THE WINTER OF DESPAIR, THE SPRING OF HOPE
“Loneliness is a city” by Li Zhiqian. Olivia Laing wrote in The Lonely City: Loneliness is collective; it is a city. How would you feel when you are left alone in an urban space designed for millions, like in the prologue scene of Vanilla Sky, with “Everything in its right place” as BGM?
Li Zhiqian is a designer, researcher and photography lover in Shanghai, China. In the coronavirus period, he walks around his neighborhood with his camera once every a couple of days. ↓
“100,000 people wearing masks" is a side project of Shanghai based photographer Coca Dai, who also runs a long term project featuring "100,000 people watching mobile phones". As the virus swept the country, masks became the new necessary after mobile phones in the daily life of a Chinese citizen.
Coca Dai is a award-winning photographer living and working in Shanghai. He’s work focuses mainly on the intimacy between family members and the social topics around it. He’s one of the most internationally acclaimed visual artist in China. ↓
“Unutterable” by Liu Xiaoguang. These are a series of pictures from an extremely individualised point of view. The photographer was staying at home in the epicentre Wuhan during the first wave of outbreak, suspecting that he was infected. This is a first-person visual monologue of a time full of unutterable anxiety, stress, and doubt.
Liu Xiaoguang (b.1987) is a photographer from Wuhan. He focuses on taking pictures for families. For him photography is a tool to repossess the bygone years. ↓
↑ “The Ailing City” by Zhao Ming. Cities are moody. Sometimes sad and sometimes happy, most of the time passionate, sensational and full of energy. But these days most of the cites are sick. Shanghai is one of the first that got infected. This is its sickly-look.
Zhao Ming is a voice actor from Shanghai. He also owns a pottery shop named Wan Gallery in Shanghai. He’s been taking pictures of the city ever since he got his first Leica camera in 2005. But the urban scene has never been so grim and gloomy as what you find in the pictures taken during the coronavirus outbreak. His lens is capturing this soundless mood floating around in the emptiness of the city.
“The Emptiness" by Hass Zhang. Empty streets of a metropolis like Shanghai, which accommodates more than 25 million inhabitants was a rare sighting, but now it's the city's everyday. ↓
Hass Zhang (b. 1986) is a Shanghainese photographer living and working in Shanghai. In the past few years, he’s also been travelling around the world documenting the lives of Chinese living abroad. As a local photographer in Shanghai, though, he deconstructs the evolution of time and space from the causes and effects to contemplate the secular nature and belief of humanity.
↑“Halftime" The city of Shanghai is almost back on its track while most of the cities in Europe are still suffering from the same evil virus with infection curves pointing to a hypothetical summit with all kinds of tangents. The pandemic is not concluded but our on-line exhibition is coming to its end halfway into the spring with the other half left for us to hang on to our hope. A big thanks with personal and international distance to all the exhibitors and our co-curator Yao Yao.