Located in the heart of M50, one of Shanghai’s celebrated art districts, the Vanguard Gallery has devoted itself since 2004 to promoting the work of young Asian artists. The exhibition Mountain in Sight, Spirit in Heart (on view until March 23) highlights two of its newest artists: Di Jinjun and Shen Xuezhe. They are the antithesis of our modern hyper-digital world. Working strictly with film, they have created a series of stunning portraits and landscapes that are at once melancholic and disturbing.
At first glance, it would be easy to draw a parallel between the photographs of Shen Xuezhe (b. 1973 in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture) and the ancient Chinese tradition of landscape painting, given their careful compositions and the importance they both attach to the representation of trees, rocks and water. But other elements undo this somewhat idealized vision of Chinese landscape and inherited tradition. Indeed, Shen brings his work up to the present day by subtly including components from contemporary urban life: a barbed wire fence here, powerlines there, and even a large bridge cutting the landscape in two.
The theme of separation is constant in the artist’s work for a reason. Living in this small village on the Sino-Korean border, Shen is cut off from the part of his family that remains in North Korea. These landscapes and rivers now take on a different dimension: they are the walls forbidding communication with the artist’s family, crystallizing his deep sadness.
By contrast with this precision, the landscapes of Di Jinjun (b. 1978 in Shanxi Province, China) are hazy, almost eerie. He achieves these effects through a technique dating from the 19th century: the wet collodion process. Di Jinjun places a high value on the manual aspect of this technique. The act of submerging a photosensitive sheet into a developer, and then trying to master the appearance of the image, represents, for him, the relationship between man and nature. The series Wet Sea attempts to unravel the inherent mystery of nature, but this revelation, he says, is only possible by using a technique from the past.
The exhibition Mountain in sight, Spirit in heart highlights the work of two innovative artists bringing the grace and magic of bygone techniques up to date with the help of contemporary elements
Marine Cabos
Mountain in sight, Spirit in heart
From January 19th to March 23rd, 2013
Vanguard Gallery
Room 204 Building. 4A
50 Moganshan Road
Shanghai, China
+86 21 62993523
