-- Artist statement
"Hujialou is a residential district in east part of Beijing. Centrally located Hujialou is changing rapidly as modern city plan is taking over and the old is seeking to find its place along the new. This change applies not only to the local landscape it has much broader implications that penetrate deep into the social, cultural and historical layer of the area. To distance pictures from the traditional documentary aspect of photography, I use fictive element, the masks of the traditional Beijing opera to transform the residents into fictional characters, allowing us to see deeper, the possibility of addressing views on a broader scale. The momentary photographs record a multilayered reality that expresses structures of power as well as tensions between the different elements in the layered image. The real world and the mythical thus attain an interesting ambiguity."
Saana Wang (born in 1979 Helsinki, Finland) works in photography, moving image and installation. Her work is an explorations of time, space, history and limits of perception. Wang lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. She has an MA degree in Photography from the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto University) and a BA in Arts, Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She started exhibiting internationally in 2004.
