Her work appeared in my lecture 'The Garden of Perfect Brightness, a life in ruins' (see the previous article in this section) long before we began investigating the dusty topography of despoliation that is the garden today. I had begun my own work on the garden and we arranged to meet in Beijing to begin making a 'portrait' of the gardens in 1998. I first saw Lois's photographs when we met in New York in 1996.
It was still not an often frequented public park, and it would still be some years before sections would be fenced off, surrounded by 'tiger skin walls' ( hupiqiang and the grounds patrolled by security personnel. It was during her time in Beijing in 1984 that Conner first made pictures at the remains of the Garden of Perfect Brightness. In 1982, when she began working with a banquet camera with an elongated 7"x17" format, she examined the long handscroll paintings of traditional Chinese art to search for hints as to how these distended views reflected and shaped a unique perception of the land. While at Peking University she explored the city and began recording her understanding of it on film. She studied for a time at Peking University, where she acquired the rudiments of the spoken language, before going to spend months at Dunhuang recording the grotto caves for a major international project. She first went to China in 1984 with a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue her interest in the visual culture of that country and to explore through her own lens Chinese ways of seeing and ways of seeing China. The New York-based landscape photographer Lois Conner has been working in China for over two decades. 'Huabiao' at the western entrance of Peking University, moved from the Ancestral Temple ( Hongci yonghu) at Yuanming Yuan.
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