This season looks highly promising for Asian photography. Throughout the region, festivals and shows are opening in style. One of the highlights is an exhibition of contemporary Chinese photography in Singapore.
Organized as part of the fourth edition of the Singapore International Photography Festival, Flux Realities: A Showcase of Chinese Contemporary Photography features sixty photographs by seven major Chinese photographers, from the old guard (Wang Qingsong, Yang Yongliang, Zhang Dali) to the new (Wei Bi, Liu Xiaofang, Maleonn, Wang Ningde).
Although their approaches differ, the work of these seven artists examines the nature of both collective and personal memory. China’s tumultuous past and present, from revolution and war to modernization and social upheaval, have led many Chinese artists to explore memories and the marks man has left on history.
This “archeological” approach to memory is especially present in A Second History by Zhang Dali (b. 1963 in Harbin). Begun ten years ago, this series sheds a new light on the more or less well known images of Mao Zedong.
Retouching, mostly digital, is the watchword of Yang Yongliang and Liu Xiaofang (b. 1980 in Datong), whose series blends the aesthetic codes of Chinese landscape paintings with childhood memories.
Equally rooted in memory, Wang Ningde and Maleonn use photography as a personal means of expression.
The exhibition also features work by Wang Qingsong, one of the undisputed masters of contemporary Chinese photography. In general, his photographs portray his more or less painful experience of post-1980s, post-reform China, where everything is going at a thousand miles an hour, and everything seems possible yet uncertain.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Œil
EXHIBITION
Flux Realities : a Showcase of Chinese Contemporary Photography
Until November 2, 2014
ArtScience Museum
10 Bayfront Avenue
018956 Singapore
http://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibitions-and-events/art-and-science-of-photography.html
