How do we visually explore a foreign place and culture? How do we integrate the history and our biases, while responding to the experience of being there?
There is a distant land that since my youth has been rooted in my imagination through the tales of others, fascinating in its mystery, daunting from the media profiling, a thick book asking to be read. So there wasn’t a moment of hesitation when I received an invitation to attend the fall 2019 session of the Tao Hua Tan international artist residency in Anhui province of China. Conceived by the visionary collaboration of a businessman, a leading art curator, and a well-known print maker, the program invites top artists from across the world for 3 weeks at the ‘By the Peach Blossom Pool Arts and Holiday Riverside Resort‘. My initial trepidation at being the only photo-based artist among some of the best painters was soon replaced by the excitement of being exposed to the different engagement of this new (to me) medium. It became an adventure into a different way of seeing, a new perspective. Gradually an idea emerged, fueled by an old fascination of mine for the intersection of historically isolated art forms. It is something I had already started with the ‘3 Eyes’ collaboration. Also something I am currently immersed in, with epoxy casts as part of my current project ‘Simulacra’. Can photography and painting (or sculpture) co-exist, and how do they relate to each other? I settled for a double-layer approach. First I created a splash of red using available paint. Once dried, I brought it into the environment, to carry all the symbolism of red and photographed ‘staged’ environments. The final step for the pieces that went into the museum show at the end of our residency was to physically integrate the printed image into stretched canvases, painted red, cut in pieces to conceal and support at the same time.
Red is everywhere in China: in the streets, the clothes, in stores, in the omnipresent flags, etc. It is clearly the national color, embedded in the history, loaded with meanings. It cannot be ignored, both by its presence and its weight.
While there I also had the pleasure of photographing Gordan Novak for a magazine editorial, start new friendships that are slowly blooming into new collaborations, document for the organizers all the art created. I was also invited to stay at the Shanghai studio of LiuJan and welcomed into the houses and studios of foremost Chinese contemporary artists.
Soon after returning from this maelstrom of new ideas and stimuli I went into the sensory deprivation of mandated ‘stay-at-home’ isolation. This somehow returned the experience into the magical, distant, exotic. I hope in time it will eventually prove to be the first chapter of a longer narrative. In the meantime, my profound gratitude goes to Guoping Wei, Liu Jian, and Gordan Novak for the incredible opportunity.
Here are the final pieces, now part of the future ‘World Art Museum’ of Anhui province:
Here the ‘red’ environments’:
Finally, a few portraits of my fellow artists:
