Venue: Granary, Huang Chuan Bei Lu n° 158 (连州市湟川北路158号)Dates: November 30, 2019 – January 03 2019
We’re used to thinking of Chinese cities as more and more developed, in the context of national growth, but China’s northeast is an exception. Bordering Russia and North Korea, the region, with ample natural resources, was the first to develop heavy industries in the 1960s and prospered for decades. There were 15 million immigrants moving to northeastern China under Mao.
But since the 2000s, the northeast has become China's most recessionary land as resources dwindled and other regions caught up. Dying industries and lack of opportunities are forcing people out of their home and to other parts of China in pursuit of work.
My project, “Freezing Land”, aims to explore descendants of immigrants living in the northeast. Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping started a campaign called the “Chinese Dream”. But what does this mean for the the once prosperous land? What’s the story of today’s northeast China?
It is difficult to encounter subjects on the street in an environment of minus 30 degrees centigrade. Therefore, I used social video app “Kuai shou” looking for young people who were willing to share their stories. The young people I met experience a sense of uncertainty. They face a choice: to leave for challenges in bigger cities, or stay behind and embrace their fate. Their voices are sparsely heard in Chinese media or through other mediums. Few people know about their stories, colorful, yet full of loneliness.
I also photographed the derelict landscape – places that were once lively but now forgotten. During this process, the emotion expressed by these young people – a mixed sense of hesitation, loneliness, and hope – resonated with me.
Ronghui Chen is a Chinese photographer and storyteller based in Hangzhou and New haven, whose work focuses on China’s urbanization. Known for his interest in the issues arising from the position of the individual within the urbanization and industrialization of China, Chen published his first collection of photographs named Chen Ronghui, now part of China’s Contemporary Photography Catalog. He was won several awards including a World Press Photo; Three Shadows Photography Award & AlPA special prize and Hou Dengke Documentary Photography Award. Now he is a graduate student at Yale School of Art.
Venue: Lianzhou Museum of Photography, 120 Zhongshan South Road (连州市中山南路120号)Dates: November 29, 2019 – April 05, 2020
Many of Zhang Xiao’s early works were grand narrative projects inspired by geography. He recorded mundane life through his snapshots. His images were endowed with a sense of surrealism because of the absurdity generated in the rapidly developing China. As in They and Coastline, Zhang Xiao captured the subtle relationship between social reality and the state of individuals under the historical context.
In the following years, Zhang Xiao shifted his focus to the hometown, concentrated on the specific region and people related to his personal experience, and completed works like Shift, Elder Sister, and Sweet Love. Through these works, he explored the complexity of China’s rural society across various dimensions and applied different medium beyond photography with the creative process.
In 1871, American missionary John Livingston Nevius and his wife brought the western apple seedlings collected from the United States and Europe to Yantai and planted them in the southeast foothills of Yuhuangding Mountain, named after Guangxing Orchard. A new era of apple cultivation in China started. As the main industry in Zhang Xiao’s hometown, apples are cultivated in every family, and most people’s life revolves around apples. In this exhibition, Zhang Xiao continues to meditate on the experience and reality of his hometown Yantai. He intertwines the complicated treads through apple, a specific object closely related to the local people, and presents the rural status quo in China under the background of apple industrialization.
Zhang Xiao, born in 1981 in Yantai City, currently lives and works in Chengdu City, Sichuan province, China. Zhang Xiao graduated from the Department of Architecture and Design at Yantai University in 2005. He was a photojournalist for Chongqing Morning Post. Zhang won the Three Shadows Photography Award in 2010 with Theyseries. He Also received the second Hou Dengke Documentary Photography Award in 2009. The Photography Talent Award (France) in 2010 and the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie in 2011 with his Coastlineseries.
“Land of Ibeji” is a collaborative photographic project discovering the mythology of twinhood in Nigeria. In West Africa and specifically Yoruba-land (Nigeria’s South West) the rate of twin births in West Africa is about four times higher than in the rest of the world. “Ibeji” meaning “double birth” and “the inseparable two” in Yoruba stands for the ultimate harmony between two people.
Through a visual narrative and an aesthetic language that is meant to reflect and empower the Yoruba culture that celebrates twins, the two photographers extend their gaze beyond appearance -with symmetry and resemblance as tools to open the eyes to the twin as a mythological figure and a powerful metaphor: for the duality within a human being and the duality we experience in the world that surrounds us.
