| Ode to the Earth |
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| Culture | |
| Thursday, 17 June 2010 | |
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It has become fashionable in recent years for photographers to give environmental warnings by showing disasters with their cameras, but Chinese photographer Luo Hong does not follow suit. His current exhibition at Cambridge’s Sedgwick Museum themed “Ode to the Earth” consists of 26 photographs taken in Africa and Western China, portraying the beauty of nature.
Created in coherence with the Shanghai Expo theme “Better City, Better Life”, Mr Luo’s exhibition is divided into two sections – “Africa – The Last Paradise for Wildlife”, which focuses on animals and “Western China – Terrestrial Heaven for Mankind”, which focuses on landscape.
Mr Luo’s animal photograph collection showed animals in very large groups, including ostriches and Oryx in the Namib Desert of Namibia, zebras and wildebeests on the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. The photographs generally captured very rapidly moving animals, giving a strong sense of energy and liveliness.
One of Mr Luo’s favourite is a simple feature of the distinct outlines of three giraffes in front of a beautiful red sun during sunset. “The three days of waiting for this moment was definitely worthwhile”, he said. Mr Luo always catches the animals in the act. One photograph looking at Lake Elementaita in Kenya showed an aggressive Marabou Stock plunging into a flock of flamingos in thousands, making them fly off in different directions. The uniformly dispersed flamingos across the sea created a spectacle, highlighting the aggressive Marabou stock in the far distance.
The landscape photographs were considerably large, generally ranging between one and two meters in width. They have aerial or oblique views, and sometimes look through thick clouds, such as the view of Mt Namjagbarwa in Tibet province where the white mountain and the white clouds blend together, forming another world against the blue sky backdrop, beneath which the Brahmaputra River winds through the valley.
Despite the distant view, these photographs also contained an incredible amount of details – a photograph looking at the 200,000 acres of blooming Cole Flowers turning the entire field yellow actually shows the outlines of the flowers when looked at carefully.
Mr Luo’s capturing of colours is also particularly striking, often presenting a spectacular view of the familiar. A photograph showing the Yuanyang terrace in Yunnan from the mountain top captured different shades of colours as the paddy fields reflected off the light of the sun from different angles. Another photograph showing the turning of hills into farmlands in south western china presents red patches of terraces amidst green hills and white crop.
Some photographs also featured the harmony between men and nature – the village of Hemu county blended perfectly with the prairie because the morning frost turned almost everything white, and the fishermen in Guiling punting along the river are joined by groups of wild swans that stood by them unafraid.
The photograph which Mr Luo gifted to Sedgwick Museum’s permanent collection was a view of Mt Gongga in Sichuan province. The almost golden snow mountain stood powerfully above the red dust of the mountain’s lower parts and the deep blue of the sky in the far distance. Its width of 2.09m allowed it to inspire awe and reflections.
These photographs all awakened their viewers’ awe at the beauty of nature. As well, they presented the vulnerability of nature against the backdrop of global warming. Some of them feature remote areas that few people have ventured into, while others allow us to remember the forever destroyed – including the villages in Deqin, surrounded by the Himalaya mountain ranges, destroyed in the Wenchuan Earthquake.
 A Chinese student performing Gu Zhen at the exhibition
Art as method of integration between China and UK
Upon visiting Cambridege, Mr Luo was very inspired. He said, “I’ve long wanted to visit Cambridege because of its prestige, but it is not until today I realised why it has nurtured so many scholars.”
His visit brought to Cambridge many surprises. Dr. David Norman,Head of the Sedgewick Museum said that this exhibition marks the first time that Sedgewick, a science museum, has exhibited works of pure artistic value. He showed me the archaeological photographs on the wall and laughed: “We generally show things like these, academic images that try to be aesthetic.”
His favourite is a bird eye view photograph overlooking Lake Natron, a highly concentrated soda lake, above which the East African flamingos flying freely in large groups. “It sparked my imagination and allowed me to think deeply about the power of art”, he said. “Now that Mr Luo’s exhibition has become a success, I feel open about the possibility of showing the work of other Chinese artists in the future.”
Kong Jun, the president of Cambridge’s student association SEEDS (Cambridge Eastern Education and Development Society), which arranged the exhibition, also felt proud about the exhibition’s reception. “As international students, I feel that we have a duty to promote Chinese culture to a western audience, and Mr Luo’s photographs provide us the perfect opportunity to do so, because photographs capture universal concerns and transcend culture boundaries of communication.”
Mr Luo trip to Cambridge also contained some pleasant surprises. In 2008, his Foundation sponsored UNEP's Painting Competition by Children in China, which attracted 1.5 million participants. One of the participants, Betty, aged 10, came to meet Mr Luo and gifted him a drawing of hers. Highly resembling of a child’s rudimentary sketches, the picture reflected her admiration for Mr Luo’s achievements and added a particularly moving scene to Mr Luo’s time in the UK.
 Betty presents her gift
Businessman turned Photographer
Although a world renowned photographer, Mr Luo is more famously known for being the CEO of China's largest bakery chain, Holiland. He built up the cake store 15 years ago, which has since grown to open more than 600 stores in China.
During his time in Cambridge, he retold the story of his career change: “I used to be an apprentice at a photography studio, but opened my own cake shop because I could not find the right cake for my mother’s birthday.” To make his products better known by more, he used hydrogen balloons outside his store. In his remote hometown Ya'an, Sichuan, this move caused the city to turn out and watch. Since then, Luo's cake business has developed rapidly. Even he did not expect that in the course of 15 years, a small cake shop with only seven staff members would grow into an industry, with tens of thousands of employees. Starting from 1995, Mr Luo picked up his long neglected hobby photography again and travelled across western China, taking landscape photographs of Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, as well as the Ningxia Hui and Tibet Autonomous Regions. In October 2001, Luo Hong took his first journey to Africa. He was immediately infatuated with the heaven of wild animals and returned more than 10 times. At the scenes of great beauty, he realised the fragility of wildlife against the backdrop of climate change and became an active environment protector. He sat up a personal environmental-protection fund in the UN Environmental Program, which is the first in UN history. When asked at a Sedgwick’s Q&A session how he managed to find time to all these activities, he replied that it was his passion and love for life that allowed him to continue his work. “When my work needs me I rush over to work, but when my work does not need me, I rush back to my nature.”
Indeed, this passion is thoroughly reflected in his work. The exhibition, which runs from June 14 to July 3, is a once in a lifetime chance to see panoramic views from several continents, which will hopefully inspire each and every one of us to care more for our environment.
The individual photographs will be auctioned after the exhibition and proceeds will go towards helping an exchange programme enabling Cambridge students to see more of China and children surviving the Sichuan earthquake to visit Cambridge and rekindle their confidence and hope for life.
Cecily Liu
 Mr Luo’s exhibition can be viewed between JUNE 14 - JULY 3, 2010 at Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EQ |
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