ART LEXÏNG unveils a solo exhibition of New York-based Chinese artist Quentin Shih (aka Xiaofan Shi) “Quentin Shih’s Moving Theater: From Shanghai, Hong Kong to Havana” at the UZCA design building in the heart of the Miami Design District. The marks the artist's first dedicated solo exhibition in Miami during the 12th edition of Art Basel Miami Beach.
Quentin Shih is recognized worldwide for his theatrical, large format tableau-like photographs which are subject to a rigorous composition and complex post-production process. His international breakthrough was made with the 2008 series Stranger In The Glass Box, a collaboration with haute couturier Christian Dior. In the series, fashion models wearing Christian Dior haute couture and sealed in glass boxes are inspected by small groups of identically dressed Chinese bystanders who resemble stereotyped characters from Communist propaganda posters, photographed against the backdrop of gritty industrial settings in northern China. The results are haunting juxtapositions which contrast the harmony of uniformity against the fundamental beauty of uniqueness, triggering a powerful emotional response where predictability proves to be both beautiful and grotesque. His photographs are provocative manifestations ripe with pan-cultural significance.
Shanghai: In 2010, to celebrate the re-opening of the Dior Boutique in Shanghai, the House of Dior again commissioned Quentin Shih to produce “Shanghai Dreamers”, a beautiful series through which Shih plays with surrealism, creating oil-painting-style compositions by retouching his subjects, and using the visual repetition Chinese cultural stereotypes in a pattern to contrast the rigor and uniformity of Chinese mass culture against his subject. The arresting, dreamlike images proved highly controversial upon their release.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong Moments is a continuation of the "Haute Couture meets surreal urban environment" thematic. Flaired pants, plaid shirts, road signs with traditional Chinese characters and English paired together with police in uniforms; like the familiar scenes of Wan Kai-wai’s movies, they're accompanied by alien-like models in the most familiar Hong Kong environments and crowds. Shih notes, "Models in Dior and Hong Kong characters had a lot of chemical reactions. I'm interested in [these] visual reactions: Although there is no clear story, all the characters are interacting with a certain link among them.”
Havana: Stemming from his series La Habana In Waiting, Shih explores the unwritten tensions and melancholy residing in Cuban citizens quietly sitting for an artist's lens. His silent stages are populated by actors with no scripts, no direction: they exist in a kind of temporal limbo, captured in a film still. Specific to Shih's work is an aesthetic presentation that does not actively disturb or alter the physical appearance of the subjects, as is widely seen in conventional forms of contemporary Chinese painting.
Image: © Quentin Shih
