The 50th edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles started on 1st July 2019. Despite the exceptional heatwave that has been striking France for the past few weeks, the Rencontres d’Arles again amaze with its atypical exhibitions and its loyal audience coming form different corners of the world.
This year, photographers from China and Hong Kong had the opportunity to showcase their works, playing around the rough and vast venues scattered across Arles, once a mighty Roman metropolis located in South-eastern France and classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage of Humanity site.
Pixy Liao: Experimental RelationshipWinner of the 2018 Jimei x Arles – Madame Figaro Women Photographers AwardVenue: Croisière, 65 boulevard Émile Combes, 13200 ArlesDate: Until 22 September, 2019
Pixy Liao is exemplary of a new generation of artists experimenting with the possibilities of portraiture and photography. Her ongoing long-term project Experimental Relationship began in 2007. The works, depicting modern partnership, emerge from her own personal experience and intimate space, yet take into account socio-cultural pressures, issues of nationality in a globalized world and the dynamics of gender roles, significant both within the Chinese context and internationally.
In this work, she stages photographs with her Japanese boyfriend, Moro, to explore how national culture influences and dictates interactions in a romantic relationship. In her photographs, Liao often portrays herself in a dominant role, while her boyfriend assumes positions of submission. She credits Moro, five years her junior, as inspiration for this ongoing series, explaining, “Moro made me realize that heterosexual relationships do not need to be standardized. The purpose of this experiment is to break the inherent relationship model and reach a new equilibrium.” Liao structures her images to appear often above her boyfriend, looking down on him from above, or fully clothed while he is naked. These subtle stagings intelligently reverse “expected” gender roles in the image.
This work forces the viewer to question his/her gaze and to take part in the couple’s performance which seems to continue long after the photograph is taken and hung on the wall. Each scene, staged meticulously to reference normative gestures from visual culture or socio-cultural tendencies, becomes active when we, the viewers, interact with it— imbuing it with our individual, private, cultural and gender bias.
Kurt Tong: Combing for Ice and JadeVenue: Ground Control, 3 Rue Jean Gorodiche, 13200 ArlesDate: Until 22 September, 2019
At the end of the 19th century, thanks to the silk trade, numerous women in Southern China became financially independent. Many would wear their hair in a long braid to symbolize their autonomy until their wedding. As Imperial China began to crumble and instability spread, some women took the initiative of adopting independence permanently as Comb Sisters. The Comb Up ceremony involved bathing with mulberry leaves as a fellow Sister braided their hair. They took a vow of chastity, declaring themselves free of obligations towards their parents, and would henceforth wear their hair in a long braid and dress in a light-coloured tunic and dark trousers.
Choosing to live a life independent of men was not without its drawbacks. Comb Sisters were not allowed to return home to die in their old age, so many sisterhood homes sprang up where they looked after each other, often considered Sisters for life. After the fall of the Empire, in the early 20th century, the silk trade was in great decline, and most of the Comb Sisters were out of work. Many travelled across Southeast Asia to work as nannies and domestic help.
This project is a love letter to my nanny, 87-year-old Mak, who worked for my family for nearly forty years. Denied opportunities due to her gender, she became the main caregiver to her siblings at the age of 8. In her early twenties, not wanting to be forced into an arranged marriage, she “combed up” and left for Hong Kong.
She would work for only two families for the next fifty-five years. Over that time, she kept her family alive through the great famine in 1950s, educated her nephews, built houses for them and supported their businesses. Yet, through all this, she has retained a very simple lifestyle.
Starting from the mere eight photographs Mak had of herself, the multimedia project is an exploration of her extraordinary life, working closely with her over a period of nearly seven years. Her story is slowly revealed through a combination of my own family archive, found photographs from her extended families, new photographs, Chinese ink works and women’s magazines from China spanning six decades.
Lei Lei: Romance in Lushan CinemaVenue: Atelier des Forges, Parc des Ateliers, 33 avenue Victor Hugo, 13200 ArlesDate: Until 22 September, 2019
This project grew out of an old photograph of the artist at Lushan Mountain in 1988. There’s nothing of the real Lushan in the photograph taken in a photo studio. Threeyear-old Lei Lei and his mother are sitting in a cardboard car in a reconstituted Chinese traditional landscape. In the distance are green mountains, houses, pine trees and mist. In the bottom right-hand corner of the photograph are the words “Travel in Lushan, 1988.”
Using black-and-white amateur photos from flea markets, postcards, propaganda images from the Mao era, screenshots from the film Romance on Lushan Mountain (the first romance film made after the Cultural Revolution, in 1980), and photos turned up in Web searches, Lei Lei creates a video collage mixing individual and collective memory. While reproducing a family memory of Lushan Mountain in 1988, the artist brings up other meanings of the site: a prominent tourist attraction (UNESCO World Heritage Site), a place of historical significance made famous by Mao Zedong, and the setting of a romantic blockbuster watched by 400 million Chinese and played daily in a Lushan cinema named after the movie. Lei Lei rebuilds the Lushan cinema in Arles to screen his own montage. He invites us to enter a space of personal memory, an animated fiction made of diverse photographic materials, to watch images from our own dreams.
The artist’s nostalgia serves as the starting point of a quest for truth regarding history, family and personal identity. It is also a reflection on the image and the status of the author. Which is more significant nowadays: the photograph as work of art or as archival image? Which is more important: the picture or the process of image production; the fact that an image is viewed or the context.
Gangao Lang Winner of the Dior Photography Award for Young TalentsVenue: Grande Halle, Parc des Ateliers, 33 avenue Victor Hugo, 13200 ArlesDate: Until 22 September, 2019
The Dior Photography Award for Young Talents launched its second edition in 2019. Organized in collaboration with the École nationale supérieure de la photographie of Arles, this prestigious competition aims to turn the spotlight on young artists from the most prestigious international art and photography schools. This year, Parfums Christian Dior has placed women at the heart of its carte blanche, offering the theme “Woman – Women Faces”. The keywords of this edition? Colour, femininity and beauty. Twelve winning photographers exhibit works that offer a different vision of female beauty.
This year winner is the Chinese artist Gangao Lang. Born in Henan, a province of China, in 1998, Gangao Lang moved to Shanghai to study photography. Humans are what the artist likes to represent the most. Inspired by traditional painting as well as modern and contemporary art, she likes to study the shapes of a face, the lines that sculpt a body. “I take pictures of women exclusively, she specifies. Observing and trying to understand the models my age has always inspired me.” For Gangao Lang, Dior symbolises an ideal. “Its search for truth and beauty is able to change with time and remains in line with the ‘real world’,” she explains.
The photographer’s best friend, Li Wanyue, has served as a model for her during this carte blanche. Although the two young women remain close, their studies in distant cities have separated them. “This distance has created a certain strangeness,” Gangao Lang confides. Inspired by modern artworks, the photographer has attempted to capture her friend’s personality and singularity through the images. “Her character made me want to represent a new version of the feminine beauty: to sublimate a strong, independent and sincere woman,” she tells us. By carrying out this project, the artist hopes to prove that the notion of colour, femininity and beauty fi the theme “Woman-Women Faces” are subjective. That they vary “according to who is feeling them and who is interpreting them.”
More information: www.rencontres-arles.com
