by Peini Beatrice Hsieh

In 2013, we saw “Dancing Divas of Taiwan”, a theater play claimed to be a first Las Vegas-type, Broadway-style musical show in this nation. It was produced by the famed creative talent Jerry Fan and directed by Jie-Huei Hsu, starring ballroom dancer Liu Chen, Chinese disabled dancer Zhai Xiao Wei and local popular artist Peng Peng. With a budget of eighty million Taiwanese dollars, after 18-month production and under wide anticipation, “Dancing Divas of Taiwan” was ready to go on stage. It was then that Cynthia Ma, a photographer newly decorated with an award, was asked to photograph the rehearsals.

Had it not been for her innocent brevity, Cynthia Ma wouldn’t have accepted the request; considering the two radically different realities she and the dancers lived in, it was even unlikely for Ma to dedicate herself to this photographic project. Each lived in his or her own world and they were like parallel lines in separate spaces, yet all came to meet one another in this event. It was a beautiful encounter before the lens, where the exchange of looks was frozen as images, all destined to be preserved in time.

Cynthia Ma was raised in loving attention and happiness. Ma’s father was one of the four musician masters in traditional Chinese opera, and she grew up with all the artists and intellectuals socializing and telling those fascinating stories in her living room. Those are probably reasons why Ma used to fancy pursuing a career onstage. But she conducted studies in nursing and biology, she’s made a successful career in advertisements and, on top of it, she has a happy marriage. In other words, Cynthia Ma never really had to deal with poverty or misery in her life. But all began to change when her husband gave her a Leica camera as a gift. When affluence is no longer a necessity, it is as if Cynthia Ma, the woman of prestige, resets her life, returns to her pure innocent heart and has invested her entire life in photography. She has since been pouring all the emotions preserved in the early life into the world in her lens. As a photographer she was soon honored with awards, which further encouraged her to work harder so she could be an even better photographer.

Writer Xi Mu-rong wrote a poem “Xi Ze”, namely The Actress; the late composer Li Tai-Hsiang accordingly composed the song, published in singer Chyi Yu’s 1983 album Only You. In “Xi Ze”, Xi Mu-rong narrates in the first persona as an actress and so laments how she was destined that, “in this life, I am only an actress, forever weeping my tears in the story of others”. But such a sorrowful, tearful statement is probably not what Cynthia Ma identifies with, if you ask me. Ma’s empathy with the performance artists is visible on her monochrome pictures and, as writer Wolfgang von Goethe(1749-1832) perfectly puts it, “there is a gentle and considerate experience, where an inner spirit is called for to identify with the object that becomes a genuine theoretical basis.” The unique power of photography is to draw people close in an instant and, through reproduction, to share its irreplaceable particularity over and over again. In the past, particularity, uniqueness and the endurance through time made art so profound; those qualities made art appreciation an experience unable to popularize. Now, with the qualities to reach the crowd and to reproduce, photography could be said to liberate art.

Photography has now become an ordinary medium in modern life, the same way print came to make publishing and reading common experiences. And as reading triggered a civil revolution, so does photography. Taking pictures is no longer some business that requires so much labor that people have to take it so seriously; especially in this digital age when virtually everyone has a cell phone or a digital camera at hand, taking pictures has become, shall we say, a reflex of modern people. Since the emergence of photojournalism, words that once were hailed as the prestigious medium gradually gave way to pictorial presentation with words; in other words, verbal reading is replaced by pictorial reading. Marcel Proust(1871-1922), the writer known for his portrayal of delicate feelings, admits, “Rather than a device of memories, photographs are more like an invention for or a replacement of memories; after all, photography is not a portrayal, an interpretation or mimicry of a subject but its trace.” Photography has the magical power to awaken and connect times, and pictures embody and evidence the spirits and fleshes, their unity and their separation. In this exhibition, Ma sees her work as clues for us to observe, play with our imagination, explore with our romantic feelings, and compose stories on our own.

Cynthia Ma once told me, all the pictures she took when shooting for “Dancing Divas of Taiwan” were snapshots. That is, she took those pictures spontaneously, not staged photos like those taken in manners of salon photography at all. There was no previously produced frame-by-frame script based on meticulously studied documentary photography; strictly speaking, it wasn’t close intense shooting like she was stalking the subjects, either. At the first glance, though, it may give an ambiguous impression that Ma took liberty of taking the pictures without the dancers knowing it. However, not only did she not mean to sneak or be like a peeping-Tom photographer, the dancers were not intended to hide themselves before the camera. It’s just like how photographer Moriyama Daido(1938-)applauds Kitashima Keiz?(1954-) on the photographs of people taken in the street, “the photographer does not embody a burglar’s style or a lecher’s eye; he has an audacious photographer’s soul that he could commit the ‘crime’ under broad daylight.” It’s the same with Cynthia Ma, and her best weapons are the Leica in her hand and her fearless, ambitious drive.

The exquisite and delicate images of the fashionable world are no longer Cynthia Ma’s concerns in photography. It is now the rough, raw and monochrome images of stark contrast in light and shadow that trigger her passions. This is also how she perceives the stage and the stark difference between the excitement and cheering under the spotlight and the silence in the dark after the show. But all that matters to her is reality, and this is how she finds real human emotions there. Cynthia Ma does not have any preoccupation; she does not even design the composition for the frame. She just awaits with an open heart, senses the momentary details in passing, and is always prepared with her lens and her sincerity. With her modest framing and wide aperture, Cynthia Ma captures a world separate from the one with sociality and formality. In this world in Ma’s lens, all are survivors of harsh realities; no one ever has a colorful life, yet no one’s life is naïve and unsophisticated. The reality shaped by those rough black spots on her pictures is graceful and solemn; the images give no hollow impressions, and those dancers that were often presented as pretty dolls in digitally modified images are now in their unaltered, true portrayal. And it’s earnest and more touching this way.

