Organizer: Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Co-organizers: French Embassy in China - Croisements Festival, Galerie Nathalie Obadia
Curators: Karen Smith, Chen Shen
In 2017, Croisements festival celebrates its 12th year anniversary. Over the past 12 years, Croisements has become the leading international festival in China, as well as France’s biggest overseas festival. Every spring, it demonstrates to Chinese audiences the strength of France’s creative sector and showcases Franco-Chinese crossovers in a range of disciplines: theatre, dance, classical and contemporary music, popular music, visual arts, new media, cinema, books and debate. The 12th Croisements festival will take place from May 6 to July 9 in 30 Chinese cities, with more than 60 programs.
Statuesque faces of women, shop-front mannequins that appear alive: in playing with the tension between image and reality, the clichés of Valérie Belin are there to provoke the viewer. Revolving around the themes of the body, identity and the artificial, Belin uses her technical talent to develop fascinating images imbued with a strange beauty.
The exhibition, held in Beijing at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and Shanghai at the SCôP, is a retrospective of the work of this world-renowned artist, from her very first projects to her latest experiments in digital and overlay techniques. The exhibition is jointly curated by Karen Smith, Art Director of Shanghai Center of Photography, and Chen Shen, Curator of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre.
About Valérie Belin
Valérie Belin was awarded the Pictet Prize in 2015 and has had major retrospectives, at the European Photography Center in 2008 and the Pompidou Center in 2015 in Paris. Her oeuvre is present in many international collections including MOMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and LACMA in Los Angeles.