Each year, ten talents of Chinese photography are selected by five curators. The winner of the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award is awarded a 200,000 RMB prize and an exhibition in the following year’s edition of Rencontres d’Arles. Amongst them is Fan Xi.
In this exhibition, ‘Living Room’, Fan Xi created an abstract set and placed blurred imagery in it. The abstraction and blur here point to the paradox of photography as a real medium: movement and stillness, reality and fiction, privacy and publicness. The clock, the floor, the plants, and the woman's silhouette in the space seem to imply that we have entered a living space that exudes a familiar scent, but given the artist’s ingenious concealment, we cannot identify any exact details. Our memory has failed here, as we have always maintained a sense of alienation under our familiar emotions. The artist invites us to enter, but turns the entrant into a strange intruder.
