20x200
Wednesday Edition: Shen Wei
Wednesday greetings, collectors! The Cold of Late Spring '09 still has Mr. Gutierrez and me in its grips, which is beginning to make both of us a little cranky. We've got stuff to do, and we want to suffer no impediments in getting it done. Raul's been busy rolling out all kinds of improvements for the site, modifying the home page to include more images of recent editions and updating the sidebar to include recent media mentions of our talented artists. We're already bumping up against some limitations there — with Alex MacLean, Jorge Colombo and Christian Chaize all worthy of the spots they've earned, we're wondering what we'll do when the next wave of attention hits. For more details check out my recent blog dispatch.
We're also prepping a big announcement, which will land in the inbox of Hey, Hot Shot! list subscribers tomorrow: this year's first 5 Hot Shots! Which means that a day of deliberation awaits me once I'm done introducing today's editions by a Fall 2006 Hot Shot, photographer Shen Wei.
It's both inconvenient and fitting that Shen's midair, en route to China, as I introduce his 20x200 debut. Both of his photographs, Blessing over the Rice Machine, Guiyang, Guizhou Province and Yi, Beijing, are from Chinese Sentiment. In this new series, he's attempting to reconnect to his memories of the homeland he left nearly a decade ago, with a fresh perspective that's influenced by his experiences and accomplishments abroad.
I've known Shen for a while now, and my evolving relationship with him is an excellent illustration of why Hey, Hot Shot! and the gallery are such fulfilling endeavors. The opportunity to work with artists as their careers are taking shape is an honor and a source of inspiration. (And sometimes it's even exasperating!) I watch careers progress with a combination of mama bear pride and curiosity, and I learn a lot from every single artist that I work with. My interactions with Shen have been particularly enriching. Coming as we do from entirely different cultures, I'm continuously fascinated — and often surprised — by how he approaches the world in his work.
Two summers ago, I co-curated an exhibition with Jörg Colberg called A New American Portrait, which included work by Shen. It remains one of my favorite exhibitions, not only because I so enjoyed exhibiting the work that we chose, but also because it gave me cause to consider deeply a genre that's been of abiding interest to me. Releasing Shen's editions has me thinking about it again, and I'm loving the challenge.
A while back, my friend Carolina caught me off-guard with a deceptively simple question. During a conversation about Stefan Ruiz and his amazing telenovelas project, she asked me to compare Stefan's portraiture to Alec Soth's. I started to talk right away, assuming it'd be a cinch to explain because I know both of them and their respective bodies of work pretty well, but I stumbled, and fast. It was hard and I was frustrated, impressed and challenged all at once. What I came around to was this, which I later wrote to Alec in an email:
... when comparing you to Stefan, I decided that your intent is different, and the differences in your intent affect your relationships with your subjects. When I look at your photos, I feel like they [the subjects] are revealing themselves to you, and that the viewer is an outsider who you're allowing to witness that relationship you've forged. With Stefan, I feel like he is persuading his subjects to show themselves to the viewer, and that he is the intermediary who facilitates it. It's hard for me to articulate why exactly, and I wonder how much of my hunch is based on knowing each one of you. I wish I could articulate certain empirical evidence in each of your photos to support the theory, but it's hard to do.
Which brings me back to Shen... his approach, and his results, are somewhere in between those two things. He once explained to me that he uses the fact that he's foreign to disarm people and/or make them feel more comfortable. His accent, his excellent-but-not-perfect-English, his entirely different cultural background — all these things could make him shy and insecure, but instead he uses them to his advantage, making people more comfortable with their own vulnerabilities.
Photographs resulting from this approach form his Almost Naked series. There's an intimacy to these images, often revealing an unguardedness which suggests to me that the subject is perhaps more at ease revealing themselves to a photographer who they see as being "other" — not part of their world, their community at all. I kind of wonder if that assumption extends to who they think his [Shen's] audience is.
That Shen's portraits are suffused with sexuality adds another important layer to the work, especially when you consider the cultural context Shen has emerged from. As he's mentioned in interviews, "Chinese people are much more conservative and isolated than Americans. Chinese people are living in a much stricter society; there are rules and rules that came out of thousands years of history."
These differences are central to Shen's work, and I think it's his enthusiasm about being freed from such conservatism that puts his subjects at ease. His fascination is accompanied by a certain amount of incredulous thrill over the fact that he can ask someone to pose nude and that they will. It's disarming to encounter someone so curious, so genuinely engaged and interested and not in the least bit jaded.
It's not the sensationalism or the taboo that draws him in, it's his appetite for freedom — his own and that of his subjects — which inspires him. With this new project, he is taking everything that he's learned and become through his time in the States and bringing back to his homeland, attempting to recontextualize it there. Both he and his country have changed considerably in the intervening years; what a treat it is to be able to witness the effects of these changes on both shooter and subject.
