Xiang Sun: Muse and Camera Obscura
By Dr. SHEN Qilan
Return to obsession; return to loss of control and to the unknown.
For Xiang Sun, photography is never merely a craft of "images", but a journey through "desire". Something invisible draws him near; through photography, he knows he can come closer to it.
This exhibition presents the muses who have inspired the artist's creation. At different stages of his life, Sun has used photography to approach and touch his muses—again and again.
A muse belongs to no one; she simply passes by, gently, as though unaware.
The muse is found in those beautiful faces. In the early years, Sun captured faces in backstage at runway fashion shows, pulsing with youth and beauty. The power of beauty is radiant, yet cruel. He now understands: what he pursued was never a single, concrete subject or person, but those fleeting moments devoured by beauty—moments when desire itself appears, when the camera obscura inside him came alive.
He himself was once a muse. A friend gifted him splendid garments, celebrating his first journey to Paris—a trip toward ideals and toward the unknown. Through the ebb and flow, through gain and loss, he has come to understand the essence of existence: only those who risk losing control can be truly free. He moved among projects, screens, and hard drives; the endless images began to exhaust him. The mechanical routine of work made him rethink photography.
The camera obscura called him back. He fell once more for this ancient technology—returning to a state where photography still possessed magic. Compared with the speed and precision of digital images, the camera obscura is slow, unwieldy, nearly clumsy.
Yet precisely for this reason, light regains its weight. When he places silver gelatin paper into developer, the darkness begins to breathe. The images emerge slowly through the liquid; a dream rises from the subconscious. It is a dream that cannot be edited afterwards, an irreversible process that promises the uniqueness and eternity of the present moment.
He cherishes the freedom of being enchanted. Only within the camera obscura and the darkroom does the muse descend. The Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser, in his Towards a Philosophy of Photography, theorized photography as a new Magic (neue Zauberei). He further argued that the apparatus (Fotoapparat) holds decisive power over human imagination because it is programmed with preset codes. For Flusser, the best photographs are those in which human intention overcomes the program. In an AI era where images may be generated by a single click, returning to the camera obscura—the earliest photographic apparatus—is a refusal of absolute control. What Sun seeks is not the technologically optimized image, but an encounter: a face-to-face gaze with desire.
The camera obscura is the primal prototype of consciousness—an infinite vessel whose magic has never failed. It lends the body to time, shape to dreams. Within it, photography regains the "rhythm of time": time of waiting, of silence, time that cannot be accelerated. There, the subconscious comes quietly, glancing back from the darkness.
The muse is a classical statue; in darkness, Sun grants the sculpture new breath with the oldest photographic magic.
The muse is also the city in which he is immersed—from Shanghai to Paris, the stream of consciousness fuses the two into one shared dreamscape.
<A Date with the Moon> is yet another attempt to approach the muse. The moon and the peacock signify two creative states—at times in dance, at times in stillness—alternating within the artist's soul. Across preparation, shooting, and post-production, Sun's aesthetic language shapes both work and life in motion. Perhaps all he wished to prove was one thing: "The beloved becomes the lover."
There is no acceleration, no embellishment—only repeated approach. In Sun's images, beauty always coexists with loss. These moments, named "Strange Days", surface like fragments of memory—distant, tender, cool and refreshing. He does not pursue perfect composition; now, the essence of photography lies not in capture, but in release.
Life, too, tests him. His mother is slowly losing her memory. So he took her on a journey—to the West, toward the grasslands. He drove; she looked at the landscape from the back seat. He photographed her smile. He says: "I want her to remember—we were on the road." He understands that photography is not the permanence of life; it is the acknowledgment of its passing. Blur, defocus, overexposure—these are his deliberate gestures. He knows how to be precise, but he no longer wants to photograph the "perfect moments," but the "moments vanishing as they unfold."
This exhibition is a heart-to-heart confession between the artist and the audience. The garments displayed on site are his many skins across time. Through slow shedding—whether adorned in brocade or covered in quills—they have become slices of time, the negatives of life itself.
Here lies the flow, the sigh, and the stillness of existence.
Here are Xiang Sun's negatives: the muse and the camera obscura.
