Galleries | Booth B05
Venue: Grand Palais, Paris
Date and Time:
7 — 9 .11. 2019 (Thursday–Saturday) , noon — 8pm
10 .11. 2019 (Sunday) , noon — 7pm
In “Paris Photo 2019”, Blindspot Gallery presents the works of three contemporary Chinese artists – JIANG Pengyi, JIANG Zhi, and Pixy LIAO – who use photography to explore intimate relationships in personal and spiritual terms.
Pixy LIAO’s Experimental Relationship is a celebration of the naturally unconventional relationship between the artist and her partner Moro, who is Japanese and fives years her junior. Experimental Relationship playfully subverts the conventions of traditional power dynamics through a hyperawareness in the performativity of gender, often presenting the female artist in the dominant role and her partner in a submissive position. Liao stages images that range from the intimate to the risqué, as the artist questions concepts such as heteronormativity, gender hierarchy, and the public-private domains of a relationship.
In the iconic Love Letters series (2011-2014) dedicated to the memory of his deceased wife, JIANG Zhi sets living flowers on fire, and photographs the moment when petals and flames coexist in the equanimity of beauty and suffering. The artist staged a visceral way to mourn, to imagine suffering, and to create a fleeting yet perpetual moment suspended between destruction and rebirth, agony and sweet melancholy.
JIANG Pengyi is renowned for his cameraless photography that pushes the boundary of the medium and explores the limits of the materiality of light. 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.
