Jiang Pengyi

In Sun! Sun!, Jiang Pengyi harnesses nuclear forces in a balance of uncontrollable combustion and meticulous experimentation. The artist uses a magnifier to focus diffuse sunlight, creating flames that burn through a proprietary cardboard-contraption covering the opening of the light-sensitive film, creating fissures for incandescent exposure. The resulting images are multisensorial spectral arrays of burns, like scars on retina tissues, like afterimages when we stare at the sun for too long, the ghostly spectra that have long fascinated aesthetes, theoreticians and artists.

In this series, Medium, the artist uses instant films to capture found images of Christian and Buddhist art, and then manipulates the work with an emulsion lift, draping them to create unique objects that blur the line between photography and sculpture. The artist likens the intimate and private contact between the photographer and the film in the dark room as the eroticism between lovers, or the spiritual experience between human and a higher being. Not only does the artist references the history of aniconism and iconoclasm in major world religions, he testifies to the irresistible urge of human beings to create and gaze upon images.

Jiang Pengyi continues his exploration of cameraless analogue photography in the newly made and never-shown-before series, Foresight, which contains large-scale abstract colour images made by exposing the light-sensitive film to organic processes of food decay, chemical reactions and even combustion.

In Dissolution, Jiang directly intervened in the found pornographic images through an emulsion lift from the instant film material. By separating the image-bearing emulsion from its original setting, Jiang gives a sculptural body to the once flat images, creating photographic objects that are unique, blurring the line between photography and sculptures.

The Sun Matched with the Sea and Dissolution are both applications of such investigation, and incorporate found pornographic images gathered from adult magazines. In The Sun Matched with the Sea, he first used instant film to re-shoot these erotic images. Then, before the image was fixed in the chemical process, he carried out a series of folding and pressing symbolic of violence and destruction. After development, the image was left with explosive lines of “scars”, one of the symbols of “transgression”.

In Some Time is a series of abstract images of dreamy colours, the result of a cameraless analogue technique in which Jiang personally manipulated the physical contact of coloured fluorescent paper against 4×5 large format photographic film in the darkroom. The former absorbs and emits light, while the latter registers and fixes the light reflection by a silver- salt reaction. Using photography to paint with light, the process is as much about the mastery of photo-chemistry as the pursuit of accidental beauty in the temporary connection between two sensing and reactive bodies.

In contrast to his early works, his latest series Everything Illuminates are images of still objects glowing in the dark. These abstract and nearly surreal images suggest the artist’s changing focus back to original form and shape, at the same time reflect his current state of mind.

In his iconic series Unregistered City, Jiang reduces skyscrapers to miniature sizes and juxtaposed them at truncated interiors and corners. The series reflects the illusive nature of the city and the world, and also the artist’s state of mind in a city with constant development and demolition.

Luminant are images of glowing luminance of modern skyscrapers by night in major mainland cities. Against the darkened cityscape, the skyscrapers stand glowing in intense brightness created by overexposure. Such overexposure instills a feeling of departure from reality into the picture, which seems to urge the viewers to contemplate the city’s over-development and the society of spectacle dominated by consumption and mass media.

Jiang’s early work All Back to Dust, massive real-life buildings turn into miniatures and are placed among junk, brushed aside like forgotten beings. Through his expression, Jiang sets out to override the rapid urbanization in the city and to unmask its illusory nature.