Sun Jinqiang

I, born in a farmer family of Xu zhou (namely the City of Xuzhou), Jiangsu Province, am at the age of 51. It was 37 years since I had joined the army at my age of 17. Later on, I was promoted to the rank of senior colonel. At the beginning of the new century, I was transferred to civilian work and started my struggling in businesses. In spite of having carved out my career for years, I have never forgotten to enjoy myself in hobbies and have bought several sets of camera equipement to kill time and relieve stress from my working and life.

It was accidently for me to fall in deep love of camera work at that time, and my creative working was started from the 1990s. My military career has endowed me with a lot of heroism but slight of cultivation of the mind. Fortunately, it has been fully supplemented at an atmosphere of the time-nourished history and culture in Shaanxi. Additionnaly, in my great passion for the nature and life, I have been full of such special sentiment to birds, flowers, hills, rivers and other beauties what I caught sight of that I cannot help taking my camera up to express my thinking, sentiment and feelings from these beauties with my photography works . Namely, to climb the mountain leaves great sentiments all over, while to enjoy the sea will get great feelings overflowed.

Common people often fall in love of the nobleness of a peony, Tao Yuanming loved the latent ease of the chrysanthemum, and Zhou Maoshu admired the pureness of the lotus in sullage. All of these belong to literary metaphors adopted by these ancient personages to express their inclinations. To be frank, I am not a literator or a poet, and I have no other inhesion but photography in my life. So I am wrapped up in the vastness of the sea, the beauty of mountains and rivers, the nimbus of flowers and grass, the playing of animals... It is a great pleasure for me to represent such magnificence, forcefulness, prettiness, leisureliness, and naiveness to the world.

Hua Mountain, a branch peak of the Qinling Mountains, shoots up in the sky in southern Shaanxi, known as the 800-Li-Qinchuan. Kou Zhun, an ancient prime minster, wrote a poem, "only the sky is above the peak, there is no mountain taller than it. Lift my head on its peak with the sun nearby, and bow my head to enjoy the cloud". It describes how high and sheer the mountain is. "It is a lotus when we look at it afar." The nature endows Shaanxi with such a stunner. It is also the place where I was born, live and work, so it is imaginably how admirable it is for me and why I am longing for express its beauty with a great passion.

I found that all the artistic expressions will become cut-and-dry and lack of vigor, unless any inspiration and emotion in them. In view of this, I have climbed Hua Mountain more than 30 times for these years and each of my mountaineering brought me different experience. I have always attempted to express my deep feelings of Hua Mountain in my works. By far, I have already created hundreds of camera works about Hua Mountain and, throught carefully selecting from them, I have made this collection, so as to make a summary of my photography for these years and accept different advices. I will be grateful for your good advice and suggestion.

Sun Jinqiang
December, 2004