From black-and-white to color, from analog to digital, from the mirror-like surface of the daguerreotype in the 1800s to the photoshopped images on our touchscreens today, the way a photograph is exposed is constantly shifting — a reflection of the rapid technological changes we’ve experienced up until now. While today we can all take a photograph in an instant by quickly opening the camera app on our phones, a new wave of photographers is expanding what it means to “create” versus “take” a photograph, opening the medium to a new visual language beyond just pressing the shutter.
Through attending exhibitions, hearing things through the grapevine, or going to the likes of Photofairs Shanghai, we saw the work of nine contemporary Chinese photographers who are creating photographs beyond photography’s standard conventions. They do this by referring to its history, physically re-adapting and reshaping it, and proposing new ways of considering it within the quick pace of our current world.
Can Sun
A bra made of steel wire, burning candles on a Bible, and a broken plate being held together by binder clips are some of the absurd objects found within Can Sun’s photographs. Greatly influenced by Absurdism and Existentialism, Sun uses everyday objects and transforms them into performative images infused with humor and self-irony, referring to them as “instant sculptures” as some of them last only a few hours.
Through the tension he creates with the surreal absurdity of his “instant sculptures” in his photographs, Sun hints at the greater contradictions existing within our everyday life. The binder clips in Untitled (Oct 16, 2020) seem to be barely holding the plate together, reflecting our own ability – or inability – in similarly holding together our fragile emotional states. The tightly interwoven lit cigarettes in Can’t Escape can’t be unwoven, just like how we might sometimes feel as if we’re unable to break away from a vicious cycle. Sun’s photographed objects become a metaphor for the absurd nature of contemporary life and the fragility of the human condition.
Xi Li
Throughout her practice, Suzhou-born New York-based artist Xi Li investigates the lifecycle of images and how they migrate, transform, and decay over time. Li spends time looking through institutional archives, leafing through old magazines, or even finding images without a known source, slowly building a collection of visual references that she then repurposes in her photographic collages.
She layers, obscures, and reconstructs elements like a picture of a wooden cabinet from a page of a 1930s decorative magazine or a floral textile print from the documents of the Met in New York, removing them from their original fixed context and placing them together in the new environment of her photographic theatrical sets. By doing so, she intertwines specific histories and moments in time that were previously fixed on the pages of vintage magazines, blurring the lines between reality and fiction and ultimately revealing the fragility of images themselves.
Yushi Li
London-based photographer Yushi Li finds herself both in front and behind the camera when creating her photographs. In The Feast, inside (2020), she places herself in the center of the frame and looks directly at us, the viewers, in an almost challenging manner, while naked men surround her, passively enjoying themselves in the opulent living room setting. Li is clothed and confrontational when she surrounds herself with naked—mostly Caucasian—men in her photographs, contrasting the stereotyped ways that Chinese women are usually portrayed as exoticized and fetishized objects made for the Western male gaze. By choosing how she portrays herself, she takes control of her own narrative as a Chinese woman.
In her ongoing Paintings, Dreams and Love series, she draws direct reference from Western art history or classical myths, like Titian’s painting The Death of Actaeon or the story of Samson and Delilah from the Bible and portrays herself as the active protagonist while the men take on passive secondary roles. She becomes the active agent within these stories, reversing the power dynamics existing between the dominant man and the submissive woman and projecting the male gaze these paintings and stories were made for onto itself.
Zhang Wenxing
Hangzhou-based artist Zhang Wenxing travels deep into the Earth to take the photographs for her ongoing series Notes of the Hollow. Even though she records the physical details of karst caves with their underground streams, sinkholes, blind valleys, and springs, her photographs can’t be classified as standard landscape pictures or photographs for scientific evidence. The opening within the Eye of the Cavern uncannily resembles an eye staring at the viewer, ominously challenging whoever dares look at it. The darkly lit cave in Film Negative of the Cave #2 seems to be calling us to enter through its obscured door-shaped entrance. The eroded rock formations somewhat resemble human forms and familiar shapes, leaving us with a discomforting and visceral feeling.
Throughout her practice, Zhang explores the greater connections existing between the conscious and the subconscious, the human and the non-human. She takes us beyond the physical and into the ethereal through her photographs, leaving us in an uncomfortable space between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Deep into these caves, Zhang leaves the external ‘real’ world behind and enters the place where our internal consciousness seems to truly live.
