A Pagoda that Moments Built
A pagoda is never built in a single stroke. Its spirituality resides not merely in the pinnacle reaching toward the sky, but in every grain of sand that accumulates to construct it.
The creative trajectory of "A Pagoda that Moments Built" unfolds across four intertwined threads: the early handmade photobooks "The Invisible Buddha" and "Like a Rolling Stone" (2015–2017); the ongoing Polaroid series "Sunshine Box" (2016–present); the large-scale mixed-media series "Hangzhou Pagodas" (2020s–present), centered on ancient pagodas in Hangzhou; and experimental works that transform carved seal faces into photographic negatives. Though varying in form, a singular impulse runs through them all: accumulating time through repetitive daily acts, and probing contemporary modes of expression at the intersections of different media.
This logic of accumulation and superimposition first found form in his handmade books. "The Invisible Buddha" documents hidden Buddhist statues scattered across the mountains surrounding Hangzhou’s West Lake. Chen Jianfei superimposed photographic images with ink rubbings, seal impressions, and hand-written calligraphy onto Dragon Cloud Xuan paper, bound in a traditional accordion fold. Inscribing text directly onto the paper and embedding seal stamps and stone-and-tree rubbings beside the photographs, he treated the image as a foundation for colophons and annotations. In his eyes, photography, Buddhist sculpture, and seal engraving share the same fundamental function: capturing the momentary tremor of the mind. "Like a Rolling Stone", meanwhile, is an associative record of scattered rocks—imagining gravel as mountain ranges, echoing the ancient trope of "piling stones into peaks." These two handmade books established the underlying logic of his subsequent practice: distinct media can be layered, and fragmented moments of time can be gathered and stacked grain by grain.
In his ongoing Polaroid project, this logic evolved into an almost rigorous daily ritual. Since 2016, Chen has used a Polaroid camera to take precisely two photographs every day without interruption. He refers to this camera as a "Sunshine Box"—a device that collects light and emotion, allowing fleeting days to return and manifest anew. Inscribing scriptures, poetry, impromptu prose, or graffiti onto each print, he transforms photography into a daily discipline. Previous exhibitions arranged these works according to book structures, divided into chapters such as "Between Lakes and Mountains, Dearest, Spring Blossoms, Solitary Peak", and The Heart Sutra. Within this body of work, photography is no longer the capture of a decisive moment, but a private diary written day after day in light and ink. This relentless act of shooting and writing is like casting fine sand toward an invisible pagoda, each frame marking the smallest unit of time.
When this diary-like recording shifted from personal emotion to urban space, it gave rise to large-scale mixed-media works focused on ancient pagodas in Hangzhou—the most concrete manifestation of "building a pagoda from sand." Engaging with Leifeng Pagoda, Liuhe Pagoda, Baochu Pagoda, White Pagoda, and Lingjiu Pagoda, the series distills the artist’s personal experiences beneath these pagodas into key concepts, employing photography, ink staining, film scratching, calligraphy, seal carving, and rubbings. The image of Leifeng Pagoda is assembled from photographs of more than two thousand stones collected along the shores of West Lake, accompanied by silver-ink calligraphy of Lu Xun’s famous essay "On the Collapse of Leifeng Pagoda". For Liuhe Pagoda, one thousand Qingtian stone seals, each carved with a character from "the Thousand-Character Classic", were stamped one by one on either side of the pagoda’s image. For Baochu Pagoda, small-regular-script calligraphy was written eight hours daily over a dozen days, imparting a pink hue infused with memories of family and love. Fieldwork, literature, legends, personal memory, and time are compressed onto a single plane, creating "a thin slice of time." The pagoda becomes both an architectural entity and a vessel for time—an anchor for memory.
This impulse to materialise time and memory pushed him to dismantle media boundaries, leading him to incise Lu Xun's text or Zhang Dai’s "Searching for the West Lake in Dreams" in reverse directly onto 617 black-and-white medium-format film using an etching needle. The landscapes of Precious Stone Hill, Baochu Pagoda, and West Lake emerge alongside characters and film, allowing gazes from centuries ago to overlap with contemporary eyes. The delicate characters could only be carved by tactile memory, yet the act of incising itself translates into a new visual image—generating a hybrid language that fuses traditional heritage with contemporary visual experimentation.
Since "The Invisible Buddha" was selected for the "TOP20 China Contemporary Photography Exhibition" in 2017, Chen Jianfei’s practice has maintained a deliberate, steadfast pace. Rather than chasing sudden epiphanies, he trusts that meaning gradually settles through repetitive labor. As "gathering sand to build a pagoda" suggests, subtle accumulations ultimately yield a tangible weight. His practice offers an alternative possibility for contemporary photography: neither competing in speed nor vying for spectacle, but tempering the texture of time within the continuity of the everyday, cultivating a distinct visual poetics at the crossroads of media.
Chen Jianfei’s pagoda will never see a final capstone.
For every grain of sand is still on its journey.
Text/ Liu Yiheng
