Long ago Paul Valery noted that Plato’s metaphor of the “cave” actually refers to a large camera obscura, and the world an unexposed film in the eyes of God.  Zheng Duanxiang is the technician who develops and brings forth the image concealed within the negative.  In such an incongruous situation, dark room toil is accelerated and the process of printing is replaced by the intense stare of a wandering light. The photographs of Zheng Duanxiang are not a simple record of moments in time. His manner of taking photos is much the same as that of a lost person trying to find their way in the dark; or to put it another way, a depiction that reveals the flesh and bones of reality in the dark.  In this darkness, Zheng Duanxiang has carefully constructed a theater of light. In this midnight theater, everything is concealed in darkness.  Under the glare of light the shape of objects becomes clear; bits and pieces, like the gradual recovery of lost memories.  The lost hours of our lives are hidden in a multitude of insignificant objects.  On chance occasions we will be guided by these objects to once again encounter those lost hours. In Zheng Duanxiang’s new series, Amnesia, all revealed objects are nothing but props for restoring memory. Here, memories are images. To Zheng Duanxiang, photographs are not instant images.  Before the object disappears into an image, it has been engraved with the moment when the negative is exposed.  This is the moment when reality disappears and image comes into being. Therefore, photography is not only observation; more importantly, it is memory, and it is this memory that created many new objects presently gazing back at you.  The memories that have been called back involuntarily by the staring light become images; like a show performed within a time capsule. However, in the dark, those myriad beings beyond the light are subject to increasingly close scrutiny, thereby making them mysterious and mournful. (Gao Shiming)