The Asian and Oceanian (Australia) artworks were selected by 6 curators representing 6 countries : Australia curated by Alasdair Foster, China by Huang Yihuang, India by Devika Singh, Japan by Mariko Takeuchi, Korea by Sunhee KIM and UAE by Jassim Al Awadhi.
• Australia
Australia can seem a paradoxical place. It is an island with many types of landscapes – from tropical rainforests to temperate farmlands, but the majority of its 7.5 million square kilometres is hot, dry and inhospitable. It is home to the world’s oldest living cultures, those of the many nations of indigenous peoples. These cultures reach back over 60,000 years, yet today the majority of Australians are immigrants or born of families who arrived but a few generations ago.
This exhibition introduces the work of eight photographers who each touch on an aspect of life in Australia. Divided into four sections, they address variously the Land, the Nation, the Home and the Past. Their work casts interesting perspectives on life in the antipodes which, while they are personal and often idiosyncratic, raise some salient questions about where and how we live.
In each pairing, one body of work is from the 20th century and one from the 21st century. This also highlights some of the shifting concerns, modes and styles of photographers across the decades: from the aesthetic constructions of pictorialism to the formal clarity of modernism and on through the eclectic criticality of postmodernism to the protean, fast-flowing age of the digital.
Alasdair Foster
• China
The Physiognomy of a Surface
Contemporary Chinese Photography through Four Photographers
Since the 1960s, during the heat of the all-consuming political movements, a small number of independent Chinese photographers decided to search for the beauty seen by their own hearts and to continue the tradition of Chinese documentary photography. One of them, She Daike, spent more than thirty years documenting one place and its changes. The iconic Three Gorges on the Yangtze River are both his homeland and his lifetime photographic obsession.
Since the millennium, a younger generation of Chinese photographers began to experiment with other platforms, with the intention to not only express themselves, but to push the limits of photography’s documentary surface. In the wider framework that they constructed, Chang He employs digital technology as a magnifying glass to reveal pressing environmental issues; Li Lang deals the darkest personal loss with the combination of photography and embodied meditation, which is a reminder the continuing influence of Buddhism tradition in contemporary China.
The British-Chinese photographer Yan Wang Preston interrogates one of the greatest Chinese myths, the Mother River. He does so through a strategic mapping methodology, resulting in an epic adventure traversing the entire country while documenting the 6,211km of the Yangtze River.
Figures and landscapes are no more than the surface of things, yet the Arabian proverb says that ‘an idea is the bridge to truth’. This exhibition is expected to give a concise review of the development of Chinese contemporary photography through four individual visions.
Huang Yihuang
• India
India’s exhibition, ‘Clearing a Space’, presents the work of established and emerging artists working in and on India. Taking its title from a book by Amit Chaudhuri, the works have been selected for their focus on personal story telling.
Devika Singh
• Japan
Since a diversity of approaches and subjects is one of the well-known characteristics of Japanese photography, this exhibition tries to show different aspects and contexts of photography. The four masters were chosen for their ongoing influence on photographers who succeeded them. Nakaji Yasui is a pioneering photographer in the age of modernism during the prewar period. Kiyoji Otsuji is known not only for his avant-garde works in postwar Japan, but also for his achievement as an educator. Daido Moriyama’s blurry, grainy and high-contrast snapshots have changed the notion of street photography since the 1960s. The works of Miyako Ishiuchi, one of the pioneering female photographers in the country, sheds light on personal memories which would normally go unnoticed. It is almost impossible to count the number of succeeding photographers who have been inspired and influenced by the independent and original ways these masters had of seeing.
The three emerging photographers stand out by their unique approaches to the medium; Takashi Arai is a unique contemporary daguerreotypist who makes use of the very old photographic technique in our contemporary life; Lieko Shiga is known for her striking pictures based on her personal encounters with a land and its residents; Ryuichi Ishikawa has been spotlighted for his powerful portraits on the streets of Okinawa.
Mariko Takeuchi
• South Korea
This exhibition introduces five iconic Korean photographers whose passionate careers are still unfolding. What they have in common is that they take photos of objects and that each creates a new world by producing a virtual scene through combining images. They approach fundamental questions to social phenomena, their individual areas of interest and the field of art throughout their visual research and attempts.
Yeondoo JUNG creates several different points of contact, reality and virtuality, as he vividly exposes the realistic course of forming a fantasy. His Location series, referring to film sets, show the course of making what is fake into what is real through a single photo. By revealing what is fake as fake in his work, he raises doubts on the truth of everything we see and feel.
Sungpil HAN creates banal or virtual spaces in a city through his Façade Project using a shield temporarily covering a building. His works as such create a different type of fantasy within time and space, the past, the present, real fake.
Changmin LIM creates landscape works amid a conjugated landscape using the flow of videos in motion. His works suggest that time and space approach us in a form where different elements are combined.
WON Seoungwon creates integrated images with stories, using individual images. Through her works, sculpture of images, she intends to reveal our lives, relationships and inner thoughts. Her Character Episode series metaphorically reveal stories on people’s varied characters.
Myoungho LEE represents objects in photography using the canvas, raising questions about the definition of art through Photography – Act Project. While seeking to show the essence of trees in Tree series on canvas, Sea series creates an illusion of transforming a desert into the sea.
• United Arab Emirates
All artists are dreamers. The word ‘dreamer’ may have a negative connotation. Yet these artists have portrayed and depicted their dreams successfully just as our leaders of the UAE have. Without the leaders’ dream we wouldn’t have had this exhibition let alone the environs of this beautiful country.
Jassim al Awadi
FESTIVAL
Dubai Photo Exhibition
18 curators bringing together works from 23 countries
From March 16th to 19th, 2016
Dubai Design District
Ras Al Khor Road
Dubai
United Arab Emirates
http://www.hipa.ae
http://www.worldphoto.org
http://www.dubaidesigndistrict.ae
