Do you remember your initial experience at making art? What were your motivations?
I remember well, I was 13-14 years old. My godmother’s husband – who was a teacher – once shown me how to develop a photo in a room measuring three square meters. As I was very little my chin barely reached the tub. I remember the white paper blackening, forms appearing, I found it magical.
I used to pick my mother’s negatives from old family albums and to experiment these images in the attic, which we converted into my little laboratory. I liked to distort the negatives, zoom in, crinkle the paper, and make dots with a toothbrush. I practised to create rayograms on which I put objects. In other words, I started photography without taking photographs for I did not have a camera yet.
I did not really get an art education but my mother has always been a big fan of impressionism. The house was filled with all kinds of Van Gogh’s posters, we went to all exhibitions, all these things had a great impact on me. Moreover, as my father was a farmer, the fact to live outdoor, to be in close contact with luminous wheat crops, shining and colourful, like flat areas of colour. Perhaps this is why I like so much Martin Parr’s colours, because they are very vivid, strong and assumed. Of course they are intentionally kitsch even nasty, as he says, so not that poetic as I aspire to. Yet they are really powerful as it is for Van Gogh, they both convey violence through colour.
Your project Subtitles is currently underway; this project examines Chinese banners and their message. Would you mind talking more about it?
There was at first a preliminary phase, between 2008 and 2011, more documentary, like a research. I shot around one hundred photographs, most in Shanghai and some in Beijing. These banners are the same Chinese people see then my friend translates them. The idea came rather stupidly: after few years strolling down the streets in China I realized I was seeing them everyday, they are part of the settings, but I did not understand them because they were addressed to Chinese people not foreigners.
Their forms and violence seduce me: they are huge, with red scripts, contrasted, with large-size typeface very striking. I wanted to understand them so I decided to photograph them. I went there by night and shot them with the flash, following Weegee’s idea to be a stranger, someone infiltrated, like a voyeur looking for things he should not see. I bought a scooter so that to lose myself into Shanghai, after two-three years spent in here I started to know pretty well the city.
After 2011 I stopped during one year because I said to myself that the idea was interesting but the atmosphere too dark and too documentary. Going into the subject in great depth would have meant travelling across China during few years in order to look for different social, economical and cultural contexts, which mean to have different contents so that to make a sort of sociological study. This would have been close to a scientific approach, like Bourdieu’s approach, it would be very interesting but I do not want to do it alone. If this adventure is meant to continue, the best thing would be to federate a network of Chinese photographers, one per city, determine the constraints (shoot by night, using 50 ISO, flash, frames…) and print a book in the end.
In 2012 I continued this series, in Shanghai and Suzhou, but there was a fundamental difference: I realized the first phase was too dark and maybe moralizing, I decided to choose my sentences, to print and to hang by myself the banners. While the first phase shown official banners, the second are unofficial banners. In most cases I took them off and kept them, I did not wanted to attract too much attention, but I left some of them when I found they fit well the setting.
In general I have first the sentence, then I look for the place. From a visual perspective, these two genres of banners appear identical, you cannot guess if you do not speak Chinese; yet even Chinese people find them puzzling. This second phase is still quite confidential for the whole series has never been exhibited yet. I would like to create a certain amount of photographs so that to get a panorama of Chinese culture through the lens of a foreigner from the inside.
You stated in one of your earlier interview that you want to create ‘alternative documentary images’. What do you mean by that?
The series Subtitles would fit within this definition for instance. These photographs are documentary even thought they have been created. They might be considered as photographs of an artistic performance that lasted between 15 seconds and 15 minutes. I guess this series aspires to bring poesy within the public space.
Would you mind telling me more about your series Day Dreamers please?
This series lasted for four or five years. For a while I hesitated to do it throughout Asia. I started it during the ‘Cross years France-China’ launched by Chirac {one of the former French President of the Republic}. At that time, French press demonized China as if it was the big bad wolf everyone should be afraid of. As for me, I noticed several times many Chinese people falling asleep everywhere; I found it rather touching, funny and far from the image the French press was depicting. I wanted to get rid of these clichés through poesy, tenderness and humour. Napoleon’s quote: ‘When China awakes, the world will shake’ made me laugh as well put in that context. Besides the Asian understanding of the functioning of the body impressed me a lot, they seem much more attentive.
You said that globalization had a dramatic impact on your work, what about China?
Rather than China itself I would say Chinese photographers influenced me more. I particularly like Maleonn for instance, Liu Bolin, Chen Wei. When I arrived in China, I realized the photographic legacy was not the same. For me it was based on humanists’ photographers from the post World War II, the Magnum’s School, which is somehow classical and slightly dogmatic. This heritage gave me more constraints compare to what I have known in China because here people do not hesitate to use Photoshop and to transcend reality. China helped me to free myself in some ways.