Yang Yong
A girl seems to have taken her heels off and is sitting on a sofa surrounded by the dark. She might’ve just come back home from a night out, her expression concerned as she looks at something in her hands hidden by her legs, maybe her phone revealing a discomforting text. Another, with messy hair and wearing a crumpled t-shirt scrunches her face as she looks directly at us from a green-lit room. In Yang Yong’s series On Edge, women are his main subjects. He captures them alone at night as they navigate the alienating sensations they might experience as they live in a big city that has experienced rapid globalization and urbanization like Shenzhen, as that is where Yang is based.
The women Yang portrays seem to be enraptured in their own world, dominated by what goes on within their heads rather than in the surrounding world beyond. Yang captures them awake and alert in this moment of peace and quiet while the multi-million-person city is asleep. While his photographs might be specific to his experience in Shenzhen, Yang documents the universal alienating aspects of living in a big city, anywhere in the world.
Lei Lei
When Nanchang-born artist Lei Lei began his creative practice, he never wanted to be labeled as solely one specific type of artist as he wanted the space and freedom to explore different creative mediums. Today, he still can’t be defined as one specific artist-type as he works across animation, video, illustration, painting, graffiti, installation art, music, VJing, and photography.
In Weekend, a video collage of images taken from old magazines and photo albums, the line between video, animation, and photography seems to transcend as it combines elements from all three forms of creative expression. He sources the visual imagery for his work from a growing collection of images from old books and vintage magazines found in flea markets and second-hand bookshops. A black and white cropped image of a man holding a suitcase might be replicated and repeated in both photograph and video against a flat blue background, reframing it into a new present and more ambiguous context beyond its fixed past.
Lin Zhipeng AKA No.223
No.223 started his photography practice two decades ago when he launched “North Latitude 23” from his home in Guangdong, the blog that made him famous among the Chinese web community. He would publish pictures of his everyday with supporting short texts, documenting his experience living in China during his mid-20s. Capturing intimate close-ups of his friends or quick shots of the everyday objects that surrounded him, many of the pictures delved into the individual and collective struggles of young Chinese people at the time, following the reforms in the country.
Since then, he has continued to capture instances of everyday life that not only resonate with his own generation but also of younger generations, too. Through the high-contrast colours he uses and the high-flash close-ups where his subjects’ identities aren’t explicitly revealed, each of his photographs seem to exist within dream and reality, fantasy and desire, all at the same time. None of his subjects’ identities are explicitly revealed and they seem to be caught in ambiguous yet candid instances, like walking on grass that bubbles, playing rock-paper-scissors with chicken feet, or having a bath with a dove. Each of No.223’s photographs seem to live in the space between the real and the surreal, leading us to project our innermost desires onto them and maybe, providing us a moment of respite from the pressures and expectations of contemporary society.
Gao Yutao
In Shanghai-based artist Gao Yutao’s work, our routines and assumptions are shifted and rearranged, and he leads us to rethink our preconceptions of the past and our everyday present. In his Michelangelo series, Gao warps the marble forms of classical Renaissance sculptures into digital glitches, no longer seen through the pure perfection of the past but rather becoming technologically altered images of our time.
In his new series of work which he began this year titled Object, Gao uses the office scanner tool to scan familiar everyday objects and organic matter and transform them beyond their recognizability. In Falling, what seems to be a guillotine violently coming down is actually the bottom part of Gao’s MacBook, only familiar through the assembly and design origin and serial information imprinted on its rear. In others, like A Nocturnal Cicada Inside the Electric Wire Network, Gao brings into question the relationship between technology and biology as the emerging color streaks are not arbitrary, but rather reveal the shared spectral structure between the nocturnal cicada’s chirps and the accidental glitch noises of the electric wires.
Yang Yongliang
Having studied traditional Chinese painting since childhood, Shanghai-born artist Yang Yongliang’s practice is intricately imbued within China’s charged history and traditions. In his digital landscapes, Yang shapes and adapts the traditional format of the Chinese landscape painting and redefines it for the present, considering it through the lens of the fast-growing and ever-changing urban city such as New York, where he’s currently based.
One day in 2023, while gazing at the layered and intricate architecture of Lower Manhattan from Battery Park, Yang was reminded of the landscapes by Northern Song Dynasty painter Fan Kuan, which led him to begin his series Parallel Metropolis. In the series, Yang captures fragments of New York’s layered concrete and glass architecture and pieces them into digital landscapes that echo the solemn and meditative nature of traditional Chinese landscapes. These collaged photographs become Yang’s way of presenting New York through his deeply rooted traditions as a Chinese artist, transcending all boundaries between time, place, and culture.
All images courtesy of artists’ profiles.
