Rock and roll in Mainland China is the most excellent representative of free will in terms of music. It was ever regarded as a harsh allophone in the age of collective silence, when soothing melody was popular. But rock and roll is still alive in present days. From the year 1990 to 2000, in fast-changing Mainland China, rock and roll, as everything else, has undergone incessant ups and downs. Though having ever shined brilliantly, it gradually dimmed with occasional flickers, which shows us distinctly the unpredictability of both the times and individual destinies. During those ten years, Chinese society is changing so rapidly that everything including social values and customs and relations between people is refreshing day and night. Rock and roll in those ten years now seems like an old dream，so faint and faraway.
Gao Yuan, who lived through those ten years, witnessed by herself not only the development of Chinese rock and roll home and abroad, but also the personal experiences of major musicians. As a professional photographer, she has photographed almost all the major events and figures in rock world of China since 1990. These pictures, abundant and widespread, is a complete record of China’s rock and roll in the photographic perspective.
As an individual and a viral artist, when she was photographing those events and people, she was also recording and expressing her own instants of perceptions with pictures. What are exhibited here are pictures of this kind.
Instead of to show rock musicians’ daily lives or performances, which areeasy to be captured and perceived, these pictures are supposed to reflect the photographer’s complex feelings toward rock and roll. She is describing her own living state and life experiences through photographing what she sees. Some pictures are not concerning rock and roll, but the photographer herself was at that time in the center of China’s rock and roll. These pictures were arbitrarily captured and developed, and thus hardly bear any relations to each other, which may seem rather baffling. But the messages conveyed by these lights, reflections and images are directly linked to the photographer’s inner feelings and instant perceptions as well as the real and exact past. With unusual perspectives and incomplete subjects, these pictures have different themes and styles. What are photographed are even not concrete persons or objects, instead, they are lights, reflections and so on. But they do have something in common, which is concentration on freedom and vitality of life as well as different states of vital life in different circumstances.
Among rock and roll musicians, who were brilliant in those ten years, some are now as active as before, some have been monuments and will be forever remembered, and others have faded out. Many events and people in the past are carved into memories only for those who were present, while for the others, their imaginations towards all these can be triggered by remained traces and fragments. For Gao, these pictures contain her memories of heart-throb for events and people in those ten years. Though the exhibition, these pictures may call up the passionate memories with rock and roll for more people, and may draw out the dreams in their hearts, no matter they are still bright or have been dimmed. These dreams in heart and the restless life vitality in art are again bonded, just as naturally and tightly as they were in the past.
