Most recently, with Fragile Balance, Haiying Nie combines photography, environmental commentary, and material experimentation into a suggestive inquiry about nature and human intervention. In this last series, she uses photography not as a flat medium but as one that can be transformed. She first began to manipulate her images in a series of technicolor marine ecosystems, with her own process of layering and manipulating the layers of emulsion. The final pieces transcend their photographic origin, becoming almost tactile and multidimensional states of underwater turmoil. Through the intentional violation of the images’ slick surfaces, the works convey a vague voice of alarm and meditation on the related environmental devastation taking place in these tender, liquid landscapes.
What distinguishes Nie’s work is her ability to transform calm, nearly pastoral images of underwater life into mysteriously abstract places with seamless ease. The crumpled, shattered surfaces of the images are thus metaphors for the wreckage caused by human-induced climate change, pollution, and other threats. In manipulating her photographs in this way, Nie is not recording environmental decay but embodying it in the very physicality of her work. Sea anemones, jellyfish, and corals are therefore twisted from their bright and regular selves into becoming an unfamiliar and alien distortion of them. It is in this transformation to distortion that the audience begins to question their ability to contribute to the destruction of fragile environments.
Therefore, in Fragile Balance, it’s through the manipulation of light and color that Nie grasps this emotional beauty and underpinning vulnerability, both tied to these ecosystems. The vivid colors were used in such a way that they created tension between being enigmatic with admiration for the beauty of the subject matter and discomfort from its distortion. Manipulation of the emulsion surfaces further engages the viewer into the tactile qualities, offering an experience that is purely sensory and not only based on observation. The visual and emotional interface that the work of Nie allows for implores us to feel the effect of environmental degradation from the inside.
Surely what Nie does goes deeper: with her help, the outlook on reality for us is shaken, and in her best works, she raises some important questions about our interaction with nature. She symbolically cracks the clarity of her photographs, breaking the illusion of a perfect, unharmed world full of hurt. Her work is at the same time a metaphor for and an injunction to all who see it to reflect on matters of extreme urgency in terms of preservation and our role in the ongoing story of environmental conservation.