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l'auteur
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Liu Lihong - Refinement
“Reality” is an inner phenomenon, and it is not appropriate to judge as true or false, Its meaning is only relative to an individual’s personal state of “being”, As to my own “reality”, it is a matter dug out from this inner phenomenon and my state of “being” is at times interesting and extraordinary. My relationship with reality is a walk or a journey in search of something. My discoveries and finding often open up new possibilities, while others simply make my friends and I smile. The course is a one full of happiness and unpredictable surprise. For me, reality is not so different from “surrealism”. Although the two words may in fact be antonyms, they are much closer aligned than their definitions might reveal. Reality is often more remarkable and stranger than surrealism. The things that strike me the most are often hiding all around me and could just as easily appear before me at any time. As to my practice of photographing and painting, discovery and judgment are more important. Every time I photograph, I have a thorough plan in place.
The camera can record things that our eyes neglect to see. By capturing all the visual elements in front of a lens and forcing them onto a single plane, the resulting image has the potential to imply so much more. How to “force” of “collect” the initial visual elements is at my disposal. This is a feeling. I collect and accumulate these feeling and attempt to record them onto film. Besides being a valuable recording of a specific instant in time, the photograph is also a device for maintaining the structure of time. I relate this thought to my deep interest in the cinema. One after another and in a logic of progression the moving image is crafted form the single frame. Even though the single image is free from the moving order of time, it still retains a sense of that time when it was captured. “Pseudo-time” is a word that I like very much. To me it means the time of a mirage or an illusion. I often doubt whether the things I have experienced have really happened. When I question these experiences and their accompanying photographs, my own existence is brought into question because I made the recordings of the experience. The photographs, which were at once realized as documents of a time and a certain truth, are just as easily transformed into phenomenon and imaginations. What uncertainty brings to us is not a sentiment, but an attitude towards reality. All idealistic and good things tend to have a much shorter life. Photography, by ”memory presenting” or “memory making” can “reappear” in those short moments of idealism and give them a chance to either be realized or not. Everyone is introspective of himself, but the result of this personal inquiry is far beyond their control.
During the years when I was photographing I was also contemplating. This kind of approach turned into a revolving thought-process. After photographing for a while I would begin to detect a certain pattern in the method of my work. I realized that I couldn’t help myself from attempting to predetermine what would result from my approach. I wanted to gain a clear direction as to where my work was taking me. “Time Story” is just an evolution of this process. And soon I found a certain charm in this approach. No matter how precise my expectation may have been, the result was always very surprising. In 2006, I produced the series “Garden”. This is a completely different work, but one could detect its origin from the earlier words “Powder Carmine” and “Time Story”. If one views these works in a chronological order, he or she would discover that they are all of one entity. Shenyang, a city the exhibition of “Homesick”, has its own unique features. Its industrial background overshadows nearly all of it municipal developments. This imbalance is at once both unique and reasonably absurd. An “industrial city” means too many things, and those arrangements of meaning appear to be somehow silly and trivial, this very type of contrast attracts me the most.
When I review my past work I find that my style of language has changed greatly, but in reality my perspective is becoming clearer and clearer. The elements hidden in my works are gradually being refined. My occupation as a teacher of photography has allowed me to get very used to experimenting with all kinds of ideas. The one that always remains is that the photograph, whether just the product of a technical process or of an artist’s creation, is always the result of a human experience.
dernière modification de cet article : 2008
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