LIANZHOU FOTO 2012 First Special Solo Exhibition for the Artist of the Year
Presented by：2012 Lianzhou International Photography Festival Organizing Committee 99 Art Center Fine Arts College of Shanghai University
In Association with：Flying Birds Team Canon China
Curator：Gu Zheng
Academic chair：Wang Nanming
Chief curator：Duan Yuting
Art director：Ma Lin
[Press Release]
Basically, Ni Weihua packs the billboard and the passers-by in a hurry into one image, which, of course, needs patience. He is selective about the passers-by in the image, who have to be relevant to the ideas he would like to illustrate in the series. All the people in his series are passers-by, irrelevant to the magnificent mansions being built behind them. The only possible relevance that the passers-by bear to the mansions might be the fact that they are the construction workers. Therefore, occasionally workers in safety caps will be seen in his series. Nevertheless, the irrelevance between the two is most prominent. They are just construction workers. Never can they be the owners of the mansions. This is Ni Weihua’s purpose, to emphasize stark social disparity and social class divide with the co-existence of mansions and construction workers. Citizens and migrant workers not on an equal footing with the former in his series of Landscape Wall are overwhelmed by the background of the advertisement once they are put in the same image, due to the overwhelming mass of the background and the snobbish contempt of the advertisement. Such a shape contrast between superiority and inferiority has rested much tension on this series, bringing the irreconcilable conflicts in reality into limelight.
Ni Weihua has made the image and words, a component of city space landscape, the background or the subject of his pictures, which have become a political existence in the city. The political existence, under the pretext of illusory consumption ideology, promotes the commercial appeal, or pacifies people with empty political slogans. Diverse as they are, one thing is certain: they are both ideology in nature. Hasn’t the overwhelming ideological image formed an important aspect of today’s political images? They are both presented in Ni Weihua’s exhibition, a most self-evident presentation of a paradoxical society in China nowadays.
