It opened on 9 April at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Caochangdi, Beijing, and will continue until 3 June 2016.
It’s an impressive show, as usual, and presented to a high level under curator Chen Shen, it deserves to be widely seen. Internationally, not just throughout China, because it is hard to imagine seeing a better range of work to reflect what is happening in Chinese photography today. Or, to be more precise, to reflect what Chinese photographers are doing in and out of China, because several of the exhibitors actually live outside mainland China.
The winner of the 2016 Shiseido Prize, Yan Wang Preston, for example, has worked and studied in England since 2005. Her striking ‘Mother River’ (the Yangtse) project is being realised as a PhD project at Plymouth University in south west England. Nine of the 25 finalists have studied outside of China (France, Germany, the UK and US.) Another studied and lives in Taipei, and one lives in the U.S.
Only 25 artists were chosen from 271 candidates, so the standard of work is very high and richly diverse. The work of many of the candidates who missed out must have also been of a high quality, so the judges, “after intense deliberation” certainly had their work cut out.
The 2016 Award finalists were Chen Wenjun & Jiang Yanmei, Dong Yuxiang, Gao Lei, Gao Yutao, Guo Guozhu, Guo Yilin, Huang Yang, Huang Zhenqiang (Dennis Wong), Huang Zhenwei, Huang Zhenqiang, Jiang Sheng & Xu Xiaodong & Xie Shaojie, Leong Chong Lao, Lam Pok Yin Jeff & Chong Ng, Liu Shuwei, Luo Zhizhong, Pu Yun, Qian Ruya, Wang Jiping, Wang Lei, Wang Yan [Preston], Xin Hong’an, Yang Wenbin, Ying Chaoxu, Zeng Rui, Zhi Leiying, Zhu Liyue.
This year, the international jury consisted of Quentin Bajac, Chief Curator of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Satoshi Machiguchi, Director and Designer of MATCH, Tokyo; RongRong, Founder and Director of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing; Philip Tinari, Director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing; and Wu Hung, Professor, and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, Illinois.
Their chosen 2016 Three Shadows Photography Award winners, Lam Pok Yin Jeff & Chong Ng (aka Lin Boyan & Huang Chengcong) – shared what is considered China’s premier photography prize of RMB 80,000 (around US $12,300), for their series, ‘The Untimely Apparatus of Two Amateur Photographers’. And the 2016 Shisheido Photographer Prize awarded toYan Wang Preston for her ‘Mother River’ series was RMB 20,000 (just over US $3000).
Immeasurable. The 2016 Three Shadows Photography Award Exhibition book is a handsome and useful book available for RMB 78 (about $US12.00). At 180 pages, in their 20x20cm series format, it illustrates roughly half of the works in the exhibiton. It includes impressions by Philip Tinari and Satoshi Machiguchi, from the all-male jury, as well as an introduction. These, as are the brief biographies and statements of intention, along with the juror’s biographies, are all in English as well as Chinese. Which is another compelling reason why their exhibitions and books should be toured.
Contact details: Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Caochangdi 155A, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015, P.R. China. Email: [email protected]
International Jury Talk Series
A series of 40-minute talks preceded the 3pm opening of the Award exhibition. The talks took place in the 3+ Gallery, with over 100 people in attendance, surrounded by RongRong and Inri’s large prints relating to the construction of Three Shadows art centre.
Keiko Toyoda, Curator of Japan’s Shiseido’s Corporate Culture Department illustrated her company’s longstanding involvement in promoting the arts. They started an art gallery along with the cosmetics empire in Tokyo in 1928. Shiseido, she said, considers making cosmetics as an art, and she showed a slide of their founding director with his camera. They have presented photography from numerous countries and see the promotion of art as part of the “virtuous cycle” that is an essental aspect of their company’s culture, she said.
Quentin Bajac, Chief Curator of Photography at MoMA in New York, spoke about photography at the Museum today, briefly touching on its history since 1937, and showing an impression of the distictly phallic building extension planned for 2020. He showed images of different exhibition designs, mentioning the increase in multi-media presentations, and the Museum’s broadening international collecting and exhibiting policy. Sculpure is often being included with the photograph displays, along with film and video, he indicated. And Chinese photography was not being ignored.
Bajac was followed by Satoshi Machiguchi, Art Director and Designer of MATCH and Company, Tokyo. An outstanding designer, judged by the books he has done for Three Shadows, he spoke, without illustrations, in Japanese, which was translated into Chinese but not English. I enjoyed watching his flamboyant figure but don’t know what he said, or how many in the growing audience found it relevant to their interests?
The final speaker, Professor Wu Hung, from the University of Chicago is an authority on the history of photography in China who I particularly wanted to hear. He is an animated speaker, but did not speak in English, His bilingual digital slides, however, were well annotated, so it was not so difficult to follow his main argument about how the inscriptions in early Chinese portraits added vital ingredient of subjectivity, which with commissioned portraits, made the images near self-portraits even though the sitter was not the actual photographer. His argument centred on significant portraits of Wang Yi’an who arranged to have himself photographed before and after to commemorate the cutting of his queue (pigtail) in 1912 to signify the toppling of the Qing Dynasty and foundation of modern China. And he compared the use of mirrors to show front and back views (not that uncommon) with “similar” images by Lady Harwarden, and Erb Bunnag whose work I did not know.
Three Shadows ‘Chinese Photobook Collection’ and revamped +3 Gallery and bookshop revamp
Saturday 9 April was also the debut for Three Shadows’Chinese Photobook Collection. In addition to the books, which included platinum prints editions, a special exhibtion, Luo Bonian & Yang Fudong was opened on the same day in a revamped +3 Gallery space. What was the bookshop and small cafe is now being used solely to promote and sell limited edition artists’s books, Three Shadows own publications, and photographs. Their bookshop has been relocated to their new Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Xiamen, Rong Rong’s home town in Fujian Province, where they have also established an annual festival.
Long caption for Luo Bonian image closeup:
Large new print of work by Luo Bonian, 1930-1940 from exhibition at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, April 2016. (For some inexplicable reason these enlarged versions of Bonian’s work were not spotted to remove dust marks and abrasions, as they were for the smaller portfolio set.)
EXHIBITION
Immeasurable
From April 9th to June 3rd, 2016
Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Caochangdi 155A, Chaoyang District
Beijing 100015
P.R. China
[email protected]
http://threeshadows.cn
