"The Tower of Babel in the 21st Century" — The Embodied Resistance of Photography
Text / Yang Di
At five in the morning, artist Wang Jinglan shares breakfast on an ice-like salt flat with the Afar people, who have inhabited this land for generations. At this moment, there is no TikTok, no Instagram, and no AI. The photograph feels no different from a gaze cast upon this place thousands of years ago.
Departing from the Americas, Wang retraces the ancestral paths of human migration in reverse in the 21st century, ultimately arriving in Ethiopia—one of the cradles of early humanity. She has traversed Iraqi war zones and visited the memorial wall for the disappeared in Mexico, observed the juxtaposition of language integration classes and immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, and visited the site in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was killed. Though these sites differ radically in nature, she makes no attempt to flatten them into a single, unified allegory; what connects them is nothing other than the physical movement of the artist’s own body.
To grasp the conceptual core of this work, one might turn to Roland Barthes’ critique of "The Family of Man". First exhibited in 1955 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the exhibition sought to emphasize a shared humanity through the juxtaposition of images. Yet Barthes pointed out: “We are held back at the surface of an identity, prevented precisely by sentimentality from penetrating into this ulterior zone of human behaviour where historical alienation introduces some ‘differences’ which we shall here quite simply call ‘injustices’.” His critique was directed precisely at this mode of narrative that subsumes concrete history beneath a universal essence.
Wang Jinglan’s practice reissues a challenge to this notion of “sameness” from today’s sites of encounter. The erased differences Barthes wrote of have taken on a new guise in the age of AI. As Hito Steyerl observes in “Mean Images,” images generated through machine learning are statistical renderings extracted from massive datasets—they converge around the average and the median, producing what she calls “hallucinated mediocrity.” This suggests that the more specific or unexpected an image is, the more easily it may be diluted and dragged back toward the average during this process. This echoes the mechanism Barthes critiqued in The Family of Man: whether through the curated selection of juxtaposed photographs or the algorithmic rendering of mean images, both mask the underlying dynamics of power behind a facade of “technological neutrality.” Yet the “accidents” brought by physical presence—those concrete, unpredictable moments that cannot be retrieved from a database—are precisely what algorithms cannot generate. Through her personal experience that cannot be reduced to an average, Wang’s practice offers viewers a highly individualized entry point into comprehending a concrete world. Over the past half-century, photography has continually expanded its boundaries beyond the act of taking photographs to encompass the production, use, and circulation of images. Archives, found images, and editing have become important methods, and whether an artist is physically present on-site no longer dictates the validity of a photographic work. Creative practice has become increasingly “disembodied.” Wang’s practice neither rejects this shift nor advocates a return to an earlier notion of photography; rather, in an era where images can be retrieved—or even generated—detached from the body, she reasserts “arriving on-site” as a deliberate media stance.
Photography may not prevent the world from becoming fully image-based, and as an artist, one must remain cautious of the risks of the gaze inherent in fleeting encounters. Yet being physically present on the salt flats, or climbing barehanded up to the cave churches, conveys a clear stance: beyond mean images, let the body arrive first, so that the act of viewing begins only after arrival—learning how to forge relationships and assume responsibility.
"The Tower of Babel in the 21st Century" serves as both the culmination of a journey and the starting point for exploring alternative possibilities.
