Photography Project

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Gillian Wearing at WHITECHAPLE GALLERY

The films and photographs of British artist Gillian Wearing explore our public personas and private lives. This Turner Prize winner’s remarkable works draw on fly-on-the-wall documentaries, reality TV and the techniques of theatre, to explore how we present ourselves to the world.  Wearing’s portraits and mini-dramas reveal a paradox, given the chance to dress up, put on a mask or act out a role, the liberation of anonymity allows us to be more truly ourselves.

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/gillian-wearing

Research on the Work of John Stezaker

Today I saw the exhibition in Saatchi Gallery – Out of Focus: Photography and I’m really interested the work of British artist John Stezaker.

He is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty.

Stezaker’s recent key theoretical research interests are in the found image, collage, and collecting. Additionally, he has recently been exploring more particular issues relating to the aesthetics of symmetry and the history of aerial imagery.

To some extent, the concept of his is similar with my recent photography project, but by different way to give the original photographs new meanings.  Unlike Stezaker, his work is combined two pictures to create a new picture, my work is combined two different mediums – picture and oil painting, opening up new characters, relationships and meanings.  What’s more, I think, probably his work more relates to the old time but mine is concentrated to different uncertain possibilities of the future.   But the same thing of us is that we try to intrude the photograph to produce new meaning by different ways.  Just as he mentioned, ‘You can only get a feeling of the inviolable purity and sanctity of the emulsion of a photograph by violating it.’

Zoe Leonard：Observation Point at CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE

American artist Zoe Leonard harnesses a natural phenomenon to think about ways of looking, recording and experiencing time and space.  Across all the galleries this major exhibition engages 3 distinct forms of photography and transforms one of the spaces into a camera obscura.  Daylight filters in through a lens, projecting an image of the world outside onto the floor, walls and ceiling.  This work invites comparisons with film and video as the light source changes throughout the day, giving rise to a continually shifting, immersive and cinematic event.

Another part of the exhibition is a series of photographs taken directly of the sun, challenging the possibilities of photographic representation.  An installation of found postcards of Niagara Fall continues Leonard's practice of attending to the world around her as a source of material, reframing or representing already existing images so as to refresh our own act of looking.  Together, the works ask us to question photographic seeing and how we relate to the mediated image.

Like the work of Leonard, my recent project is exploring the interesting and challenging way of looking, but rather than recording the past time, I try to add another medium - oil painting to intrude the photography, thus making original photographs produce different possibilities of meaning by viewers' curiosity.

http://www.camdenartscentre.org/exhibitions/?id=101276

Photography Project

Photography Project

 I'm little confused about the form of oil painting - the color should be inside of the photography or from outside to inside?

Sigune thought all the painting should be in the photography.

But Silke totally didn't agree with the viewpoint of Sigune,  she preferred this one which I did last week.  Maybe I should do more experiments to rethink the relationship among the photography, oil painting and the background white paper, thus achieving the concept of intruding.

Silke thought the photography should not always in the centre of the background and suggested me to try something like this.  Also, she suggested me to print photography in different papers, the effect would be totally different.

Both of Sigune and Silke suggested me to try some big ones.  I do agree with them and I'll try that after I find proper papers or canvas.

Lecture: Tim Flach at LCC

Tim Flach produces highly conceptual images of animals that have created international recognition and have inspired discussion alongside the emerging philosophies of humanism.

I'm really interested in the work "More than Human".  He makes some of the most stunning portraits I’ve ever seen. They are imbued with subtlety, grace and an amazing sense of humanity, despite the fact that humans very rarely appear in them. Tim Flach photgraphs animals; from horses and dogs to pigs and bats, to several creatures that I don’t even recognize, and he’s simply amazing. The portraits are not elaborate, nor are they man handled into oblivion in post. They are, instead, simple photographs (okay, maybe not so simple) that attempt to show the viewer the essence of his subject, the soul, if you will. 

Through Tim’s unique vision and ability to challenge the viewer, he has created a series of images which encompass not only his personal beliefs, but the concepts common in modern and historical religious and cultural symbolism, the human obsession with ‘cuteness’, cross-breeding, the blurred line between human and animal genetic modification, conservation, morphology and plasticity. Tim brings the viewer into an unnatural proximity to his subjects, encouraging discussion on the human-animal boundary and attitudes towards non-human animals and the changing relationships, both literally and allegorically, between man and animal.

http://www.timflach.com/