Her name is Qiwen Deng, a curator and art critic based in Paris, Shenzhen, and Shanghai.
She has offered us a photographic map of Shanghai.
Here it is with her text. – JJN
I pay close attention to contemporary forms of visual creation in East Asia, as well as the practices of Asian artists in Europe. With the mil.lieux collective, I explore the multiple narratives and interlacings between image, memory, and territory.
Continuity is the theme of this special edition, dedicated to Shanghai, a city awakened by images this May.
The seven articles that comprise it navigate between institutions and independent spaces, tracing more than a century of photography history in Shanghai, while highlighting emerging artists noted at PHOTOFAIRS. It features both collective creations from self-organized communities and experiments conducted in the field of independent publishing.
In this diversity of practices, the image appears both as a medium for documenting urban spaces and narratives, and as a vector of sensitive, individual, and situated experiences. A language in perpetual evolution, photography produced, deconstructed, reinvented sketches our imaginations and our belonging to the city.
This edition seeks to create a dynamic map of contemporary photography in Shanghai. It reveals a rich, shifting, and vibrant artistic landscape, reflecting a city traversed by intersecting temporalities and plural imaginations.
Qiwen Deng
