Zhai Yongming

  • Fully Immersive Script Preface Zhai Yongming likes to visit former residences of celebrities during her travels. She looks for mirrors...

    Fully Immersive Script

     

    Preface

     

    Zhai Yongming likes to visit former residences of celebrities during her travels. She looks for mirrors in those former residences and uses her camera to capture her image in the mysterious spaces as if the multiple mirror images can bring back the dissipating feelings that once existed there. She wants to connect with the places and the people who once lived there through her visits and lens.
     
    Unlike the standard travel photos, her selfies feature the sudden intrusions of one or multiple “selves” and often appear abstract and bizarre. Thus, her illusory and distinctive images evoke a matrix that interrupts the chronological order without us nociting. Every time she presses the shutter feels like a swift “face-changing” (a magic trick that's a highlight of Sichuan Opera), and the ancient technique makes the images more thought-provoking, prompting us to identify the “subject” hidden in reality, time, memories, the subconscious, and even death.
     
    Through her seemingly fear-evoking and unsettling images, Zhai isn’t intentionally releasing or emphasizing emotions in exchange for satisfaction. Instead, she’s simply enjoying discovering the theatricality in the moments of conflict that can potentially take place in a scene, like a short narrative poem. She tries to create a three-dimensional space within a plane, capture the feelings in these multi-dimensional realms, and complicate the flat and monotonous reality. Furthermore, she aims to create natural landscapes through those wrinkles in space, as Hiroshi Sugimoto once said in Until the Moss Grows. The poet’s works are inspired by the existing objects inside her frame. She likes to photograph moss and other plants because of that sense of infiltration similar to ink, set against the vibrating light and shadow on the water and on the background wall. Through the depth and the blooming, her photographic portraits feel like nature itself depicting the interconnectedness of things.
     
    Her selfies from her visits bring history back into the present moment, while her painting-like images uphold the classical principles. All these photographic scripts in her works establish a fully immersive tunnel that connect time and space. “Jiao Ben (script)” is the specimen of animals’ feet as well as the extensive Heart Sutra; it’s up to the viewers to finish the works and fill in the blanks in this fully immersive experience.

     

    Curator: Shen Yi

  • ARTIST: Zhai Yongming Zhai Yongming, born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of...

    ARTIST: Zhai Yongming

     

    Zhai Yongming, born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, then worked as a physics institute engineer until 1986. She began publishing poetry in 1981. Travelling extensively throughout Europe, she also lived in the US for nearly two years, during which she toured the nation by car. Consistently ranked as one of the most intriguing and challenging contemporary Chinese poets, she’s received numerous awards for her work, including the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize, the Best Ten Women Poets of China Award, the Italian Ceppo Pistoia International Literary Prize, the 31st Annual Northern California Book Awards and the Chinese Media Award. She was also invited to attend the San Francisco International Poetry Festival in the US in 2009. Among her many poetry collections are Woman; Above All Roses; The Collected Poems of Zhai Yongming; Call It All; Fourteen Plain Songs; and Interlinear Spaces. Her poetry has been translated into English, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and German. She has also published six collections of essays and literary criticism. Ms. Zhai lives in Chengdu, where she owns and operates the art and literary bar, “White Nights”. 

  • CURATOR: Shen Yi Shen Yi is a film producer and screenwriter who graduated from the School of Creative Media at...

    CURATOR: Shen Yi

     

    Shen Yi is a film producer and screenwriter who graduated from the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong. She started her career as a photographer, poet, literary critic, and curator. Shen Yi is a two-time First Prize recipient of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. From 2009 to 2013, she hosted her solo photography exhibitions in China, France, and Italy. Among her works, The Disassembled Notebook was exhibited at Women Photography Festival in Toulouse, France, and was highly recommended in the special issues on Women’s Photography in Trans Asia Photography Review. In 2012 and 2019, Shen Yi curated the significant poet Bei Dao’s photography exhibition Nil Mirror and Double Shadows.
    She was invited as one of the jury members for the Chinese Film Media Awards 2011 and 2013, My French Film Festival 2013, and “Forward Future International Screening Unit” of Beijing International Film Festival 2018. Shen Yi started filmmaking in 2014 as the co-producer and creative consultant for NeZha (2015), executive producer and screenwriter for Ash (2020), and producer and associate director for Literary Documentary Like the Dyer’s Hand (2020).

  • Zhai Yongming, A Touch. Photography, Giclée Print. Courtesy of the artist

  • Zhai Yongming, Architecture. Photography, Giclée Print. Courtesy of the artist

  • Zhai Yongming, Architecture Forms Its Classical Principle. Photography, Giclée Print. Courtesy of the artist

  • Zhai Yongming, A Stone Statue. Photography, Giclée Print. Courtesy of the artist

  • Zhai Yongming, Sky. Photography, Giclée Print. Courtesy of the artist

  • Zhai Yongming, Downward. Photography, Giclée Print. Courtesy of the artist