Peach Blossom Spring has been a Chinese dream for more than a thousand years: a place where people “knew nothing of the Han, let alone the Wei and Jin.” The sherman of Wuling, who stumbled upon this dream, reached that secluded realm of suspended time, peace, and abundance through a cave he discovered by chance. “In the mountain there was a small opening, through which there seemed to be light.” The cave, as a singular geological formation, has always seemed to remind us that even within what Buddhism calls the “turbid world of the ve delements,” escape remains possible.
Immortals take caves as their dwellings; bandits make them their lairs. Enclosed by mountains and stone, such spaces seem able to contain all manner of heterogeneous forces. Because they are hollow, because they are dark, resistance finds a place to reside.
Within the history of civilization examined and compiled by modern archaeology, caves hold an equally extraordinary role and signicance. Early humans relied on the shelter of caves, where the rst forms of civilization slowly took shape. The forces gathered within caves eventually manifested as the possibility of leaving them; the materials deposited inside became testimony to humankind’s earliest places of survival.
Humans have depended on caves, yet have never conquered them. Even today, with the assistance of immense machinery, the transformations humans can impose upon caves remain extremely limited. Caves may be inscribed into the history of civilization, yet they continually reveal the indestructible force of nature. Within them, human action and imagination are pushed to their limits, while the body remains rmly conned inside a nite physical space. Caves preserve the memory of civilization, yet at the same time dilute human traces through nature.
On June 27, 2020, Ouyang Heli happened to discover on a digital map that less than one kilometer from his home lay “Longtan Mountain Site”: three karst caves on a small hill. It is the earliest known ancient human habitation site discovered in the Kunming region to date. According to archival materials, accumulated remains such as burnt bones found at the site date back more than 30,000 years. Yet when he actually arrived there, the passage leading back to “30,000 years ago” was nothing more than a low cave mouth overtaken by wild vegetation.
The series Arche of Time began precisely at the moment of this encounter between the photographer and the cave entrance.
Before this, Ouyang Heli’s practice had long followed rigorously dened themes. His systematic training in philosophy led him to seek the stability of concepts and categories. Yet as he repeatedly entered and exited dozens of caves scattered across Southwest China, that former stability gradually dissolved. Again and again, he stepped into the darkness deep within mountains and the womb of the earth, using his own body and eyes to relocate the winding paths of light. Placing himself at the sites where early humans once lived, Ouyang’s photographic language began to acquire a lucid yet mysterious texture, shaped by the interplay of light and shadow and by ruptures in historical time.
Ouyang Heli admits that even today, whenever he enters a cave, his body is awakened by an almost primal sense of fear. Inside the cave, every movement must obey the geological environment; creation therefore begins as sensory labor. When concept, narrative, and logic all fail, photography becomes a witness to the gaze being pushed back by stone walls.
It is also through this near-expeditionary process that, as vision gradually adapts to darkness and becomes able to capture the details of the interior space, the lens begins to recalculate the distance between the photographer and the world. Light, fractured by physical conditions, shifts from familiar to strange, and from strange back to familiar. Throughout this series of cave photographs, Ouyang continues to work with large-format lm. The slow process of image formation is both a necessary negotiation with “time” and an act of respect for the gradations of grey within space.
Ouyang Heli is not a fanatical “cave enthusiast.” The caves he chooses are all archaeologically recognized “human sites.” Yet once he enters their cramped or expansive depths of darkness, time as measured by human chronology loses all precision. Likewise, even when standing within spaces of civilizational history veried by scientic knowledge, the force of the nonhuman remains so powerful that the work is haunted by a sense of estrangement. Bodily presence does not imply intimacy between the photographer and the “object” photographed. As the world becomes clear beyond the limits of explanation, the image records a kind of ambiguity long since unfamiliar to modern people.
The time and space represented in Arche of Time approach the limits of individual speech. Yet they also bear witness to a chapter in Ouyang Heli’s own life history, and to his reconstruction of his conceptual system. A person consciously casts himself into darkness, confronting time and space through a phenomenological meditation. From the deepest darkness inside the cave, he suddenly turns back: the path of light becomes clear, and a new viewpoint emerges together with a new “world.”
Changgeng Yuan