-- Artist statement
The #365PhotoChallenge is a project by Wei Ding from 2019 to 2020, where he created a new image every day for 365 days without stopping.
It was not easy to come up with new ideas every single day throughout the year, but Wei Ding managed to find inspiration from different places of his life.
Early on, Wei Ding focused on his experience as a city dweller, playing with the tension between temptation and toxicity with junk food and cigarettes. He also took visual elements from big brands, mixing them with other elements to create “ad-like” images to explore the feeling of being sieged by ads on a daily basis.
Later on, Wei Ding started to create based on impression from classic films such as Akira, Blue Velvet and American Beauty. The project came to an end right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the period close to the end, Wei Ding made several works from his experience of living through the pandemic and the quarantine by himself in Shanghai.
Throughout the project, Wei Ding experimented with making images with different techniques. He used body paint a lot, often on hands or mouth, in place of regular portraits. He also played with closeups of body parts such as mouth, which he found as a symbol of over-consumption and temptation.
In order to shoot, edit and upload every day, Wei Ding tried to make most of his limited time and space. Most of the images from the project were shot indoor at his “home studio”, a 12 square-meter rental room, also his living space, which can hardly host over three people. But the #365PhotoChallenge empowered Wei Ding in its unique way. From that point on, Wei Ding gained himself more mobility and initiative as a visual artist in the digital age.
Wei Ding 丁惟成 is a Chinese-American photographer currently based in Shanghai. Born in the age of the Internet, Wei taught himself the discipline of photography through YouTube and other online platforms under the belief that artists need to create themselves outside of the current system of Art. Wei has been active in the online community and had initiated and completed an online photography marathon project — 365PhotoChallenge. It is a project where he committed to creating a new photography work every day for 365 days, which became the soil for his own artistic exploration. His photography work has been published as featured stories by Neocha, i-D China, Magazin “Konfuzius Institut”, KEYI Magazine and Radii China. Wei Ding is the 1st place category winner of 2020 Budapest International Foto Awards.
