© Victoria Jenkins, Capnomancy, from Images from the Institute of Esoteric Research

© Victoria Jenkins, Aeromancy, from Images from the Institute of Esoteric Research

“A characteristic claimed to be unique of photography has been its ability to record the visible, material world, its perceived objectivity and accuracy has lead to a utilitarian application of the camera as a tool for documentation, and this can be traced back to photography’s early history. Parallel to this is a history that echoes with illusion and trickery; photography carries a false empiricism, for which we may allow our guard to be dropped.

The photographs presented here are rooted in the language of rational investigation, employing quasi-scientific laboratory style conditions in to which a series of still lives, fictional archival images, are constructed. A commingling of varied sources occurs: vernacular imagery of magic tricks, home science experiments, divination practice, superstitious belief and forensic investigation. The intent is to play on the conflicts in the languages that are being appropriated: logic and absurdity, revelation and trickery, illustration and illusion, but also that which seems concurrent despite the apparent polarities: the image whose authority is asserted through a shrouding in secret language and gesture.

This collision and coinciding intends to produce a series riddled with ambiguities, the oblique amongst clarity providing a slippery surface on which to form the photographs narratives.”

More of Victoria’s world here

Theo Angelopoulos departs, today, at 76, ironically run over by an off duty cop while working on set for his next film.

It’s a sad moment for true cinema lovers but for the Greeks as well. Neither the kind of martyr they need today, nor the kind of sorrow or brief grieving mass hysteria in the media.
“Etermity and a Day” and “Ulysses’ Gaze” are masterpieces of which I am now reminded by this unfortunate happening. I shall see them again in the next few days and think of a no man’s land.

Wishing him all eternity and a day

© Chen Qiulin, Ellisis’s Series No. 3, 2002 (photograph)

© Chen Qiulin, Peach Blossom, 2009 (dvd still)

At a time when her understanding of contemporary art was still limited, Chen was unexpectedly invited to partake in Parabola, a satellite show of the First Chengdu Biennale (2001). On this occasion she created Ellisis (. . . . . .), a performance piece that she documented in film and photographs. The work is based on a Chinese expression that roughly translates as “sweet harm” and refers to all the enticing things that modern society throws at young women. In Ellisis, Chen sits in front of a vanity table placed outdoors among the rubble of an undeveloped site with new buildings, a coal power plant, and factories on the horizon. She is wearing a pretty dress and is admiring herself in the mirror, oblivious to a man throwing pieces of a soft, creamy cake at her until her hair, face, and dress are coated. Her absorption in herself and indifference to her surroundings are a metaphor for the situation that many young Chinese women find themselves in. Unlike older women, Chen’s generation has not lived through revolutions or hard times. Rather, they are seduced by the sweetness of a prosperous society while ignoring the potential emotional harm hidden within.
(…)
Sichuan Province experienced the worst earthquake in its history in May 2008. Only three months before the Beijing Olympics were scheduled to open, with China the focus of world attention, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives, their loved ones, their homes. The severe sense of loss reverberated with Chen, whose most recent body of work reflects on life in Sichuan after the disaster. Peach Blossom (Tao Hua, 2009), on view for the first time in the United States at the Hammer Museum, was created in the same spirit as the earlier Wanxian video works—with an archival instinct and a lens on the personal, social, and environmental changes shaping people’s lives. In Chen’s words: “We cannot avoid natural disasters—life goes on. I made videos and performed in the areas hit by the earthquake as a commemoration and hope that more people will see how people are living in these areas and help them.”

source: excerpt from text by France Pepper. Continue reading

More of Chen’s work can be seen here

© Hai Bo, Winter, from the Four Seasons, 2003

© Hai Bo, Shadow 2, 2009

Time and memory weave through Hai Bo’s work, as they have for the last 20 years. For one series, They, he obtained souvenir-photos from family friends and acquaintances taken during the era of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Often these were group portraits of Red Army members posed in rows: No hierarchy of importance was allowed and anonymity was underscored with uniform haircuts and utilitarian clothing. With a distance of 30 years, Hai Bo found and gathered the same individuals to recreate the original souvenir-photos. He posed them in the exact positions. Then he paired the pictures of past and present in diptych form. Today, with the influx of Western influences in China, hairstyles and clothing vary from one person to the next. And, because the subjects are not part of a danwei (work unit), the re-photographed individuals are no longer interchangeable with one another. Rather than members of a group, they are individuals grouped together.

