-- Artist statement
As Jean mentioned, ‘wound’, in some circumstance, is more like a hidden and moaning soul. What I have been concentrate on are those ‘wounds’ and ‘sorrows’ growing with teenagers, especially with adolescents who doubt themselves, query about sexuality, or build their identities through rebellious behaviors. While I am seeking a self-reflection in my tentative work, I attempt to penetrate a deeper layer of people's psychic world, or from another perspective, mine.
While I am facing others, I am gazing at myself by the mirror of the camera, gazing at those wounds on my mind. In my work ‘Could Spring Feel Ache’, I am trying to construct a vague self-portrait by facing the vulnerability of others juxtaposed with performances and staged scenes. What attracts me the most is always the fragile moment of a boy in his adolescent period, the transforming moment could be vulnerable or sentimental, like petals lying down on the road after a breeze.
By picturing and creating ‘wounds’ in color darkroom, I am trying to fictionalize the ‘face-to-face’ moment collaged by those portraits with the projection of myself. As John Szarkowski once mentioned in the article called Mirrors and windows, since photography was invented, it was divided into straight and synthetic photography. However, in my works, I am pondering about blurring the line between objectivity and fiction. What I believe is, reality, could never be what you have observed or heard, but what an individual believes.
Bowei Yang 杨博炜, who was born 1994 in Hangzhou of China, is a photographer based in Beijing and London. By mainly focusing on photographing the Chinese teenage queer group, his work documents the contemporary teenage queers living in China combined with staged memories of his childhood, and he also tries to query the self-identity in awareness of diverse collective identifications and group traumas. His works are mostly inspired by Chinese philosophy, literatures, and are constructed to ponder about the reality of document through the photographic media.
He received his bachelor degree in Photography from Beijing Film Academy in 2017 and entered the Royal College of Art in London in 2019 to continue his pursuit in photography. He is a finalist of the Lensculture Emerging Talents (2019), a finalist of Gomma Grand(2019) and a finalist of AINT-BAD first book award (2019). He had exhibited his work in China, France, Japan, the UK, and other countries. His work was also published by publishers like Lens Culture, Aint-bad Magzine, IGNANT Magzine, China Daily, and others.
