Lisa Ross’s luminous photographs are not our usual images of
Xinjiang. One of China’s most turbulent areas, the huge autonomous
region in the country’s northwest was brought under permanent Chinese
control only in the mid-twentieth century. Officially, it is populated
mostly by non-ethnic Chinese—Turkic peoples like Uighurs (also spelled
Uyghurs), Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz, as well as Mongolians and even
Russians—and its population has long had difficult relations with Beijing. In 2008, 2009, and 2012, Xinjiang was the site of bloody
protests.
Instead of representing these political conflicts, however, Ross’s
photographs are unassuming and quiet; people are never present and the
objects she captures—stone on sand, cloth on stone, the skeleton of a
dried animal—have an incandescent glow, as if lit by another sun. In
fact, these images reveal a little-known religious tradition in
Xinjiang—its desert shrines to Sufi saints. Taken in the Xinjiang’s
Taklamakan Desert, they are collected in Ross’s addictive new book,
Living Shrines of Uyghur China, and are now
on view at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.
Lisa Ross
Xinjiang is famous as part of China’s Silk Road. Buddhism entered the
country through this western region and, later, Islam. Today, the
Uighurs form the second-biggest Muslim population in China. Unlike their
more numerous Hui breathren, however, the Uighurs are ethnically very
different from the Chinese, descending from Turkic peoples. Ethnic
Chinese control has been tenuous, with regular rebellions against
Beijing’s rule. Most locals are Sunni Muslims, but many Sufi sects are
popular. It is these more mystical groups that worship in the shrines
photographed by Ross.
These shrines are made of different kinds of materials, but most are
wooden posts or dried branches, stuck in the sand or cracked earth, and
bound with colorful cloth.
Some are more clearly identifiable as funeral memorials for one,
often famous, deceased person. They are individual graves, sometimes
grouped together as in a cemetery, other times alone in the desert,
frequently in the form of little picket fences surrounding a mound. Most
have some colorful cloth tied to the wood to make it stand out in the
monochromatic landscape.
Occasionally, Ross found small dolls, which signify a wish from
visiting women for pregnancy. Women would drop off the dolls at shrines
that they found efficacious. Other times, dried remains of animals
testify to a sacrifice made in a saint’s honor, or function as
talismans.
Lisa Ross
In her preface, the New York-based Ross explains what drew her to
this unusual topic. She was visiting Xinjiang over a decade ago and a
friend who knew her tastes suggested she walk into the desert. After a
while she began to see colors—the cloths revealing themselves behind the
dunes—and the small wooden cribs or rafts that marked the burial areas.
She made another trip and then another, centering around the heartland
of Uighur culture, the oasis towns surrounding the Taklamakan Desert
that is located in the heart of Xinjiang and forms its spiritual and
ethnic center of gravity.
Becoming almost an obsession, her interest led her to meet local
scholars, such as Rahilä Dawut, who had written in China on the shrines
and accompanied Ross on a trip. Despite the complicated politics
surrounding her—Beijing has restricted access to the region at times of
heightened unrest—she writes that “I made a conscious decision to remain
apolitical, in large part because I wanted to respect and protect
everyone with whom I worked.”
Lisa Ross
And yet these empty landscapes and simple graves—Ross says she
purposefully avoided people—belie political struggles. In one of the
introductory essays, the French historian Alexandre Papas notes that
many of these shrines have over the past decade become commercialized.
As part of its effort to bring minority faiths under central control—and
to commodify religion—the Chinese government has encouraged some to be
walled off, with admission charged. Often, this is done by Chinese
entrepreneurs, with government approval. This isn’t unique to Xinjiang
but it’s imaginable that it could add to ethnic tensions between the
indigenous people and Chinese immigrants, who have been encouraged to
move to Xinjiang to work in construction, energy industries, and
services.
The state, though, has also sought to protect them by giving some of
them official status as “cultural patrimony sites.” This means there is
money available for preservation, but it also risks transforming them
into exotic relics rather than part of a continuing religious tradition.
Islam is one of the officially recognized religions in China but it
remains tightly proscribed, with ethnic Chinese bureaucrats deciding how
many Uighurs and other Muslims may travel, for example, on the Hajj to
Mecca.
Most of this, however, is left unsaid in Ross’s book. Many of the
photos are of more modest shrines than the big tourist attractions. They
are small mounds and markers to more personal religious expression.
Mostly, what interests Ross are the deeper issues of spirituality: what
does a pilgrim see or experience on the way to a shrine? What is
holiness? Looking at these bright, numinous images, we begin to sense
something inexpressible but more profound than any of the region’s
difficult politics—a glimpse at the intangible traditions and beliefs
that have given shape to Xinjiang’s Muslims over many centuries.
Lisa Ross
Living Shrines of Uyghur China
by Lisa Ross, with essays by Beth Citron, Rahilä Dawut, and Alexandre
Papas, is published by The Monacelli Press. Ross’s photographs are on
view at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City through July 8.
written by
Ian Johnson
April 25, 2013
sursa