Wednesday Edition: Shen Wei
Wednesday greetings, collectors! The Cold of Late Spring '09 still has Mr. Gutierrez and me in its grips, which is beginning to make both of us a little cranky. We've got stuff to do, and we want to suffer no impediments in getting it done. Raul's been busy rolling out all kinds of improvements for the site, modifying the home page to include more images of recent editions and updating the sidebar to include recent media mentions of our talented artists. We're already bumping up against some limitations there — with Alex MacLean, Jorge Colombo and Christian Chaize all worthy of the spots they've earned, we're wondering what we'll do when the next wave of attention hits. For more details check out my recent blog dispatch.
We're also prepping a big announcement, which will land in the inbox of Hey, Hot Shot! list subscribers tomorrow: this year's first 5 Hot Shots! Which means that a day of deliberation awaits me once I'm done introducing today's editions by a Fall 2006 Hot Shot, photographer Shen Wei.
It's both inconvenient and fitting that Shen's midair, en route to China, as I introduce his 20x200 debut. Both of his photographs, Blessing over the Rice Machine, Guiyang, Guizhou Province and Yi, Beijing, are from Chinese Sentiment. In this new series, he's attempting to reconnect to his memories of the homeland he left nearly a decade ago, with a fresh perspective that's influenced by his experiences and accomplishments abroad.
I've known Shen for a while now, and my evolving relationship with him is an excellent illustration of why Hey, Hot Shot! and the gallery are such fulfilling endeavors. The opportunity to work with artists as their careers are taking shape is an honor and a source of inspiration. (And sometimes it's even exasperating!) I watch careers progress with a combination of mama bear pride and curiosity, and I learn a lot from every single artist that I work with. My interactions with Shen have been particularly enriching. Coming as we do from entirely different cultures, I'm continuously fascinated — and often surprised — by how he approaches the world in his work.
Two summers ago, I co-curated an exhibition with Jörg Colberg called A New American Portrait, which included work by Shen. It remains one of my favorite exhibitions, not only because I so enjoyed exhibiting the work that we chose, but also because it gave me cause to consider deeply a genre that's been of abiding interest to me. Releasing Shen's editions has me thinking about it again, and I'm loving the challenge.
A while back, my friend Carolina caught me off-guard with a deceptively simple question. During a conversation about Stefan Ruiz and his amazing telenovelas project, she asked me to compare Stefan's portraiture to Alec Soth's. I started to talk right away, assuming it'd be a cinch to explain because I know both of them and their respective bodies of work pretty well, but I stumbled, and fast. It was hard and I was frustrated, impressed and challenged all at once. What I came around to was this, which I later wrote to Alec in an email:
... when comparing you to Stefan, I decided that your intent is different, and the differences in your intent affect your relationships with your subjects. When I look at your photos, I feel like they [the subjects] are revealing themselves to you, and that the viewer is an outsider who you're allowing to witness that relationship you've forged. With Stefan, I feel like he is persuading his subjects to show themselves to the viewer, and that he is the intermediary who facilitates it. It's hard for me to articulate why exactly, and I wonder how much of my hunch is based on knowing each one of you. I wish I could articulate certain empirical evidence in each of your photos to support the theory, but it's hard to do.
Which brings me back to Shen... his approach, and his results, are somewhere in between those two things. He once explained to me that he uses the fact that he's foreign to disarm people and/or make them feel more comfortable. His accent, his excellent-but-not-perfect-English, his entirely different cultural background — all these things could make him shy and insecure, but instead he uses them to his advantage, making people more comfortable with their own vulnerabilities.
Photographs resulting from this approach form his Almost Naked series. There's an intimacy to these images, often revealing an unguardedness which suggests to me that the subject is perhaps more at ease revealing themselves to a photographer who they see as being "other" — not part of their world, their community at all. I kind of wonder if that assumption extends to who they think his [Shen's] audience is.
That Shen's portraits are suffused with sexuality adds another important layer to the work, especially when you consider the cultural context Shen has emerged from. As he's mentioned in interviews, "Chinese people are much more conservative and isolated than Americans. Chinese people are living in a much stricter society; there are rules and rules that came out of thousands years of history."
These differences are central to Shen's work, and I think it's his enthusiasm about being freed from such conservatism that puts his subjects at ease. His fascination is accompanied by a certain amount of incredulous thrill over the fact that he can ask someone to pose nude and that they will. It's disarming to encounter someone so curious, so genuinely engaged and interested and not in the least bit jaded.
It's not the sensationalism or the taboo that draws him in, it's his appetite for freedom — his own and that of his subjects — which inspires him. With this new project, he is taking everything that he's learned and become through his time in the States and bringing back to his homeland, attempting to recontextualize it there. Both he and his country have changed considerably in the intervening years; what a treat it is to be able to witness the effects of these changes on both shooter and subject.