叶锦添一个星期就能拍上千张的照片。跟痴迷的摄影家一块儿旅行，你会发现他即使不在按快门，也会同样专注地一直四处在看。他的视线余光是磨锐过的。他在下出租车时或在午餐桌上都能找到可拍的镜头。照相因而就像吃饭呼吸一样自然，要它停下来也有如要画家搁下画笔一样困难。透过观景器方框去观察世界会拉近同时也拉远我们与环境间的距离。即便摄影曝光的时间长度仅只一瞬间，但在那一刻所需要的专注，其实与任何画家的长时间凝视是同等强度的。随着在观景器中的形象布局变得更频繁更细致，照片就更直接地反映并记录了我们观看这个世界的方式。照片于是开始不那么像人工构筑了。照片看起来不再像照片了。
我们每日从醒来到入睡，都是由影像伴随着。我们越仔细研究照片，会越发觉得它们让我们想到其他照片。它们其实是呈螺旋线状的一连串自身指涉。我们渴望看到新鲜影像，但它就像新鲜的思想一样不易见。
我们所见过的每张照片的记忆都牢牢地锁在个人的影像库里。我们带着一部摄影的历史到处走，就像我们都带着一部个人的电影史或是艺术史一样，其重量也不轻。透过努力和想象，惯性摄影者最终能创出一个自我身份。那些照片会开始像“他”或是“她”自己的，而不是森山大道、比尔·艾格斯顿或是楠·戈尔丁的。真正的自我最终将会显现。达到此等境界可能需要一生的时间。但永远都达不到也有可能。
叶锦添的摄影表达一套复杂的语言，因为他过的就是复杂而多层次的生活。他平时关心的层面很广，他的照片也反映出这种多样性。他的照片模糊、快捷、简单、纪实、恬静、神秘……描述这些照片所需要的形容词能填满一张很长的单子。他是职业的细节观察者。在一天之中，他可能会注意到布料的悬挂、缝针的细节、某种特别色调的灰色、浮雕的刻画，或者是较大的景观中洒在建筑物上的阳光、夜色里的都市、空中俯瞰的海岸线……这等专业的工作应该是多人合作的，可能还动用了大型电影制作组的大批专家。然而他也是个艺术家，艺术家的定义就是孤独的，不论后面支持架构如何。因此创作的压力仍归他一人，唯独他一人。这是最富挑战力也是收获最丰盛的职位。目前对他来说，也是最有吸引力的工作。不过锦添和我们都一样，也曾受到他人的影响。只要造访他的住处，你就会慢慢开始消化他书架上的收藏。书架几乎覆盖了每一面墙。他需要大量的书架空间来收纳他的好奇心。难得的伦敦之行途中，他会造访查令十字路书店街。我要是在东京与他不期而遇，可能会看到他在神保町翻阅着老旧的日本杂志。他可以是春画专家，就像他可以是日本宫廷织锦专家一样。他书架上不只是森山大道的摄影或是很可以预料到的荒木经惟的集子，因为锦添也对地下人物，像东京的诗人和电影、剧场导演寺山修司很有兴趣。寺山是个才华特别多样的人物。初次与锦添接触，你会发觉他的旁征博引也同样富有异国情调。他的作品需要这等尺度的注意，如此，他才能灵活汲取各种不同的历史传统，比如从上海到西藏，而加以发挥。从最新的蝙蝠侠电影到英国早期舞台设计，他都必须熟悉。无论锦添的摄影是多么纯粹，它都与他的剧场感一同处于叶锦添世界之核心。安排布置他的照片，就是创造故事叙述的机会，因为所有照片都将布局于某种剧场之中。这些照片不只是视觉世界复杂的抽象化过程之结果，它们其实构成了一个持续发生的故事，即使这故事可能就像穿过城市这件事一般简单。锦添最早在香港是主修摄影的学生，之后在台湾的剧场工作经验改变了他的方向。摄影原是他用来记录舞蹈和剧场设计的工具。而现在这些照片本身就成了戏剧。
锦添最后选择在北京定居，也正在建造自己的工作室。这个抉择很有意思。这个城市景观变化之剧烈，能让出租车司机都摸不清方向而迷路。北京的基础建设步调跟不上都市建设的速度。高楼瞬间矗起，天空被这些建设工程的灰尘以及引擎的排烟笼罩着。当交通瘫痪缓慢前进时，你也只能认命，接受这个步调，在旁观望。最常见的景象可能是由高楼望过空谷，找寻对面的阳台，或是在闪烁的灯火中捕捉生命迹象。不然就是俯瞰着人群和车辆形成的图案。这是一种让人眼花缭乱的生存。而地面上的景观往往是在缓缓移动的车中，自车窗向外看去，车窗玻璃模糊、柔和了街景。北京吞噬了车辆。科幻小说曾经将这类城市描绘成沉睡的怪物，夜夜嘶嘶呻吟。身处在这般能量之中，很难不把城市看做一个生物，各种告示和灯火就是它的脉搏。穿过这般景观，很难不把它想作一出戏。
“新”中国艺术的前进步伐就快得像北京或上海爆发成新世纪的大都会一样。像叶锦添这么一个好奇的聪明人执意穿过这般的大漩涡，而路途上又选择了相机作为主要工具，是多么自然的事。相机镜头是民主的。它透过长方形观景器，将一切经验等化为一系列影像。自高楼俯瞰下去的景象就等同于自己脚下地板的花纹。圆形的光源可能是灯泡也可能是月亮。观景器可自混乱中找出秩序。
叶锦添的语言构成一个超大的视觉长句。它忠于此地，并与日常生活完全同步。它容易解读，就像打开门，摇下车窗，从方形观景器中去观看全世界一样。
The View Finder
Mark Holborn
In a single week Tim Yip may take more than a thousand photographs. When you travel with an obsessive photographer you notice that even if they don't release the shutter they are still watching relentlessly. Their peripheral vision is sharpened. They can find the pictures as they get out of a taxi or sit at the lunch table. Making a photograph is then an act as natural as eating or breathing and as difficult to stop as it is for a painter to lay aside his brush. Observing the world through the rectangle of the viewfinder offers both engagement and distance from the surroundings. Even if the act of photographic exposure lasts but a fraction of a second the concentration at that moment is as great as any painter's prolonged scrutinizing. As the arrangement of shapes through the viewfinder becomes more frequent and more refined, the photographs reflect more directly the evidence of how the world was seen. They start to look less like a construction. The photographs stop looking like photographs.
