Opening Reception:
Sat Feb 7 2009 4 pm
In the digital time that we now live in, the complicated process of traditional hand crafted photography might seem to be a part of history. FQ Projects is pleased to present an exhibition of Chen Nong & Wang Tong’s hand printed and coloured photography as well as a show room of their working process in developing and finishing their photographs.
Chen Nong and Wang Tong both live and work in Beijing, work closely on their photographic art work sharing a dark room and painting studio. They both stick with using large format cameras and film, shooting on real sites rather than using photo shop and hand printing by themselves using fiber paper and hand colouring onto the photographs. Each final painted photograph has been worked through their hands with at least 8-9 procedures. The difference between them is that Chen Nong uses ‘Staged Photography’ to reconstruct the historic scenes, while Wang Tong takes ‘Straight Photography’ recording history. Both of their ‘historys’ are taken in a subjective way, not only through the choice of camera angle, but also the final colouring determines the colour from their own memories.
Chen Nong’s image making is like a film production, as the scenes he wants to take are always enormous, subjects such as Terricotta Worriers (Bing Ma Yong), battle field of historically revolutionists, locations such as Three Gorges (Chang Jiang), Yellow River or even the landscape on the Moon. He often make his own stage properties and clothes for the hired models and travels far for his shoot. On the site, like a film director he poses hundreds of models and sometimes has to use big machinery like cranes to reach the effect he wants to acheive. All that hard preparation work is just for a click. Following the shoot he then starts the printing and colouring work. Chen Nong is probably one of the few people nowadays still hand printing more than one meter large size photographs, through which reinterpret history and address serious issues by staging the senery and the daring extreme colouring.
Although Wang Tong is traveling around China too to find previous propaganda traces on the wall, he takes what’s there for his photo recording. As he said this is like a race with the modern development construction, he had used more than ten years to complete ‘Mao on the Wall’ series. The images in this series are probably all disappeared now. Wang Tong’s images are always crystal sharp and beautifully composed. The high quality documentary photography combines the subtle warm colouring brings viewer back to a nostalgia memory.
A little Shanghai ‘Ting Zi Jian’ room housing the dark room equipments and the set up of artists’ painting studio will be presented to show viewers how the artwork been processed. Photography as a new contemporary art genre, the reproduction versus uniqueness, hands-on process versus high-technology issues are dressed in this exhibition. FQ Projects aims to bring the conceptually interesting technically orginal and difficult works to a wider viewers in a friendly manner.