Communities have developed cultural practices in response to this high twin birth rate that varies from veneration to demonization. In some areas, shrines are built to worship the spirit of the twin and celebrations are held in their honor. In others, twins are vilified and persecuted for their perceived role in bringing bad luck in particular to rural communities.
In Yoruba beliefs, each human has a spiritual counterpart, an unborn spirit double. In the case of twins, the spiritual double has been born on earth. The friction, between communities celebrating twins and rejecting them, lies in the perception of the twin as an extremely powerful spirit. Some see it as a threat and as something that cannot remain on earth and has to be sent back to the heavens where it normally resides.
To highlight the “magical” and “supernatural”, to visualize that what cannot be seen; two color filters were used in certain pictures, amplifying the duality of two photographers, two individuals, two identities; two perceptions colored differently. Colors symbolizing contradictory beliefs: purple for the spiritual and heavenly and red for the earthly, danger. Layers of portraiture, double exposure, landscape and still life come together as visual narrative translating the mythology of twin hood. The photographers are using various genres with duality as a key theme: the metaphor and the literal, the visible and the invisible, the material and the spiritual.
Bénédicte Kurzen’s (France) photographic career began when she moved to Israel in 2003, covering hard news as a freelancer in the Gaza Strip, Iraq, and Lebanon. In 2004, her photography developed from hard news to a more documentary style with her work on the lives of volunteer suicide bombers and widows in the Gaza Strip. Bénédicte contributed with this work to the “Violence Against Women” group project, in collaboration with Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Bénédicte holds a master’s degree in Contemporary History from the Sorbonne, Paris. She wrote her final essay about the “myth of the war photographer”, which inspired her to become a visual storyteller herself. For the past ten years, Bénédicte has been covering conflicts and socio-economical changes in Africa. In South Africa, where she was based, she explored some of the deepest social challenges of the post-apartheid society producing “Next of Kin”, “The Boers Last Stand” and “Amaqabane”, on the life of former anti-apartheid combatants. The latest was produced for prestigious World Press Joop Swart Masterclass 2008. In 2011, she received a grant from the Pulitzer Center, which allowed her to produce a body of work on Nigeria, “A Nation Lost to Gods”. Her work has been screened and exhibited at Visa pour l’Image and was nominated for the Visa d’Or in 2012. After becoming a NOOR full member in 2012, she decided to move to Lagos, from where she could pursue her coverage of Africa, with a focus on Nigeria. This resulted in 2015 in the exhibition “Shine Ur Eye” with Robin Maddock and Cristina de Middel, which traveled from Photo London to Lagos Photo Festival and more places.
Sanne De Wilde (Belgium, 1987) in her photography explores the role genetics play in people’s lives and how this shapes and affects communities. Picturing people suffering from a condition making them vulnerable in the eye of society. She graduated with a Master in the Fine Arts at KASK in Ghent (BE) with great honors in 2012. Her photo series ‘The Dwarf Empire’ was rewarded with the Photo Academy Award 2012 as well as the International Photography Award Emergentes DST in 2013. Her series ‘Snow White’ was awarded 16ème Prix National Photographie Ouverte and NuWork Award for Photographic Excellence. She was awarded the Nikon Press Award in 2014 and 2016 for the most promising young photographer. The British Journal of Photography selected De Wilde as one of ‘the best emerging talents from around the world’ in 2014 and recently received the Firecracker Grant 2016, PHmuseum Women’s Grant and de Zilveren Camera award for ‘The Island of the Colorblind’. She has been internationally published (Guardian, New Yorker, Le Monde, CNN, Vogue) and exhibited (Voies OFF, Tribeca Film Festival, Circulations, Lagos Photo, Lodz Fotofestiwal, IDFA, STAM, and EYE). Since 2013, De Wilde works with the Dutch newspaper and magazine De Volkskrant, in Amsterdam the Netherlands and joined NOOR as a nominee in 2017.
More information:LIANZHOU FOTO FESTIVALA Chance for the UnpredictableNovember 30, 2019 - January, 3 2019www.lianzhoufoto.com
LIANZHOU MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY WINTER EXHIBITIONS November 30, 2019 - April 5, 2020Lianzhou Museum of Photography, 120 Zhongshan South Road, Lianzhou, Guangdongwww.lmop.org.cn/en
