Psychedelic Bamboo

One can also notice that as a title, Psychedelic Bamboo is an amalgam of Western hallucinogenic drug culture with a reference to the ubiquity of bamboo in China, in both art and nature. Feng Yan’s use of abstraction also relates to his fondness for traditional Chinese painting with its dynamic nonrepresentational brushstrokes and flourishes.

Indeed, the romanticism of these photographs—their deliberate beauty—raises useful questions about the relationship between photography and painting.

The flatness of the surface shows us that the image is resolutely photographic, even if it recalls, in its quiet luminosity, a painter like Rothko.

—Jonathan Goodman