José Drummond’s black-and-white photography series Spellbound echoes the story of Zhuangzi’s Dreaming of a Butterfly. The myth features beautiful images that blur the line between reality and fantasy, remaining in people’s minds forever even though they seem vague. Photographic works in this black and white series present fantasy-like scenes: gentle female figures loom in the pictures, intriguing the viewer. This is the fantasy aspect of Zhuangzi’s Dreaming of a Butterfly, the unspeakable Zen.

The Aesthesia of Déjà vu

The charm of modern photography lies in its vocabulary that spans reality and fantasy. The use of black and white and ambiguous appearance give real objects fragmented memories, a kind of ‘déjà vu’. Photography detaches the two-dimensional sphere from reality: José Drummond’s black-and-white photographic series present blurred human figures, thereby creating illusions that people can hold related to time and space. These images contrast black and white and directly bring forth rich nostalgic sentiments. The artist deliberately blurs the focal length of objects to create distance in an aesthetic manner; this is also a seductive method. Exhibition-goers are led by the artist to a personal yet shared memory or sphere, enchanting them so intensely that they can no longer distinguish between reality and a virtual dizziness derived from the virtual realm of the senses. René Descartes (1596 – 1650), in his Meditations on First Philosophy argues that humans perceive all things in the world indirectly through senses of perception of the world, and this is why the external world may be real and may be unreal or virtual. Such an argument is an important proposition of scepticism and the artist’s awareness of his own vocabularies in the arts. Drummond creates this series with inspiration from senses of anesthesia, dizziness and disorder. Exhibition-goers enjoy a photographical visual experience in a fantasy-like virtual yet real two-dimensional antinomy. Within the realm of visible and invisible explicit forms and implicit spirit, the essence of photography lies in seeing that constantly alternates and moves between existence and alienation.

The Immanence of Zen

Themes embraced in these fantasy-like photographs are also themes from mythical stories, deliberately blurring the focal length of objects. The artist’s own questions on the awareness of the nature of existence and the use of artistic vocabularies are both emphasized by his use of blurred black-and-white photography. In his creations, Drummond employs different methods of the visual arts in portraying diverse identities and thoughts. His early works were also influenced by numerous Zen studies - in past paintings or today’s installation art, photographical works or other works employing diverse media - but all are directly related to Eastern Zen thoughts. Despite living in this foreign place of Macao, and having accrued many years of exhibition experience in Europe and the United States, Drummond maintains his enthusiasm for studying and researching Eastern aesthetics and philosophical ideas; all these themes are embedded and immanent within the form and performance of his artwork.

The Meaning of the Shadow World

Blurred female figures can be seen in this series of works.  ‘Female figures’ can be regarded as symbolic in terms of sociology or anthropology, but they share the same characterisation of being primitive. Particularly in this series, the ‘female figures’ are lifted to become a graphic symbol of metaphysics with black as the shadow and white as the light. As similes or metaphors, the images of the female figures are not a fetish; these aesthetic and unreal fleeting moments once again represent the meaning of the shadow world.

Shadow exists between the visible and invisible; it is memory, virtual and a projection of the scene between myth and fantasy.

Perhaps Drummond is an artist who works with beautiful myths, or a Zen monk wandering along the path of aestheticism.

- by Kwanyi Pan, Curator