Faërie (VI)

About this work

My project <Faërie> explores the traditional Chinese literati gardens with photography. The intellectuals of the old dynasties had built their retirement home with private gardens. As renowned scholar James Cahill wrote in <Garden Painting in Old China>, spending a day in the Garden while a thousand years could have passed outside, and therefore the Garden is a Faërie within the real world. The intellectuals who built them were creators of a Secondary World, in the same way, as English writer J. R. R. Tolkien argued, that fairy-story authors create the Faërie realm. In effect, the garden is a mysterious realm of fairies, ghosts and other supernatural beings, in which our ultimate desire could be fulfilled: Escape from Death. Now the gardens are popular tourist destinations. In my project, I try to transform the noisy tourist attraction into images of mysterious realm, each on one single negative. The photographic images help us to look beyond the material world and find this hidden Faërie, beautiful but illusive, forever an object of human desire. The truth claim still associated with analog photography transforms my creation into belief of such Faërie’s existence.

About the artist

Photographic artist based in Birmingham (UK) and Shanghai (China).

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