Fei-Lai Feng, Hang Zhou, 1999

This photograph, like much work by Thomas Struth, is big as life. Struth's monumental images are shot with little staging or editing, directly from life. The work that established him as one of the most eminent photographers of the contemporary moment pictured visitors in international museums and churches; largely desolate city streets in Europe and the United States; and portraits of individuals and groups with whom he is intimate. Fei-lai Feng, Hangzhou belongs to a more recent body of the artist's work that combines elements of all three categories, representing tourist spots, public gardens and jungles, and crowded urban areas and landscapes.
Here, twelve Chinese tourists visit the garden of an ancient scholar. Contained within the massive photograph are allusions to other photographs: a couple stands in the foreground, apparently posing for a portrait, while another man perches on a rock, his camera aimed. Struth's characteristic blend of the timeless and the transitory is very much in evidence. The garden sculptures and lush, overhanging vegetation are centuries old, but within this immemorial setting the bustle of everyday life continues: a man walks down a path, his figure blurred, and another figure is truncated at the lower right edge of the image. Neither portrait, nor still life, nor landscape, Fei-lai Feng, Hangzhou is all three-and something else entirely.