Admen are not known for their sensitivity to nature; they're rarely moved to ponder their place in the cosmos. Which makes ad exec Chen Weizhong an anomaly. His book of photos, "The Third Pole," tells of his solitary journey to the wilds of western China.
In the early days of advertising in China, Chen Weizhong spent an inordinate amount of time searching for a perfect leaf for a perfume ad.
Two decades later, nature still inspires the 51-year-old photographer and advertising executive. Last year, a series nature photographs won him acclaim and solidified his position as "one of China's best 10 advertising photographers."
A three-month trip last August to photograph China's vast western regions yielded a breathtaking book of photography called "The Third Pole."
Dressed simply in a T-shirt, Chen fits neither the image of a middle-aged executive nor of a hip ad man. Instead, he is down-to-earth, determined and extremely patriotic, qualities he says he developed during his years in the military. It was army life, as well, that taught him the survival skills needed during his 90-day western adventure.
Traditionally, the half-century mark for a Chinese is said to be a time of peace and quiet, when one reflects on a life well-lived surrounded by family members. But Chen wasn't quite ready to settle into retirement mode.
His taste for travel has taken him to more than 30 countries, beginning in the 1980s, when he was sent by the government to photo-graph aid projects in deve-loping countries.
In more recent years, he has spent months each year photographing nature around the country. Chen has covered 25,000 kilometers and traveled all four routes leading to Tibet: from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. He has ventured onto Everest's glacier, climbed to an altitude of 6,000 meters in Xinjiang and slept in the "no-man's land" in Tibet. He has staked his life and been rewarded with a myriad of breathtaking nature photographs.
After wandering the world, Chen says, "I am a strong believer that the most beautiful scenery in the world is right here in China. And photographing the western region has been my long-time dream."
Chen's dream journey took three years of preparation. A training regimen of running and push-ups was designed to increase his physical strength and stamina; he drove into mountain areas to improve his driving and navigation skills, once covering 8,000 kilometers in eight days.
And he buried himself in books on the regions' geography and climate. Chen was well aware of the risks: "Being ill-prepared could have led to death," he says. Taking no chances, he also wrote a will and purchased US$250,000 worth of life insurance in Hong Kong.
Last August, Chen bid farewell to his wife and set out in his Pajero, armed with his Pentax camera. He lived the rough life of an explorer, eating instant noodles and dry biscuits, and sleeping in tents in snowy mountains, prairies, deserts, fields and canyons. But the physical hardships, he says, were not as difficult to endure as the mental ones. "If there were only one person left in the world, he would not die of hunger or thirst but of loneliness," he wrote in his diary on August 25, as he camped at the foot of snow-covered mountains in Xinjiang.
"Have you ever experienced being the only human soul in the vast expanses of the desert or prairie?" Chen asks rhetorically. "I couldn't sleep at all. And it wasn't only because I was on the lookout for wild wolves..."
During the day, his biggest worry was his car. "What lies ahead? Will that road lead to a cliff? As long as the car is functioning, I had a way out, even if I was injured." The alternative, too horrible to contemplate, gnawed away at him - and sometimes turned into reality.
Once in Tibet's no-man's land, he ran into a swamp. His car got stuck and began to sink. "There was no one to answer my SOS. I knew, at that moment, what despair truly was," he recalls. But with the stroke of luck that seems the company of all successful explorers, he suddenly noticed the barely discernible outline of a camp in the distance. Leaving the car, he walked towards the camp for three hours at an altitude of 4,700 meters, finally reaching it.
On Everest, he met a team of Spanish explorers who later perished on the mountain. That served as a wake-up call for Chen, who decided not to attempt the mountain without proper training and equipment. It wasn't a difficult decision, he says, because he is the first to admit that he is a photographer, not an adventurer. "I cherish my life," says Chen. "I am not in this to test the limit of my stamina. I am a photographer who wants to record as much beauty as possible."
For Chen, the endeavor of drawing closer to nature is ultimately a way of meditating on life. "When you drive or walk in the desert or prairie, you will understand that one is so small compared with nature. We are no different from a beetle. Only then will you begin to understand," he says.
(eastday.com July 22, 2002)
