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for Chen Jiagang
Chen Jiagang
Chinese, born 1962
Lives in Beijing
Trained as an architect, Chen Jiagang is notable for having opened China's first private art gallery. He is also especially articulate about his work: his intention in creating it, the ideas he investigates, the technical choices he makes. The artist's website is a worthwhile place to start to gain insight into his work. Chen draws heavily on China's past in his process of photographic mythmaking, whether by adopting philosophical ideas of time and space, following aesthetic principles such as isometric perspective and layered planes of imagery, or equating landscape photography with Chinese literati landscape painting.
Chen is equally engaged in China's recent past, present, and place in the East-West dynamic. He has referred directly to the "sunny days" of the years spanning the late Cultural Revolution and early reform, a time he considers a special period when a "duty-based society" valued collective well-being above personal privilege. Chen challenges himself to depict that more egalitarian time which exists in his memory because, he has explained, I feel that the society I am living in is not perfect. It is not the social form I
want and we are not living it in happily." Chen seeks to arouse people to think through photography, but not to use it as a political tool or weapon as happened in the hands of Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
Chen's preference is for large-format, color images which draw not only on Chinese artistic traditions but also contain elements of documentary and staged photography. He addresses the ephemeral nature of time and value of memory in order to present his very political view. Through scenes of nostalgia and melancholy, the Temptations series explores romance and the unequal position of women in society. F. Klapthor, 2015
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