Inner Ear , the latest addition to UCCA's Curated By... series, showcases two very different young talents working on the frontiers of Chinese photography. Qiu and Ren Hang were born 13 years and over 2500 kilometers apart, and their styles and subject matter could not be more dissimilar. Qiu's poetic black and white images are often grainy or blurred: like scenes glimpsed through a pane of rain-spattered glass, they evoke memories of rural southern Chinese landscapes and a rapidly disappearing way of life. Ren Hang's clean lines, vivid colors and playful eroticism reflect the new urban China: his young subjects strike poses in sterile apartments, couple on nondescript sofas, crouch on cold porcelain toilets or tiled bathroom floors. Sometimes as they stand before their rented windows, gazing at the urban landscape outside, we can sense thatthey feel lost, or wistful, or apathetic, or simply alone. Like the inner ear, whose differentiated parts are necessary for hearing and equilibrium, the work of Qiu and Ren Hang allows us to hear more clearly the voices of this generation, and to maintain our sense of balance in an age of disequilibrium.

- Jérôme Sans, UCCA Director

Qiu and Ren Hang: Inner Ear

Qiu's black and white photography is delicate and subtle, redolent of "moist southern air and particles in motion," as the artist himself describes it. There are men, women, faces, hair, hills, the shadows of trees, bare branches, sky, distant mountains, fog, narrow paths, straw hats, girls in white dresses, butterflies, motorbikes and fields of burning rice stubble. Qiu's images are fragments of silent poetry, born of southern China, the place he calls home. In an age of fast-paced transformation and tremendous social change, Qiu's work informs us that our "spiritual homeland," or what is left of it, is growing more distant with each passing day. By distancing himself from reality, Qiu helps us to preserve the memories that remain.

Ren Hang, who hails from northern China, createsa world vivid and variegated: there are friends of his generation, girls holding flowers, expressive eyes behind a veil of flowers, a heart-shaped airplane, bathrooms, bedrooms, sofas, floors, climbing vines, gardens in the dead of night, artificial hills, manmade lakes, wooden trunks and bodies, bodies everywhere—for in Ren Hang's work, the body is omnipresent. His youthful tableaus, played out like scenes from a silent film, show us life at its most primal and instinctive, in all its unrestrained creativity. Ren Hang uses his camera to shock the senses and set the heart pounding, thus allowing the heart to soar; by stripping away all pretense, he creates images that are both disarmingly direct and suggestively ambiguous.

The title of this exhibition, Inner Ear , refers to the deepest recesses of the human ear. The inner ear is composed of two key parts: the cochlea, which allows us to hear, and the vestibular system, which helps maintain our equilibrium. But how do these discrete parts function in concert? In Chinese, the term inner ear is interchangeable with the word labyrinth , and appropriately so, for here we encounter two tiny particles occupying separate nooks deep within the labyrinth. Working with black and white and color, respectively, Qiu and Ren Hang create resonant images that transmit information straight to our synapses.

- Rong Rong, Guest Curator

ARTIST STATEMENTS

For over ten years, I have been a collector of memories, observing and experiencing the world around me. Coming to the city from the countryside has made me a passive participant in China's urbanization; the only thing I can do is to maintain my right to observe and experience the world. I am often torn between the complexities of urban development and my nostalgia for the countryside. The vicissitudes of time, growth and death, land and people... these are all players in a constantly-evolving absurdist drama.

Images are a way of preserving the external world of my senses and the inner landscape of myself. And yet I know that someday I, too, will be landless and dispos sessed.

- Qiu

These works are not the product of a long-standing delusion, some hidden hand back on the attack; rather, they are the brutal after-effects – the unbearable tension, self-isolation and abnormal psyches – bred by societal oppression and repression. These things I have seen with my own eyes, and so I created a ensitivity test on the heart's surface, assembling a high-density aggregation of allergic reactions. Even in places where there is light, shadow thrusts its tongue into the extremities of darkness, licking it into screams or applause; various festering wounds burst into bloom, moving ever lower; dust is suffocated until it explodes; flowers bloom from bone marrow. Who are the real mischief-makers, the hands behind the curtain that open your mind? Whose is the fistful of strongsmelling paint, the pictograph fingerprints whose smudges are everywhere? Thus I lost my creativity, squandering myself in one go. (This exhibition should be a celebration, an excerpt of all those gaily-colored organs.)

- Ren Hang