Eighteen Views of California

Eighteen Views of California

On October 24, 1871, eighteen Chinese were killed in the Old Town of Los Angeles. More than a hundred and fifty years later, we encounter photographs taken by Cui Yujian at that very intersection. "Eighteen Views of California" departs from this site to photograph Chinatown's paifang gate, Lantern Walk, Japanese Village Plaza, the red fire lookout tower, and Koreatown. These locations are spread across a region stretching from the town of Locke on the Sacramento River to Angel Island in San Francisco Bay; they are also distributed among three neighborhoods mere kilometers apart in downtown Los Angeles. Each of them operates as usual today. In "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Walter Benjamin wrote: “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again.” We understand the past through the shadow that the present casts upon historical ruins, just as these photographs simultaneously cover the surface of the city and the trauma sedimented within it. They require us to grasp such memory at the instant it flashes into view, and this is what it means to articulate the past historically.

ARTIST: Cui Yujian

Cui Yujian (b. 2002) graduated from the Photo and Media program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he studied under Andrew Freeman, Kaucyila Brooke, and Norman Klein, among others. He currently works at the intersection of traditional photographic processes and the fashion industry, and is one of the primary directors of the Los Angeles-based photographic institution Color&Black&White. His editorial and commercial clients include "Vogue Japan", "Another Man", "W Magazine", "Apartmento", "Canada Goose", and "Dior". 

His artistic practice primarily explores the tension between social development and personal emotions, the history of Asian immigration in Western America, and individual self-expression across cross-cultural spaces, while engaging in critical experimentation with the concept of time in photography. He is the recipient of the 2022 Allan Sekula Social Documentary Fund.

Curator: Guosen Chen

Guosen Chen holds a master’s degree from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University and is a PhD candidate in Aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy of Art, School of Philosophy, at the same university. He is a co-founder of the Photography Theory Shelter community. His research interests include photography theory, the ethics of artificial intelligence, and phenomenology. He also teaches photography and translates and introduces writings on photography theory to Chinese readers. His articles in Chinese and English have appeared in Photography and Culture, Twenty-First Century, Journal of Nanjing University of the Arts (Fine Arts and Design), and Chinese Photography, among other publications. He is a co-translator of the Chinese edition of Pamela M. Lee’s Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present.