Pictures greet us when we wake and follow us in our sleep. The more we study photographs the more they remind us of other photographs. They present a spiral of self-reference. We long to see something new but original vision is as scarce as original thought.
The memory of every photograph we have ever seen is lodged inescapably in our personal image banks. We carry round with us a history of photography just as we bear our personal histories of cinema or art, and they're heavy. The habitual photographer can through labour and imagination eventually create an identity. The photographs start to look like HIS pictures or HERS, not like Daido Moriyama's or Bill Eggleston's or Nan Goldin's. The true self emerges. It might take a lifetime to reach that stage. It might never happen.
Tim Yip's photographs express a complex language because he lives a complicated multi-layered life. He has to spread his attention widely. His photographs are appropriately varied. They are blurred, fast, simple, graphic, serene and mysterious. The list of adjectives to describe the pictures would be long. He is a professional observer of detail. He might in the course of a day notice the hang of cloth, the intricacy of stitching, a particular shade of grey, the definition of a carved relief or in the bigger landscape, sunlight on buildings, a city at night, the coastline from the air. This professional work is collaborative and might involve the crew of a major film production with its armies of specialists. He is also an artist, a role that by its very nature is solitary whatever the support structure. The creative load is then his and his alone. It is the most challenging and fruitful position and right now for him the most attractive location. But Tim, like any one of us, has his influences. Spend any time in his apartment and you can start to digest the contents of his bookshelves. They line nearly every wall. He needs a lot of shelf space to accommodate his curiosity. On a rare visit to London he'll head to the bookshops of Charing Cross Road. If I were to meet him in Tokyo by accident I would find him in Jumbocho browsing through old Japanese magazines, he would be an authority on erotica as he would be on Japanese court textiles. His shelves reveal more than the photographs of Moriyama or predictably the books by Araki, for Tim would be attracted to such underworld characters as the Tokyo poet, film and theatre director, Shuji Terayama, a figure of conspicuously wide ranging talents. Tim's breadth of reference appears similarly exotic when you first meet him. His work demands this scale of attention so that he can apply himself to diverse historical traditions from, say, those of Shanghai to those to Tibet. He must know about the style of the latest Batman movie to the stage arrangements of early English theatre. However pure his photography, it sits with his sense of theatre at the centre of his world. To arrange his photographs then provides the opportunity to create a narrative because all the pictures start to fit into a kind of theatre. The photographs are more than complex abstractions of the visible world. They form parts of an ongoing story, even though the story might be as simple as that of crossing the city. Tim began as a photography student in Hong Kong and was transformed by his work in theatre in Taiwan. Photography was a tool with which to record his designs for dance and theatre. Now the photographs themselves form the drama.
It is in Beijing that Tim has found his home and is building his studio. It is an interesting choice, for being a citizen of Beijing at this time makes living in New York City seem like a stroll in the country. The city is in such flux that even taxi drivers will get bewildered and lost in the changing landscape. The city's infrastructure cannot keep pace with its construction. Buildings rise in the blink of an eye. The sky is clouded by the dust of this enterprise and by the fumes of the engines. As the traffic crawls you surrender to the pace and watch. The common view may be from out of a window in a high-rise across the canyons to search out the opposite balconies or catch the signs of life in flickering lights. Or else you look down to the pattern of figures and cars below. It is a vertiginous existence. The ground level view is most often that seen through a car window moving very slowly, the glass blurring and softening the scene. Beijing engulfs the cars. Science fiction once portrayed such cities as sleeping monsters that hiss and groan through the night. It is hard in the midst of such energy not to regard the city as animate, its signs and lights but signals of its pulse. It is hard not to think of traversing this landscape as anything other than a drama.
The art of 'new' China has moved as fast as Beijing or Shanghai erupted as the great cities of the new century. How obvious that an intelligence as curious as Tim's would seek to navigate through such a maelstrom and how obvious that his chosen tool for the journey would be his camera. The lens is democratic. It levels all experience to a series of shapes through the rectangle of the viewfinder. The view from the high-rise window to the ground below equates to the pattern of the floor beneath ones feet. A round source of light could be a light bulb or the moon. The viewfinder can order the chaos.
Tim's language forms a great long visual sentence. It is true to this place and it is in perfect synchronicity with the daily round. It as simple to read as opening a door, winding down a window and peering through a rectangle to see the whole world beyond.