Agnès de Gouvion Saint-Cyr wanted to share with us her “Coup de coeur” for Lu Nan. Here is her text: Festivals have a particularity in that they show you things you’ve been preparing yourself to see for many months, and then suddenly, the magic happens, as well as the surprise.
It is firstly the small schoolchildren of Mohammad Golchin who bring us in their youth, in the softness of the pastel tones and the harsh Iranian winter, and then, work slowly maturing, the daily life of the Tibetan peasants, as they are presented with great conviction and just as much modesty by the Chinese photographer Lu Nan.
I had seen the first fruits during a projection, about 5 years ago at the Festival of Llanzhou, while he declared being worried about the inexorable disappearance of the traditional Chinese ways of life. He offered to us in Perpignan a rigorous work not only on the surface but also more profound, a page of eternity, a book of wonders that the talent of Abax restored in all of its delicacy.
The notes slightly syncopated of Nyebe Nilam by Yungchen Lhamo chant the soft, long and laborious family procession of peasant Tibetans, wearing tools on their shoulders during their difficult ascension to the mountains, on rocky and steep paths that bring them to their lands.
From then on, the field works are shown with precision and an incredible visual purity: fields with primitive carts drawing the furrows of heavy land, the woman on the left, the man on the right, also stressing the importance of family, a pedestal of the Chinese society, harvests that bring together adults and children in ancient gestures before resting, that brings the bodies together. Then we slip into the privacy of these families, where the treatment in black and white increases the feeling of eternity that is released from these scenes treated in a pictorial way: the mother that feeds at the same time her child and a young lamb, the young man who, in a tender gesture, caresses the weather-beaten face of the grandmother, the teenager who is transformed by the flour into a “Lunar Pierrot”.
Concerning the final gallery of portraits, it seems reminiscent of works by Penn, when, inspired by the empathy he felt for his Latin American model, he highlighted not only fragility but also dignity.
In short, Lu Nan tells a simple story with an incredible talent.
Agnès de Gouvion Saint-Cyr
