Three Shadows Photography Art Centre will present A Life with the Mountain: Wang Wusheng’s Vintage Photographs from September 5 to November 8, 2026. Curated by renowned art historian Professor Wu Hung, the exhibition marks the first solo exhibition of Wang Wusheng’s work since his death in 2018. It will focus on his most representative Mt. Huangshan series, featuring original black-and-white gelatin silver prints. Created from the 1970s through the 1990s, these works embody more than three decades of the artist’s engagement with Huangshan, including nearly one hundred visits to the mountain, as well as years of darkroom printing and experimental processes.
From his first ascent of Huangshan in 1974, Wang Wusheng regarded the mountain as a lifelong source of artistic inspiration. Although he spent many years living abroad, his photographic practice remained deeply rooted in his homeland. As an important pioneer of black-and-white landscape photography in China, Wang reinterpreted the expressive spirit of traditional Chinese landscape painting through the language of black-and-white photography. In 2025, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Three Shadows +3 Gallery, and the Wang Wusheng Legacy Executive Committee undertook a systematic review and documentation of the artist’s photographic legacy. Building upon this research, the present exhibition further illuminates Wang Wusheng’s distinctive artistic significance within the history of Chinese photography and the broader development of international photographic art.
Text/ Wu Hung（Guest Curator）
Depicting immortal mountains has a time-honored tradition in Chinese art. The first figure in Chinese history to describe immortal mountains at length was the great Eastern Zhou poet Qu Yuan (c. 340–278 BCE). In his masterpiece “Encountering Sorrow” (“Li Sao”), he recounts a spiritual journey to the immortal terrain of Kunlun. The visual culture of the Han Dynasty established a basic iconography for the immortal mountain; during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period, an important personage in this development, Zong Bing (375–433), further brought the immortal mountain into association with the practice of painting, religious meditation, and individual scholar-artists. By the time of Guo Xi (1020–1090), the theorization of landscape painting had marked a new stage of landscape art in China.
From the seventeenth century onward, paintings and illustrations of the Yellow Mountains became an important component of Chinese landscape art. Hongren (1610–1663), Mei Qing (1623–1697), and Shitao (1642–1707) imbued their paintings with personal experiences, associating the tradition of the Yellow Mountains with their individual painting styles. What posed new conceptual questions to the “art of the Yellow Mountains” was the introduction of photography to China in the second half of the nineteenth century. This long-standing artistic tradition clearly culminates in contemporary photographer Wang Wusheng’s (1945–2018) alluring images.
Wang Wusheng’s distinct imagery and his deeper relationship with traditional aesthetics and painting styles separate his work from the prevailing trend of “pictorial” art photography at the time. Unlike most of the “Yellow Mountains photographers,” he is not interested in the identity of specific scenes, and only occasionally labeled his pictures with names of peaks or waterfalls. His pictures are gorgeous, but their beauty does not come directly from the natural scenery. Rather, the mountain’s natural wonders have been transformed into artistic spectacles through the artist’s commitment to the medium of black-and-white photography, his insistent pursuit of dynamic movement and metamorphic images, and his deep emotional engagement with his subject.
Wang Wusheng’s mountain peaks are often densely dark—a kind of velvet darkness that seems full of color. These images manifest the same idea that in a great painting “ink encompasses all the five colors” (mo fen wu se), as articulated by the Tang Dynasty art historian Zhang Yanyuan in his Record of Famous Painters of All the Dynasties (Lidai Minghua Ji), except that ink painting is replaced by black-and-white photography. His dark mountain peaks are not static, two-dimensional silhouettes, but dynamic substances that interact with other nature phenomena—clouds and mist, wind and rain, light and shadow—in a ceaseless movement. Believing that “the art of the East essentially expresses the artist’s mind (xie yi),” he claims that these images reflect his inner vision of the mountain. He writes: “Different cultural background, education, life experience, personalities, and personal interests lead to different responses to the world. Therefore each person forms his or her own unique, subjective ‘Yellow Mountains.’ The Yellow Mountains I have tried to capture over the past thirty years is such a subjective entity in my own mind.”
This does not mean, however, that his images are artificial inventions, To the contrary, he insists that his photographs must be loyal to the real place. To him, although a good photograph must express the artist’s vision and personality, it should never violate the nature of photography as a means of spontaneous recording. His own method of producing an ideal image requires prolonged experimentation. From selecting a suitable negative to determining the best composition and tonal variation, it often takes several weeks or even several months to make a satisfactory image.
In 1974, Wang Wusheng made his first trip to the Yellow Mountains. Twenty years later, he recalled his experience at that moment, when he reached the top of the mountain and saw the world with fresh eyes:
I felt that I had left behind the noisy mortal world, and had arrived at the center of the Universe. Nothing here had been contaminated by human society, and everything here was pure, fresh, and harmonious. I was amazed by the vastness and magnificence of heaven and earth… I felt I was confronting the long, eternal movement of history… My chest had never felt so expansive. I felt I could tolerate anything in the world. My soul seemed purified, and all of my worry and pain had disappeared, like smoke or vapor vanishing of its own accord. My body and mind were filled with peaceful love and benevolence. Since that climb, I have experienced the same powerful feeling whenever I return to the Yellow Mountains. Each time, I stood there five or six hours on end, forgetting everything around me and only savoring this feelings, this beauty. My eyes were moist, and a voice came from the void: “Here is the origin of your art and the meaning of your life.”
Unknowingly, he is repeating what has been said by Zong Bing, the fifth-century monk artist who believed that divine wisdom could be attained through meditating on a sacred mountain. Similar words were also uttered by Qian Qianyi, the seventeenth-century writer and martyr, when he wondered how he could return to the dusty world after visiting this heavenly place. Is this because Wang Wusheng’s experience was close to that of Zong and Qian? But his photographs of the mountain seem to rise above the necessity of such contextualization. As many viewers in different countries have told him after seeing his exhibitions, “Your images are timeless.”
Text/ Wu Hung（Guest Curator）