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. 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.