Wenjun Chen and Yanmei Jiang are an artist couple based in Guangzhou. Their work has consistently focused on the relationships and communications between individuals in the social and cultural environments within which they exist. Their project Me and Me (2015), shortlisted for the Kassel Book Dummy Award in 2016 and exhibited at the Lishui Photography Festival in November 2017 is a delicate, multi-part handmade photobook and photographic installation which includes images, letters, and clips from social media. Compiled between 2007-2014, the photographs give us an insight into the couple’s relationship as they pursue a romantic relationship and eventually marriage.
In their work, we can glimpse at what may be considered less “photographic” moments in the couple’s relationship, such as Yanmei waiting in her wedding underwear before the wedding or Wenjun playing cheerfully with their cat in bed. These moments are captured with spontaneity and intimate composition – often employing a close focus – zooming on the subject as longing eyes may when observing the object of love. Since the project provides two points of view, we witness the same moments narrated by both Wenjun and Yanmei in photographs and letters. Thereby the viewer becomes a voyeur into their private moments with an omnipotent understanding of the narrative. The project contains a unique ensemble of small photobooks, letters and images, bound together in a pale pink, traditional Chinese floral fabric folding box. This work was exhibited in Lishui within the context of a fantastic exhibition of nine handmade photobooks from China and abroad entitled Temperature on Paper curated by Sun Yanchu and Shi Teng.
Native of Hunan Province, Du Bao Ni currently lives and works in Changsha, China. Her featured book project, is in many ways a visual meditation on her relationship to the photographic medium explored across the sheets of a 48-page book. The photobook combines images she has taken of places, people, and a range of meaningful or unimportant moments which have been bound, burned, glued upon and colored in an experiment of personal expression. The book is an evocative storytelling experience, rich with metaphor and ambiguity – a great example of the blossoming handmade photography book culture on the mainland.
In the artist’s own words from the preface: “I always press the shutter when ‘I mirror the world.’ I feel like I’m taking pictures like writing a poem or a fable, and I’m just thinking about the allegory and not the moral… These images are a celebration of joy and sadness, and are a metaphor for confusion. Time and life flow out, and people will lose everything, and everything belongs to the past, to oblivion.And yet photography cannot belong to the past, they can only represent it. The past and memory are often more profound and authentic than the pictures…..My photographs have a meaning that goes beyond what can be seen as a book goes beyond the words.”
Holly Roussell Perret-Gentil
Holly Roussell Perret-Gentil is an independent curator specialised in contemporary Asian art and photography.
