In a reality that is highly systematized and mediated, the act of seeing is no longer stable. It no longer originates from an individual's consciously chosen standpoint but is perpetually displaced, disassembled, and reconfigured under the multiple forces of urban structures, social roles, technological mechanisms, and emotional experience. The position we occupy is neither a geographical coordinate nor merely a matter of identity-based belonging; rather, it constitutes a condition of viewing in a state of constant flux.
Position To Be Determined unfolds against this backdrop. The works presented in this exhibition emerge from a longstanding creative collective centered on practices of seeing and image-making. Through sustained discussion, practice, and mutual response, its members have developed their respective photographic projects. These works do not derive from a unified theme or style but have gradually taken shape along diverse life experiences and visual trajectories, informed by a shared critical inquiry.
For these creators, photography is no longer merely an instrument for documenting the external world but a method for repeatedly calibrating one's own position—between reality and image, between personal experience and social structure, between the visible and the invisible. Seeing thus becomes a situated act: it entails hesitation, unease, and displacement, yet also involves continuous attempts at reorientation. What the works present is not a definitive standpoint but the traces of how seeing is compelled to adjust under the pressures of reality.
The complexity of contemporary photography resides precisely in this indeterminacy. Images no longer correspond straightforwardly to reality but are embedded within larger systems: platforms, algorithms, circulation mechanisms, and visual conventions persistently shape how we see, what we see, and how we are seen. In such an environment, the composed gaze loses its efficacy, supplanted by a stance that demands constant recalculation. Photography no longer occurs from a fixed point of observation but is generated within viewing relations that are subject to external pushes, interferences, and redistribution.
Consequently, the works in this exhibition do not strive for formal completion. They approximate a processual existence: some arise from subtle fragments of everyday life, some intervene in constructed landscapes and spaces, some engage the threshold between individual affect and social reality, while others confront the technological and systematic rewriting of the image. The differences among the works are not discrepancies to be reconciled but constitute essential tensions within the overall framework. It is precisely through these divergences that the boundaries of seeing are continuously expanded, and the very meaning of position is reopened for interrogation.
Notably, this "to be determined" condition is not a passive state. On the contrary, it reactivates possibility for photography: when position is no longer predetermined, seeing is liberated from prescribed paths; when standpoint is no longer fixed, images are freed from singular functions, entering more complex circuits of exchange. Here, photography is not solely an expression of self or a depiction of the world; it becomes an ongoing practice of probing—a search, within a perpetually shifting reality, for positions from which one might still stand and respond.
Position To Be Determined does not seek to provide a definitive statement on contemporary photography. It is, rather, an invitation: an invitation to engage with these still-forming practices of seeing, to attend to their hesitations, displacements, and processes of reorientation. Within an unstable condition, what photography registers is not "where we already stand," but rather—how we persist, and continue to seek footing, in a reality that keeps us in motion.
Text/Xuxu