Photography is No Longer Credible – He Xingyou Solo Exhibition
Opening Reception: 6 – 8 pm, Thur 13 Feb 2014
Venue: CONTEMPORARY BY ANGELA LI
G/F, 248 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
Exhibition Duration: 14 Feb – 9 Mar 2014
Website: www.cbal.com.hk
The exhibition is supported by ALPA of Switzerland and Mamiya Leaf.
The exhibition will also open at Today Art Museum, Beijing, China in March, 2014.
He Xingyou, “Lanzhou”, Photograph, 110x221cm
賀興友,《蘭州》, 相片, 110x221cm
————————–
CONTEMPORARY BY ANGELA LI presents the solo exhibition of photographer He Xingyou, featuring his Landscape series taken throughout China. These works include the commonly seen contemporary landscape – large-scale city relocations and urban periphery constructions, deserted half-finished projects, ghost towns, mountain digging, sabotaging of the nature under the allure of great profits, with green mountains and clear water reduced to pieces of construction sites. “His main targets shown in Landscape series are a variety of construction sites throughout mainland China. As a result, what matters now is not how to record an event, but how to bring both immersive and historic truthfulness to the viewer. The scenes He Xingyou faces today are apparently different from what traditional literati saw in their time. Today the nature has been changed and even greatly destroyed by human hands, turning into construction sites or similar places. Here, two great forces – both human labour and nature are fiercely competing with each other, like what happens in a cruel battle,” says renowned Chinese curator Wang Lin.
“He Xingyou’s aim is to change people’s customary visual habits. In China, people have become used to seeing construction sites, for they commonly exist everywhere. Worse still, people even become numb at the official and commercial powers’ contempt over nature and manipulation of people’s daily life. The visual effect that He seeks to achieve is the presenting of magnificence. He has brought us back to those scenes through omnipresent, highly vivid details: the devastated stones and soils, the grass, the trees, and the animals, all of which shock us. In his works, even grand scenes embody disturbances, and more sadness.”
He Xingyou has a complicated past. He had been a successful entrepreneur in China since the 1970s, but had gone through many ups and downs in his life. He had been arrested and put in prison several times, having been accused of being a counterrevolutionary in his teens, from listening to Soviet classical music on the radio, for being a capitalist when he was 20 after making decent money from taking photographs and portraits and later again in the middle of the last decade. However, all these never stopped his pursual of photography.
Prior to this solo exhibition, He Xingyou had a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing and the Museum subsequently collected 12 works from the show.
The exhibition will travel to Today Art Museum in Beijing, China, opening on 21 March, 2014.
About Contemporary by Angela Li art gallery
Founded in 2008, Contemporary by Angela Li has been dedicated to the promotion of contemporary and avant-garde artists from China and around the world. The gallery has held successful exhibitions for Chen Jiagang, Chen Wenling, Tony Oursler, Shi Jindian, Peter Steinhauer and Nancy Chu Woo, to name but a few. In January 2013, the gallery moved to a bigger space at the trendiest part of Hollywood Road, with 3,000 sq. ft. of newly renovated exhibition space. The gallery shall continue to hold quality exhibitions for local and international audiences.