In his acclaim of photographer Paul Strand’s accomplishments, recently deceased John Berger(1926-2017)states that a photographer is often also a successful biographer. A photographer would capture the flash of a historical moment with camera, crystallizes it into physical reality, and accomplishes an “autobiography” for the photographed subject that the photographer becomes the biographer. Whether the photographic as well as the biographic project is by request, the photographed subject is entrusted to the photographer, allowing the photographer to see through everything in his or her life, be it an interpretation, an explanation, a defense or a wish. In the flash of taking pictures, a story is painted, where the photographer apprehends the life trajectory of the photographed, and connects the dots between them. This way they could communicate with each other, awaken the past and look forward to the future. What is wonderful is the flash. The flash of the camera is like the flash of life, when it gives an astounding impression that all the life of the photographed is consolidated and crystallized into an image and presented before the viewer. This is how Moriyama Daido opposes common understanding and argues that “the past is fresh, and the future is memorable”. Certainly he makes this statement out of the clear notion that any moment is a node in time and in life, as it is also a punctum. The flash when the eyes meet it flashes into flames, only that it does not burn to ashes; it burns into eternity.

I remember one time a dance critic friend familiar with body language told me, should you accidentally catch a dancer inadvertently dropping his or her shoulder, this dancer is either physically too old to dance or exhausted to the core. In her pictures, Cynthia Ma also accidentally reveals to us the secrets of the dancers or the many unknown concerns on their mind. What a photograph may expose is sometimes too much to take or to gaze. The sparkling accessories and the shining light are barely a disguise of the aging tired face as well as the despair of long-gone past glory. Those tailor-made and dazzlingly decorated costumes look exactly what Chang Eileen masterfully describes, “life is a splendid and exquisite costume, with lice climbing all over it”. On the silhouettes of those fabulous dresses, there leave but beautiful yet melancholy gestures of hand and body, one after another. Through photographic image, Cynthia Ma exposes the youth that is destined to shine only once, as she honors the dancers who are to be left nameless and to vanish in history. An actor shall realize that life onstage is like what Chang Eileen makes clear in her short story Hua Diao, or the Withering Flower, “laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone. How long the misery, and how short one’s life.” In the end, the bland boredom after the brief though shining bright is but the fate common to us all.

As a veteran advertisement woman, there is no doubt that Cynthia Ma is good at telling stories with pictorial images. Each photograph in this project is a segment in the life of all the individual lives; it may not tell all the stories with all the endless, complicated details, but it embodies and reveals the most earnest and truest feelings. So it’s not only the dancing divas of the glamorous colorful world that look close; it’s also Cynthia Ma who, in the project, grew to feel for and identify with the divas. If not for the unknown emotion driving her and the friendship with the production team for so long, how does Ma, born into a comfortable life and raised in the upper society, return the warmth and light that’s been cast onto her? In the supplement booklet to his only photography collection, Kamagasaki(1980), Inoue Seiry? admits, “people are always restless; so am I. That’s to say, my personality loving people so profoundly and deeply that it makes me cry and my very same personality resenting people so much it hurts, they are all reflected on the people of Kamagasaki.” This legendary photographer, who Moriyama Daido considers his mentor, leaves behind images of nobodies living in poverty and hardship, which have eternalized and become timeless “truthful images of Japan at a time of rapid growth.” No matter if Cynthia Ma is conscious of her work with similar crystal clarity, that “Dancing Divas of Taiwan” reveals the darker side of human life through those portraits indeed leads us to deep thoughts.

Philosopher Walter Benjamin(1892-1940) makes clear in his famed criticism on rethinking the history of photography that, even though we have entered the age of mechanical reproduction, it is still the “aura” that art reaches us with, right then and right there, and that is what he renders the truth. Indeed, since the moment when the artwork is complete, it is bound to bear with material deterioration and witness its transference through numerous generations and countless owners. And as Benjamin states, in the mechanical age, be it photography as art or art as photography, or art by way of the photographic form, the fact is that we can longer consider artwork a private property; it is now a collective product that all of us participate in its production. Living at a time as Benjamin did, he would find it difficult to imagine an age of information when the Internet saturates every corner of our life. More than ever, we are closely connected with and tightly attached to one another, in spite of our fate that our flesh will withdraw from the stage we called the world, that we will all soon be forgotten.

I remember the other day when I walked past the neighborhood of Huayin Street in Taipei. What I saw was desolation and depression; none of this reminds us of the bustles of the show clubs and strip clubs that once crowded this neighborhood. All that used to prosper and shine eventually withers and dims. And it’s difficult to settle a conclusion on everything once and for all; only those who experience with their flesh and life feel and understand the real taste of it. “I leave when the pub closes,” so wisely said Sir Winston Churchill. It’s the same under the spotlight, where the star may rule the stage and the has-beens may hide in the shadow, but, when the show’s over, all is gone. Without the spotlight and with no audience, there is no place, no stage, for any actor, star or has-been.