It is all about resurrection.
- Yu Likwai

Pékin Fine Arts is pleased to present “Yu Likwai: It's A Bright Guilty World”. This is the artist’s 1st solo exhibit in Beijing, and a continuation of a project started and exhibited by M+ Museum last year in Hong Kong.

One of Beijing’s most celebrated cinematographers and film-makers, Hong Kong native Yu Likwai resides in Beijing, where he makes his own films and also frequently collaborates with Beijing film-maker Jia Jiangke. Yu has long experimented with photography, video and installation in addition to his filmmaking pursuits.

The artist explains, “Over the years, I have been taking photos of empty spaces: dysfunctional apartments, abandoned factories and urban peripheries. By contemplating these desolate city fabrics, a weird fixation developed in my mind: Is there any possible kind of latent “existence” hidden inside my images? Since then, I was absorbed by the idea of reinventing imaginary human traces belonging to these barren locations.

Thus the whole photographic project was initially a fill in the blank mental exercise. All my narrative motivations were triggered by the Void of these unoccupied spaces even before any human character was invented.

Very soon all kind of overdramatized plots, loosely reconstructed crime scenes, hysterically wild tales of debauchery come up in my mind... And it quickly becomes a question of staging and re-staging, just like what I used to doing when we shoot a movie.

Quite inevitably, cinematic details creep into my storytelling. I am always fascinated by the fatalistic human relationship depicted in Film Noir: the perpetual role-playing game between victim and malefactor, the self-victimized and the wrongly accused. After all, Film Noir’s perspective is what I would term ‘nihilistic cool’. It gives me carte blanche to reveal what is plausible within the impossible, i.e. my fictive “latent image”.

The video installation FLUX (2013) is my own reinterpreted Phantasmagoria, an experimental Frankenstein photomontage. The idea originated from some black and white photos that I made 20 years ago. While scrutinizing again these faded images, I had a com- pulsive urge to “reanimate” them, both in a spiritual and physical sense.

To endow a freeze frame image with life, montages with different layers of images are projected on transparent holographic film. With low-tech minimalist trompe l'oeil effects, I intend to recreate the sensationalistic visual experience similar to that of an 18th century magic- lantern show.

This installation is also my tribute to silent movies and horror genre. Historically the cinema evinced an affinity with the phantom realm of Ghosts and supernatural beings. Horror emerges as a trope of film itself, as a medium of shadows, dematerialized presence, life drain- ed of substance.

FLUX (2013) is my personal attempt to negotiate dialectics between the freeze frame testimonial nature of photography and the lifelike illusionism of the cinema. As André Bazin explains, ‘Cinema is an “idealist” or “essentialist” medium; its illusionism is rooted in the “mum- my complex”’. In a manner of speaking, this installation is an exercise to reanimate mummified pictures, revealing my innermost desires and impulses.”

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Pekin Fine Arts