“This land is your land, this land is my land.”

America is at its core a paradox, an impossible promise. The land is supposedly open to all, a nation of freedom, and yet also a former colony and imperialist superpower that historically closed its borders to “undesirable” populations. Via the doctrine of manifest destiny, the States conquered the native peoples of America and then immediately declared the landscape—with its plains, waterfalls, and mountains—a symbol of American unity and freedom, “from sea to shining sea.” There has been an attempt by the United States, in other words, to politicize the continent’s natural landscape, to take hold of its symbolic value in addition to its physical soil. In a series of photographs titled “The Expeditionary Series,” Tseng Kwong Chi presents powerful images of himself in the American landscape wearing his iconic Mao suit. A strange, poetic, mystifying collection of black-and-white photographs, “The Expeditionary Series” defies simple interpretation but evidently grapples with the complex relationship between nature and politics.

This series is presented at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art as part of “Performing for the Camera,” an expansive retrospective exhibition of Tseng Kwong Chi’s work. Born in Hong Kong in 1950, the artist immigrated at age sixteen with his parents to Canada after they were exiled for their Nationalist affiliations in opposition to Mao Zedong. Tseng became deeply involved in the 1980’s New York art scene through his close friendship with celebrated artist Keith Harring, but never reached a comparable level of fame himself. Yet, it is evident upon entering Tseng’s retrospective that he was a visionary in his own right.

Tseng is perhaps most famous for the project that directly preceded and led into “The Expeditionary Series,” which was titled “East Meets West.” The photographer took proto-selfies at various Western tourist attractions and monuments while wearing a costume dubbed the “Mao Suit” (grey buttoned outfit styled after Mao’s with dark sunglasses). For example, there is the exuberant photograph New York, New York (Brooklyn Bridge) from 1979—an image of choice for the Block Museum as far as marketing (it is pasted onto the building’s elevator, for example).

The artist is caught leaping high into the air, one fist raised, backgrounded by the bridge and city skyline. The image is fun, playful, and like all of the photos from Tseng’s “East Meets West” series, semantically elusive. Is it truly a celebration of intersecting cultures? Or an ironic criticism of Western orientalism, daring the viewer to perceive Tseng as a cartoonish foreign tourist? How is any of this connected to Mao’s communist politics? It is not easy to say for sure, as ambiguity and surrealism are intentionally stirred into the images; ”My mirrored glasses give the picture a neutral impact and the surrealistic quality I’m looking for,” explains Tseng in a documentary film exhibited as a part of “Performing for the Camera” (East Meets West, as quoted in the Chicago Reader). In this way, Tseng’s images in “East Meets West” feel striking and mischievous, but are dominated by his mysterious persona.

Yet, while Tseng’s mysterious “Mao” character creates a conceptual puzzle in “East Meets West,” it subtly underscores the independent power of the natural landscape in “The Expeditionary Series” by establishing stark contrasts between himself and the wilderness around him. Take, for example, the photograph Mt. Dawson, Glacier National Park, British Columbia. At first, all that you see in the image is the mountain: glorious, enormous, shrouded in mist. You have to search carefully through the rocky outcrops and pine trees to find Tseng, standing minuscule in the corner of the image.  This “Where’s Waldo” hunt for Tseng demonstrates how different the images are from those of the “East Meets West” series; while his character was foregrounded in those photographs, here he is almost nonexistent. This is partly due to a technical deviation from the previous project; after “East Meets West,” the artist hired an assistant to work his camera from afar, so that could to wander away and bury himself in the composition. If anything, his character here serves to portray artificial geopolitics (orientalism, imperialism, Maoism) as insignificant in the face of ancient, natural beauty. Additionally, though his mysterious “Mao” persona is minute compared to the mystery of Mt. Dawson’s foggy peak, it acts as a scale against which the beauty and surrealism inherent in nature can be measured, and thus, revealed.

 

Each photo in the series is unique, poetic in its own way. Take the striking National Grasslands, South Dakota, for example, in which Tseng’s sunglasses flash white from lighting as another bolt strikes a field in the distance. Or Lake Ninevah, Vermont, a portrait of Tseng floating in a boat above foggy water. Figure turned away and softly backlit, he becomes something of a dreamy silhouette. Even more striking in this regard is the photo titled Puerto Rico, in which Tseng stands truly silhouetted on a distant craggy cliff as the sun sets over water in the distance. If not for the context of the rest of the exhibit, one would not even know that these were images of Tseng, let alone images of Tseng wearing his Mao costume. If the oft tongue-in-cheek artist is infiltrating and mocking the practice of ecotourism, then he is doing it with such subtlety that his stoicism comes across as reverence.

 

The most politically pointed image in the series is certainly Shrine of Democracy: Mount Rushmore, Black Hills, South Dakota, in which Tseng stands tall but small in the foreground before the iconic mountain (and monument, connecting back to Tseng’s earlier series). Unlike the other photos in “The Expeditionary Series,”, this one contains a relatively striking label: “Shrine of Democracy.” You cannot help but read the phrase ironically, even though it is the unofficial slogan of the monument. Here is an embodiment of the attempted politicization of America’s natural landscape, and Tseng remains subtle in his criticism; the only indication of dissent comes from his posture—he faces the monument with arms crossed behind his back, inviting you to guess his thoughts as he gazes up at the so-called shrine. Though the photo is ambiguous in this way, it is worth noting that the geopolitical tensions recalled by Tseng’s “Mao Suit” can be traced back to imperialist American values enshrined in the carvings of the rock. But more than anything, Mt. Rushmore itself feels kitschy and artificial compared to the pure magnificence of Mt. Dawson on the opposite wall. We can attempt to politicize nature, but Tseng’s careful observations encourage you to climb past that ideology with him and see the natural wonders as wonderful as they naturally are.

You cannot ignore the fact, while examining these images, that Tseng Kwong Chi was approaching the end of his days during their conception in 1986. Tseng was diagnosed with HIV in 1987—a disease that would take his life only a few years later. Susan Sontag, another key member of the New York art crowd (who wrote prolifically on the subject of AIDS) says in her essay In Plato’s Cave,  “A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori.” Here, in “The Expeditionary Series,” there is one mortal subject, the artist himself, but there are also the virtually immortal wonders of the natural world. Perhaps Tseng was considering his own mortality when he minimized himself before those mountains and seas that would assuredly outlive him, outlive us all, and our politics. Perhaps he saw something ineffable through those dark sunglasses, through the mist.