They highlights not only the passing of time, but also the poignant cultural divide between China then—the agrarian-based communist country under Mao Zedong, when the Cultural Revolution swept away the vast legacy of Chinese traditions in the arts and literature—and China today, which is undergoing a rapid expansion, westernization, and industrialization as part of the global market economy.

Still, Hai Bo’s artistic preoccupations are grounded in personal experience. “After moving to Beijing, my hometown took on a new perspective,” he wrote in 2005. “Once I returned to Changchun and met an old acquaintance of my mother on the street. She and her friends used to play with me when I was small, and in my mind they were a group of beautiful young girls. I was shocked by the middle-aged woman in front of me and, without thinking, I exclaimed: ‘How come you have become so old!’ She replied: ‘Look at yourself, have you not grown up as well!’ I suddenly felt the cruelty of time.”

excerpt from article by Philif Gefler

More of his work here and here

© Li Yun, For Individual Use, from the series Impermanent Instant, 2008

© Li Yun, Connecting Wire, from the series Impermanent Instant, 2008

“We Chinese people are struggling in the whirlpool of cynicism with no exception.

This is my understanding of the current times. With frenzied emotions and twisted bodies, we are marching forward with vigorous strides. While people are gaining tremendous amount of self-satisfaction in all respects, what emerges behind is a deeper sense of dissatisfaction and helplessness. All this is because that we always have some in-born things left to be fulfilled while the reality cannot be altered. Therefore we choose to forget. It is just like a person who has stopped the psychological growth in his childhood. The body is mature but he has given up the self-improvement of the mind. He just indulges himself in the pleasure of enjoying life whenever possible.
(…)
´Recent reading and realistic experiences make me believe that our history is not only lonely but also destined with no possibility to escape. Looking at these objects, I can’t image what else functions they can bring to us. How useless they are, except for being used to exchange money.

Often I feel that we are always waiting for a convulsion, a convulsion that is not coming from the reality but from verbal words of others. In reality there is only daily life left and we are reminded by other ‘mouths’ that the current reality is so full of surprises that we find no way to fit in.

However all these present in front of you today can’t provide a heart felt convulsion. Because the appearances are so insignificant and the huge reality behind is always so obscure. I am only expecting for a slight disturbances on your heart, just like the dust floating under the light, so that my intentions won’t be realized with nothing.”

excerpt from text by Li Yun. continue reading

His work here

© Jiang Zhi, On the white #4, 2007

© Jiang Zhi, Love Letters No.6, 2011

“Oneness and unity only rests in ‘word’, never in the ‘matter’.

I recall a conversation with a neurologist about whether ‘insanity’ exists, and if it did, how. We arrive at an interesting concept, that we were not very interested in the notion of ‘insanity’ itself, in other words, to us, ‘insanity’ in ‘general’ does not exist. ‘Insanity’ only exists in ‘situations’ and ‘conditions’, that is, ‘who’, ‘with whom’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘why’, ‘why not’…? Only in these ‘wholes’, ‘situations’ and ‘assemblages’ does the word ‘insanity’ has a ‘referent’. Here, the significance of ‘insanity’ lies in its ‘eventualness’ and not its ‘essence’. And here, because of the ‘eventual’, ‘insanity’ gained a ‘new’ reference, such that ‘sanity’, ‘fascination,’, ‘dream’, ‘rationality’, etc. can no longer be distinguished. Such ‘attitude of observation’ no longer serve as the ‘judgement’ of words (the essence between insanity and sanity), nor the ‘micro-politics’ of the boundary between objects (insanity against fascination’,), nor the ‘fight’ between words and matter (the essences of insanity versus the eventual in insanity). Instead, it’s the ‘materialisation’ of a concept, a ‘new’ form of ‘clinical symptom’, ‘an unprecedented form of insanity’: who, with whom, when, where, how, why… What we are observing has always been the ‘process of individuation of events under certain circumstances’, not the words, the object, person, nor subject…We call that ‘becoming insane’.

