Blindspot Gallery presents  “Everything Illuminates”, featuring Mainland Chinese artist Jiang Pengyi’s recently completed series Everything Illuminates.

Jiang’s photographic language marks a shift from the macro view of urban spaces and digital manipulation in his previous iconic series All Back to Dust (2006-2007) and Unregistered City (2008-2010) and to an introspective, micro view of inanimate objects in his recent works. Everything Illuminates reveals the intrinsic light that exists in any daily object such as paper, chair, candleholder and bed.

Jiang poured liquid wax mixed with fluorescent powder onto different objects, allowing the faint fluorescence to slowly flows and traces the objects’ different shapes and forms during the long exposure. The images present surreal glimpses into the intrinsic light that exists in daily objects and illuminate the traces left by the objects’ existence on time.

The objects appear surreal and peculiar glowing in the dark as it is illumined by their glow. Their familiar image and function disappear. Such disappearance of image and function seems to suggest a kind of destruction. “Through the elimination of image, Jiang deconstructs our existing cognition, the social codes of the objects, and the relation between the viewer and the objects being viewed,” art critic Luan Zhichao says.

Scholar and art critic Gu Zheng has a different view about destruction in the series. Referring to the broken chandelier in the final image in the series, while hanging is a normal state for the chandelier, the object is burdened by its own potential energy, an innate force that causes its fall. Jiang creates this sense of unease and anxiety from hanging through grandeur and splendor. “What is intriguing here is that the chandelier retains its endless glow despite being broken...while destruction is often linked to darkness, the faint yet insistent glow of the broken chandelier perhaps symbolize rebirth rather than destruction,” Gu says.

About the artist:

Born in Yuanjiang, Hunan Province in 1977, Jiang Pengyi graduated from the Beijing Institute of Art and Design in 1999. He was awarded the Aletti ArtVerona Prize for Photography in 2011, the Jury Grand Prize from the Société Générale Chinese Art Awards in 2010 and the Tierney Fellowship Award from the First Annual Three Shadows Photography Award in 2009. Jiang was invited to participate in the Helsinki Photography Biennial 2012 and was nominated for the Prix Pictet 2012.

His work is collected by a variety of private and public institutions worldwide, including Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation Collection in Switzerland, the French Regional Contemporary Art Fund of the Loire Region (Frac des Pays de la Loire) in France, the Tierney Family Foundation and ArtNow Contemporary Art Collections in USA, the UniCredit Art Collections in Italy and Germany, and the Bank Aletti Foundation (Fondazione Banca Aletti) in Italy.

Jiang currently lives and works in Beijing and Hangzhou, China.

Image: © Jiang Pengyi, Blindspot Gallery