is not merely static representation of stark realism. Long Chin-San, 70-year-old doyen of Chinese photographers, believes that photo­graphs can utilize the time-honored principles of composition and design basic in Chinese painting. Mr. Long uses composite photography to tran­scend the mechanical limitations of the camera. One critic said of his work, "It is his rapier-sharp aesthetic sense, his peculiarly Chinese sensitiveness, that give his pictures their inimitable spirit." Reproduced below is "Peaks Fantasy."

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Chinese artists paint, not from imagination, but from memory, and with their art improve on na­ture. With the camera as my brush, I have endea­vored to do the same. The composite picture helps to bridge time and space, to produce a picture called up by my visual impressions." "After the Tang Masters" shows a striking resemblance to landscape paintings of the Tang period.

 

 

 

 

 

"Music of Falls" (top) transmits the feeling of dark turbulence. "Pasture" (bottom) is permeated with a sense of pastoral tranquility.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Welcome Pine" (top) and "Majestic Solitude" (bottom) are two more Long Chin-San photographs which display cliffs and trees in exquisite balance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Spring Fantasia" interprets a poem by the famous Sung poet, Liu Yung. After an idyllic night drifting on a small boat, two lovers say farewell just before dawn. As the girl leaves, her lover is left in the last light of a waning moon. His sorrow is shared only by the lone willow with its thousands of trailing "strings of love." Yet not one of those "strings" can tie his beloved to him.

 

 

 

 

 

Bare tree branches in "Deer in the For­est" (top) and "Still Life" (bottom) give expression to balance and beauty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunlight glistens on the gently rippling water of "The Silvery Stream" (top). A more ethereal atmosphere is evoked in "Dream of an Excursion" (bottom).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Goddess of Mercy (Avalokitesvera Bodhisattva, or Kuan Yin in Chinese) towers over a lone bonze studying Buddhist scriptures in the Wu Yu Temple.