Feng Yan’s minimalistic images are simply arresting and starkingly beautiful to behold. Images of seemingly ordinary places and corners are imbued with a sense of oppression and tension. The pictures seem to contain more than they show and the viewer is left to wonder why; until he/she realizes that these places are more than what they seem to be.
[all images © Feng Yan]
These ordinary everyday scenes were taken in places of power - government buildings, a close up of Mao’s limousine and the staircase that leads to China’s military museum. His works question the ordinariness of our surroundings through a context of history and politics; the abstraction rendering them strangely surrounded in mystery. What has happened or is happening in and beyond the image?
I am intrigued by how these “stories” or “emotions” become attached to space and our perception of it. If the viewer was not informed of the story behind the images, would the images cease to be as powerful? How does the participation of the viewer and the photographer’s intention work in tandem to bring the images to a new level?
View more in the series on ArtNet. I also found another series of an earlier exhibition here. There’s an interview (in Chinese) here, which talks on a variety of issues, his work and philosophy on photography, and how a Western education has changed the way he approached his work. I’d do a short translation and summarization of the interview if you ask nicely.
5B4 asked the same question about context in his post: la liste
To me, good pictures should encompass context in the pictures; they should be emotive and narrative on their own, without needing a textual description to make it so. Contrast Feng Yan’s pictures to Akash’s. The beauty of Akash’s pictures are that they are so emotive and beautiful on their own (i particularly liked the Ship breaker series ). The socio-context that we are provided from the text merely serves to bring the photos to a whole new level. Emotions that are conjured become a sick sense of unintentional schadenfreude, a myriad of conflicting and stirring feelings. Yet Feng Yan’s pictures to me, say nothing on their own. They wholly require the textual context to make any political statement at all, so to me, these are not the best pictures at all.
Images are created based on the context of the situation and the photographer’s state and mind. We could say that Feng Yan intellectualized his images by subduing the political context around them by abstracting the surroundings. Meaning is added through the viewer’s active participation whereas Akash’s presents the facts as they are, beautified to cause viewers to linger longer than they should.
Both treatments have their own flaws, one could argue thatt Akash’s images are too pretty to become effective agents of change but one must then examine the context from which the photographers wish their work to be seen. Personally, I think both are good but we can’t compare them side by side for they serve different purposes, created from motivations.