I remember that an exhibition about contemporary Chinese photography had a great impact on me: it was held at the Tri Postal in Lille {exhibition Zhù Yi, regards sur la Chine d'aujourd'hui in 2008}. There were no documentary photographs, the only ones that were documentary – meaning they recorded reality - corresponded to photographs of artistic performance. So I think the fundamental difference resides here: the relationships with reality and mise en scène. In retrospect I realized that I also like to play with reality and fiction. A photograph by definition is a lie because it is a choice, a tiny frame taken from reality. Off course there are different levels.
According to Henri-Cartier Bresson the ‘decisive instant’ aspires to fix a precise instant, the instantaneous, the intuitive. The best know of your series refers to this concept yet you intentionally uses photomontage. Is this to thumb one’s nose at this old concept or a manner to make it evolve?
This point is linked to what we just talked about. The attempt to move beyond Cartier Bresson’s principles was one of the reasons why I called this series Instants Décisifs. It is a way to pay tribute while jeering at his rigidity and dogmatism at the same time. Cartier Bresson is a master we should respect but he is not the only one. Each of my photographs combines almost 20 photographs at once, they all symbolize one instant décisifs, this is why I used the expression in the plural. I would never have done such a series if I had not been in China because of psychological barriers that photographer such as Maleonn perhaps helped me to surpass, and without any need to meet him. On each photograph, there is an indication of the date and the hour corresponding to the moment the first and the last photographs were taken. Everything is true actually. I wanted to get close to the boundary, a sort of 50/50, it is true and false at the same time.
Moreover after having spent few years in China I felt that Chinese were going to win the Olympics, I mean to win many gold medals, and it was indeed the first time in history that Americans were second. It was a forerunner of a geopolitical change from a global perspective. There no link with sports in my photographs; it is just a metaphor. So I went to Beijing during the Olympics without knowing what I will do, I was yet convinced I had to go there. For me, it embodied a decisive instant in itself; I had to witness this geopolitical reversal. I rented an apartment during three months so that to finish this series.
You are also the co-founder of ‘Blank Shanghai’, a transdisciplinary creative agency composed of several members. You collaborated with them so that to create the clip I like people an artistic video based on your personal photographs. What motivated the addition of other mediums to your work?
I wanted no one can tell how it was done, even in large format. I wanted no mistake regardless the 200 000 000 pixels, I wanted everything to be perfect, to be as illusory as possible. But at the same time I wanted to explain to the audience how it was done, as if it was a pedagogic mission. So I met Nicolas and Thomas - with whom we founded Blank Shanghai – and proposed to them to create a kind of making-off video by using the 7000 images I shot during this summer in Beijing. Because the ten or so images I show are a tiny part of the whole thing and I wanted to utilize the whole content, I did not wanted to let it die. In this project, I was only the artistic director, Thomas and Nicolas did the rest together. The image and the sound have been created simultaneously, which perhaps renders this video very powerful. In the end, I find the video almost more interesting than the photographs.
Can you talk about your relationship with Martin Kemble, the Art Labor Gallery director who supports you.
I was beforehand a visitor to the gallery since it was based in the same street as my former apartment. When I left for Beijing I sent him few ideas, we discussed a little, he liked it and then we started to work together. I did not shop around to find a gallery for I had a lot of prejudices against the art world. However I appreciated Martin’s touch, notably the fact that he was on the margins, I recognized myself in him somehow because he did not corresponded to the clichés I had about gallery owners. Now I would like to continue our collaboration so that to find another gallery abroad for my images will not be seen in the same way.
What do you think about Chinese contemporary photography?
I truly think it is the place to be to create photography, the place the most dynamic, filled with such effervescence, energy, a place where people want to move forward, to reinvent themselves. Regarding the content, as I said earlier, it remains mainly fictional, conceptual, dreamlike, and sensible. It has nothing to do with documentary photography inasmuch as it is a mean to express oneself.
I like the fact they are unscrupulous, they let bygones be bygones, there is a sort of collective stimulation. Chinese people would copy each other and I think it is a good thing. Contrarily in France when someone invents something new he immediately protect it by copyright; so if another person create something similar, the first one would immediately lynch and criticise him. We are all sponges and draw our inspiration from each other. Off course there is a difference between draw inspiration from and plagiarize.
For instance in my series Instants Décisifs I openly refer to Martin Parr. You always need to copy your masters so that to emancipate from them afterwards. This notion is deeply anchored in Chinese culture, a calligrapher would copy over and over again characters until it becomes an art. Capitalism, private and intellectual property tend to constraint this approach. From an artistic perspective, influence is not a bad thing.
What are you future projects?
Subtitles will take me a lot of time. Except this one there are plenty of other projects, even too much. The next one will be a series of portraits of twentieth-century icons, dead or still alive, and seen through their fridge. My aim is to make a sort of still-life / metaphor but thought as a portrait.
More information: www.ericleleu.com