Group Photo : Solo Exhibition of Wen Ye

 

—— Memory, Emotion, and Social History in Wen Ye's Group Photo

Photography’s gaze on objects is, at its core, a ritual that transforms everyday experience into historical evidence—or, in another sense, it re-enters the field of symbolic substitution to return to an examination and remembrance of the human subject. Once the lens strips away human subjectivity, objects become proxies for the absent body. Through their folds, wear, and fading, they construct an intersecting narrative of private memory, death, and social history. In this genealogy of “evidentiary photography,” the Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi’s Mother’s and 1.9.4.7 stand as paradigmatic works: the former presents the traces left behind in her mother’s clothing, evoking remembrance and achieving a kind of emotional restitution, ultimately sublimating individual death into fragments of life’s memory; the latter focuses on the marks left on the skin of women born in 1947, confronting the contest between the body and time in the postwar generation. In Thomas Ruff’s Portraits series, human faces are stripped of emotion and identity, leaving only a pixelated epidermis. Yet in this absolute objectivity, viewers are compelled to imagine questions of identity politics. The paradox of evidentiary photography lies precisely here: the colder the gaze, the more it awakens the submerged currents of history.

 

The silence of objects often cuts deeper through history than human speech. Take, for instance, Song Dong’s Waste Not, where he collaborated with his mother to present a vast inventory of household objects—objects that themselves narrated the story of a family. Or Ishiuchi’s photographs of Frida Kahlo’s belongings, where the juxtaposition of relics reveals the coexistence of pain and art. Looking back at Group Photo, Wen Ye’s differentiated portrayals of shoe wear seem to hint at the divergences of fate in an era of rapid economic reform and social transformation. Some shoes are plain, even deformed, as if their owners had spent long years laboring for livelihood, with neither the means nor concern to update their attire. Some leather shoes remain pristine, suggesting that their wearers had moved into a class free from toil. Others, outwardly intact, are mottled inside from sweat, showing long use and neglect of upkeep. A striking pair of green high heels, with its untimely flamboyance, stands out as a dissonant note within the collective narrative. As one stares, a question arises: who was their owner? Of the same age, with the same schooling, yet her shoes express an aesthetic of life so different from her peers. At what point did her life diverge from theirs? This moment of questioning is itself the path into Wen Ye’s work. These portraits of shoes mark radically different textures of fate. Gathered, photographed, and arranged by the artist, they coalesce into a shared history and case-study slices of social history. Within them, time unveils its invisible violence: the marks of wear on the shoes embody this violence. Though the human body is absent, its fate is not. Rather, these objects’ material expressions mirror the living conditions and historical circumstances of these graduates of pharmaceutical studies. Both body and object are carriers of time’s scars and history’s wounds.

 

Wen Ye’s images are restrained to the point of coldness: unified white backgrounds, cool sidelight, emotionless close-ups that recall typological order. It is precisely this archival detachment that renders private objects public. When a shoe’s crease is magnified into the contour lines of time, an individual’s life history sutures itself silently to the macro narratives of the 1990s—state-owned enterprise reform, accelerated urbanization. This is the shared time and memory of a generation.

 

Why did Wen Ye, among all possible objects, ultimately choose “shoes”? Perhaps because shoes possess both aesthetic recognizability and are the most easily worn of all attire. Shoes are linked to walking; they extend the body, serve as social calling cards, and mediate social interaction. They are practical yet symbolic, linking individual and collective. By focusing on shoes, Wen Ye precisely addresses the wear-and-tear endured by his generation in an era of ceaseless transformation. To photograph these shoes as portraits is, in truth, to observe human expressions and the social histories inscribed upon them. Faced with these decontextualized object-portraits, I am reminded of Chu Chu’s early series Object/Non-Object, in which oversized scissors, pots, and other everyday things filled the canvas. The notion of “object yet non-object” points to the bodily and social information embedded in daily items.

 

Thus, “objects” have become a vital theme in contemporary photography. This is evident not only in the practices of Ishiuchi and others mentioned earlier but also in the works of Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Wall, Sophie Calle, and Chinese artist Li Lang.

 

The order of objects is the order of people. Wen Ye's Group Photo takes this further - when 39 pairs of shoes are viewed as portraits, viewers perceive not only individual differences but also the invisible frameworks of collective fate: the same starting point as classmates, after three decades of social upheaval, crystallize into a fragmented map of destinies through the evidential nature of shoes. By congregating and exhibiting these shoe portraits, the work inevitably becomes an invitation to reunite their owners. Thus, these pieces serve as mediators negotiating with time and fate, unburdening their possessors of reality's nick after shedding the burdens and scars of reality, and reactivating shared memories and emotions, once again returning them to the lived spaces of study and life. From this perspective, the work's overflow of meaning is indeed a cross-temporal reunion and a lived event. Restraint becomes a prelude to warmth, while gazes return as the language of the soul.

 

The power of evidentiary photography lies in the fact that objects are not silent; they speak through the information they bear. Group Photo speaks with precise objecthood and minimal gaze: every crack is certain, every fading irretrievable. Once pulled by the lens from private closets into public exhibition, the shoes are no longer just shoes, but mirrors of a generation’s destiny—not merely their expressions or names, but also the unspoken wear-and-tear and resilience within thirty years of social transformation.

 

Written in Beijing, April 3–5, 2025