Putting the 'art' into artifacts
With one photo of a tomb figure from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and housed at Xi'an Museum-a horse-riding woman, holding a konghou, a plucked stringed instrument-Huang deliberately chose a low shooting angle to make it appear as if she is charging at the viewer.
In many cases, Huang makes full use of the museum lights. The luminous spots become part of what constitutes the appeal of his photos.
For instance, in a photo taken at the Shanghai Museum, the positioning of the spotlight shining on a Tang-Dynasty stone bodhisattva offers the squatting figure a "moon" to enjoy as if it were "night", while the lighting in a picture of a dancing tomb figure at the Hunan Museum delivers him a playmate-his larger shadow.
When looking at Huang's pictures, one can barely see traces of the glass windows that surround his subjects. Huang prefers to photograph against a dark background. His trump card, as he referred to it jokingly, is to wait for someone (preferably not too thin) wearing dark clothes to pass by and unwittingly provide his backdrop.
Fengjiangjiang, another zhihu.com user, was impressed by Huang's persistence when photographing relics and artifacts because it's so time-consuming and requires a lot of patience.
According to Huang, he will not do too much research in advance. Rather, he prefers to see interesting pieces on-site and tries to dig up more information on them later online or via books and any other sources that are available to him.
