Jimei x Arles 2018 第四届集美·阿尔勒国际摄影季

On November 23, the fourth annual Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival will open its doors in Xiamen, on China’s southeastern coast. Those lucky enough to nab tickets to the event, which closes on January 2nd, will catch sight of work by some of the most innovative artists working in photography today.

A spin-off of the Rencontres d’Arles, the prestigious photo festival held every summer in southern France, Jimei x Arles will bring together work by established international figures and up-and-coming artists in China. Inspiration for the event came from Chinese photographer RongRong, one of the founders of the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre—the first museum of its kind in China—and Sam Stourdzé, director of the Arles festival.

Each year the festival gives a Discovery Award to an emerging Chinese photographer. This year’s ten finalists—Shen Wei, Shao Ruilu, Su Jiehao, Pixy Liao, Coca Dai, Yang Wenbin, Lau Wai, Hu Wei, Lei Lei, and Wong Wingsang—show intensely personal work that spans the breadth of the medium. Neocha is proud to showcase the work of these photographers.

Click on the arrows to see more of each artist’s work.

Shen Wei‘s photos have a deceptive stillness, like a muscle at rest. An image of the artist pausing as he descends into a pool is permeated with an eerie tension, while a photo of newly opened cherry buds seem to leap out of the frame. Two close-up self-portraits—one with eyes open, one with eyes closed—cloak his features in darkness, hiding as much as they reveal. Shen’s careful manipulation of light and color imbue static images with dynamic strength.

Shao Ruilu’s photos are visual riddles whose answers lie just beyond our reach. Perhaps the coins in various currencies suspended in mid-air offer a commentary on international finance or economic uncertainty. Perhaps the two still lifes, composed like paintings by Zurbarán, are a gloomy meditation on mortality: between one frame and the next, the peaches have rotted, the ash pile has grown, the newspaper’s been replaced. With her unusual subject matter, Shao raises questions that linger long in your mind.

At first glance, Su Jiehao‘s photographs look like pure compositions of color and form—you could be forgiven for mistaking them for abstract paintings. Only upon closer examination do they come into focus as ordinary scenes: a ruler, a rainbow, a rooftop covered in snow. The final three images—stills from his video The Storm in the Morning—are less abstract but no less enigmatic. With his stunning sense of composition, Su creates images with an arresting beauty.

For the past eleven years, Pixy Liao has been documenting her life with her boyfriend Moro in the photo series Experimental Relationship. Often she places him in submissive positions, upending the traditional gender roles in which she was brought up. In these images, Liao, previously the subject of a Neocha profile, examines intimacy with a playful eroticism.

Shot over a period of seven years, Coca Dai‘s series Judy Zhu 2008-2015 chronicles the life of his girlfriend (now wife) Judy through pregnancy and motherhood. His images have an unrehearsed quality that only film can provide, and taken together, they offer a candid, multi-faceted portrait of one woman in contemporary China.

While other artists here explore love and relationships, Yang Wenbin shows the technology involved in solitary expressions of desire. The photos in his series Euphoric Mirror are utterly without eroticism: in one, vibrators are presented as simple industrial products, assembled on production lines in factories; in another, a computer mouse in a crotch hints at the dissatisfactions of internet stimulation. Yang’s offers an unsentimental view of sexuality in the digital age.

In her series Memories of the Future, Hong Kong artist Lau Wai takes old photos and film stills of her hometown and adds her own cyberpunk touches. The effect is playful but hints at a more serious purpose: is she suggesting that the city’s history, as documented in photos from the last century, is as fake and retouched as her own images? Or is she hinting that Hong Kong’s future won’t be so different from its past? Lau’s work offers an ambiguous meditation on fantasy and time.

Hu Wei explores the commemoration of the past in his unconventional series Proposal for Public Assembly / Encounter. A native of Dalian, he presents photos and souvenirs of the monument built in 1995 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the city’s liberation from Japanese occupiers. By using found images nearly as old as he is, Hu challenges the very notion of what constitutes photography. And when the past can’t be openly discussed, he perhaps offers an oblique commentary on which histories are remembered and which are passed over in silence.

Like many of the other Discovery Award finalists, Lei Lei uses digitally altered images to test the boundaries of photography. His 1700 Poses of Human Gesture shows the same girl sitting in countless different positions, while other images of his shown here present small variations in a violinist’s pose. Carefully manipulated to look old, Lei’s photos explore the ability of photography to capture the reality and the past from more than one perspective.

Reflection and repetition underpin the work of Wong Wingsang. Polaroid head shots, samples of leaves, a sunset framed through reflections in a window: in each case, Wong draws our attention to tiny differences in nearly identical images. Conversely, his final photo included here—a triptych consisting of a house cat, cruise ships, and a solid black square—seems to dare us to find a common thread among seemingly unrelated images.

Website: jimeiarles.com
Facebook: ~/jimeiarlesphoto
Instagram: @jimei_arles

Contributor: Allen Young