Strange Images from Xu Lei
Elusive eroticism, ambiguous allure, confrontations that hover between closeness and distance, moments caught between laughter and tears, tensions held yet unreleased—all these are reorganized within Xu Lei's frame. Through his lens, the world is granted an unprecedented chance to be reconsidered.
All this takes place in Xu Lei's shifting of scenes, where he swiftly seizes the instant when the elements of reality fit perfectly into his sense of accord. With both speed and composure, he records and arranges these moments into acts that renew imagination and interpret the world and reality anew. With his distinct perspective and sensitivity to the real, he walks through the world, selecting—above all discovering—its scenes, quietly fixing them on paper, and unfolding the many scripts of his theatre of the world.
We then come to see that even though photography records reality, it has the power to alter and transform it. There are, in fact, at least two kinds of photographic record: one that records for the sake of recording, and another that records not for documentation but for subjective expression. The latter—the act of expressing one's own view through photography—was not clearly recognized when the medium was first invented. Yet gradually, the desire to transform the world through photography grew quietly and persistently, until it reached a point where it could stand in opposition to the former.
Moreover, in Xu Lei's work, the creation of meaning develops further—from a single "record of the strange" to the juxtaposition of two, or even more, such records. Juxtaposition becomes a kind of magic that layers strangeness upon strangeness, generating new relations and forming an imaginative space that is broader, more ambiguous, and more paradoxical. Juxtaposition is construction, and within construction, surprise arises again. In the theatre of the world, such surprises come one after another, dazzling the eye. From the "recording of the strange" to the "construction of the strange," Xu Lei's idea of juxtaposition expands the meanings of the world, enriches the play within the theatre, and greatly enlarges the possibilities of photography itself. This reminds me of the Japanese artist and surrealist Shuzo Takiguchi's words: "Surreality exists within reality itself." Within the ordinariness of the real world, Xu Lei uses the seemingly documentary method of photography to generate images and spiritual states of the surreal. The strangeness and unpredictability of the world thus astonish and fascinate us—perhaps this is the deeper motive of his photography. Perhaps this is the true challenge of the medium.
As the curtain rises on Xu Lei's theatre of the world, what we see are scenes carefully staged through photography to reconstruct the world in a surreal way.
Text / Gu Zheng
