Blogging

After a long waiting, this block will be back to activity.
The main focus has been image art work made in China.
There's an article about Chen Chieh-jen's work that will be posted in an appropriate time.

As images are collected everyday, some issues have been insisting in their priority.
The main focus will be texts concerning new thoughts about Image.
Thank you all for your patience.

Liu Zheng

Born at 1969, Liu Zheng was together with Rong Rong, editor of "New Photo".
This Chinese photographer shows in his works a will to create photo narratives.

One of his most well known works - The Chinese, depicts a sort of documentary style photography.
Some critics found it close to assumed documentary photographers, like Diane Arbus or even Robert Frank (within others).
It's clear in this work that Zheng wants to present the contrasts undergoing on Chinese society - the lower class (like the coal miners shown in the photo, at left) and the new uprising society of business man.
Though, despite the black and white of this work, there's a gray area - the Chinese people which live in he boundaries of social acceptance, namely street performers, travesties, strippers, homeless children, Buddhist monks and mental disabled.
The photos belonging on this series (and the result of several years of work and travel at China Mainland) have a common ground which unites all the characters - Death.
The social differences highlighted on the photos of the living loose all the meaning in the face of a deceased individual - another unifying contrast (presenting groups of living individuals against the death of one).


Soon, Liu Zheng changed his style from the Realistic approach. In a way he distances himself from The Chinese producing a more choreographed and surrealistic body of work.
Zheng acts now as a director for his models in unique scenarios filled with violence, death and nudity.
This attitude also shows an attempt to escape from the accepted photographic style available during Post Cultural Revolution - enhancing the distance from his previous work and at the same time a sort of preparation for next turn on his work.

That turn can be found in his recent work, like four instance the Four Beauties (shown below).

In this series of photographs there's an evocation of past memories. Episodes of Chinese History rewritten by his lens, and where's patent the drama and again violence and sexual desire in the built of China History.


These could also be the words used to describe
another of his works - Revolution.
Here, he reconciles again with his earlier work, but now contrasting the cruel rawness of Reality with the choreographed explicit violence of his new photos.

It's interesting the pursue of women as the main victims of Revolutions wars or meaningless violence.

Currently, his work seems to be start to be also distant from Chinese reality.
Survivors is he name of a new series. Here the violence appears more crude, but without the epic scenery of his previous works.
The photos are simpler, yet intense.
Here the face of Global Death is portrayed in evoking a breakthrough of China as a Global country - the world united by Death (as if it was a bigger scale than the one used from The Chinese).
This openness to the outside could be analyzed as a "breach" in the usual Chinese secrecy, but at a same it's clear in this work the inevitable natural tendency for the Chinese people to become more and more global citizens.



Links: Liu Zheng

Rong Rong

Born in 1968, Rong Rong (born Lii Zhirong) is one of the most important Chinese contemporary photographers.
Originally wanting to be a painter, Rong Rong turned to photography co-founding with Liu Zheng, in 1995, a magazine called "New Photo".

His avant-garde works focus subtly changes happening nowadays, at China.
Though, instead of making a clear political statement, Rong Rong uses his creativity to describe the precarious situation brought by changes of the Chinese quotidian.

In this photo, East Village, Beijing, No. 20 (1994), Rong Rong captured the performance of Zhang Huan, another Chinese artist.
The series of photos about this performace - Twelve Square Meters, makes a clear contrast between lack or minimum sanitation which most of the Chinese population around big cities are subjected and the cleanness of Chinese ponds.

Other works by this artist comprise also urban changes, which are transforming most of Chinese city landscapes and questions how China is facing the Globalized world culture (specially about Western influence on traditional Chinese culture).
His series about ruins, for instance, document a soon to be extincted Beijing where traces of human occupation appear in a demolished scenery.
In the middle of so big destruction, life still inhabits those spaces through abandoned memories left behind.

Rong Rong and Inri

Since 2000 this artist works closely with his wife Inri, who is also an extraordinary artist.
Their common work inspires a kind of new beginning for China's population.
Love, discovery, excess, escape and gender questioning seem to be an intrinsic part of their common body of work.
The photo presented is In Fujisan, Japan, 2001 n3.
This photo belongs to a series of black and white photos. It's patent the complicity between Rong Rong and his wife, Inri - their bodies joyfully playing in an arid landscape. Two free spirits, in a performance, happy to be alive despite the desert they are living into. There's no World around them and there's no need for that World's existence since they are together.


Links: Rong Rong and Inri

Made in China

Made in China, 2007 Pedro Reis

I'll start the first posts taking a closer look to Photography at China.

Since mid-nineties Chinese photographers, as well as filmmakers shared with the rest of the World the transformations undergoing at their country.
The Chinese People become more and more a fact than a mystery.
Nevertheless, yet a lot has to be said and viewed.