The operation of our brain is not like Freud’s ‘stage’, with various characters, symbols, representations. Instead, its operation resembles the ‘factory’ of Deleuze: machines, mechanisms, installations, settings. It constantly produces desires and becomes a ‘machine of desires’.

To complete this concept, Deleuze divided the Freudian desire: we never long for a ‘matter’, a ‘word’ or any ‘object’. What we yearn for has alway been a ‘state’, a ‘whole’, a ‘collection’. We crave not for ‘daddy mummy-penis nipple’, but for ‘a world of one’s own’. As Proust puts it, ‘I hunger for not only this woman, but also the landscape surrounding her…’, ‘What a woman wants is never only a dress, but the world she can embrace wearing the dress. What a man wants is never only a woman, but the life he can live having that woman.’

It is ‘desire’ that creates a ‘world we must arrive’, rushing us to ‘leave here to go there’, compelling us to ‘become’.”

excerpt from text by Véronic-Ting CHEN. Continue reading

More of Jiang’s work here

© Chen Wei, Broken Aquarium, from the series Everyday, Scenery and Props, 2009

© Chen Wei, Idol behind the curtains, from the series Everyday, Scenery and Props, 2009

“The photography/installation works of 31-year old artist Chen Wei illustrate an intricate imagination fascinated with the eccentric and fanciful pursuits of early science, mathematics, alchemy, philosophers and madmen. Taxidermy, broken mirrors, melted wax, bats, bees, deserted bedrooms, and found objects become the artist’s tableau. With a meticulous attention to details, Chen Wei creates mesmerizing scenes that leave the viewer puzzled by their intricate narrative, fantastic visual impact and odd beauty. In some of the works, the sole human subject resembles an absorbed mad scientist or passionate poet, adding feelings of isolation or estrangement to an already bizarre scene.
read more
Chen Wei’s creative and contemplative process consists of searching for and compiling myriad fragments of personal memories, and incorporating inspiration and objects from childhood or fantasies imagined juxtaposed with realities found in modern China. Most of the works are sketched and created on location in the artist’s studio and then photographed, with the end result being less about the camera process as it is about the assembly of the elaborate elements that are captured in his works. The spirit and style of Chen Wei’s photography works also point towards a new generation of emerging Chinese artists born in the 1980’s who are less focused on political history or obvious social criticisms than personal and intellectual freedoms and the individual’s place in a now modern and developed China. History for them has been obscured by economic and social reforms, and the speed and scale of development is the contemporary China they have witnessed.”

source: m97 Gallery

His place here

© Amanda Tinker, Untitled (Left Foot #1), work in progress, 2011

Palladium Print 8″x10″

© Amanda Tinker, Untitled (Julian with Peonies), work in progress, 2010

Palladium Print 8″x10″

“My latest work, still in progress, explores the intersection between the psychological landscape of family relationships and the body’s physical form, compromised, intact and otherwise. This work deals both specifically with the physical effects of a degenerative nerve disease in my family, and generally with the anxieties, joys and ambiguities of family life. I want to confront my own anxieties over my children potentially developing a debilitating illness, but at the same time appreciate the simplicity and overwhelming urgency of childhood.”

More of Amanda’s work here

© Gunnel Wåhlstrand,

© Gunnel Wåhlstrand, White Peacocks, 2007/2009

109 x 160 cm, ink-wash on paper

“For eight years, Wåhlstrand has worked exclusively with a kind of re-development of private photographs, using black ink and water, a precise and time-consuming technique that she masters to perfection. The earlier body of motives consisted of her father’s family photo album, but has now been expanded to a wider family group. One of the larger works, Mother Profile, is a rendering of a studio photograph of the artist’s mother. In the exhibition, it is placed so that she gazes at the landscape where her father dramatically crashed and fell to his death. Further on in the room, a portrait of him can be seen. It is the smallest work in the exhibition and the only one in colour. The artist decided that the fact that no colour photographs ever existed of her grandfather, was a strong enough reason to return to colour, for her sake as well as for his.

Wåhlstrand’s depiction is a both deeply personal and universal process. The precise and demanding task of depicting these documents is a way for the artist to physically and psychologically approach a personal history of which she, without any own experience of it, lives the consequences.”

source: Andréhn-Schiptjenko gallery

More of Gunnel’s work here