Photographers Show New Ideas

By Mei Zhong, Fu Shuqing

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Photographers Show New Ideas

By Mei Zhong, Fu Shuqing

第三批“新峰計劃”攝影培育人才Ten talented young photographers in the New Peak Project at the opening ceremony of the exhibition

Faces in 24 Hours caught our eyes as soon as we stepped into the photography hall of the Exhibition of Achievement of New Peak Project. It was late November 2015 and we were at Zhejiang Museum of Art. Altogether 30 artists respectively in photography, painting and calligraphy in the New Peak Project sponsored by Zhejiang Federation of Literary and Art Circles showed what they had achieved in the year.

Faces in 24 Hours comprised two groups of photos, each series displaying the same face photographed over a period of 24 hours. The photographer was Yan Xiang, a graduate student who majored photography at Zhejiang Media College and did this work there. He hit upon the idea in January 2015 when he found himself pressed for time to do photography homework long overdue. He cracked his mind and decided to let the camera automatically take a photo every 15 minutes for 24 hours. He handed in the homework just before the deadline. Then he took the inspiration a step further and trained his camera on the young as well as the old and took continuous photos. He picked two faces to the exhibition.

We were not the only people who marveled at Yan’s works. Some visitors were photographing the exhibit photos one by one.

We talked with Yan at the exhibition hall. He was happy to be at the exhibition. He felt grateful to the project for the opportunity to be seen at the museum, which he thought was a first-class venue for exhibition. Yan Xiang is now a graduate student with Shanghai Normal University. Yan said he felt lucky to be in the project. “I am highly motivated and I feel the pressure,”reported Yan. What would you look like in the photos if you turn the camera at your own face for 24 hours? We asked jokingly and he laughed.

He shared with us what went into this series of photos. He thought what he had done could be described as behavioral art. He meant to remove the disguise and get down to the true nature of individuals.

New Peak is a five-year project sponsored by Zhejiang Federation of Literary and Art Circles. In each year, 30 candidates are chosen. They do field studies, get special trainings, and get one-on-one lessons from masters. This is an effective way for these young talents to learn and grow. The project started in 2013. The year 2015 was the third year.

Through Yan Xiang, we met with Zhao Yangyang and Chen Ronghui at the exhibition hall.

Zhao is a college graduate who studied photography at Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics. She had won several awards at the provincial and national levels for her excellence in photography. Her works at the exhibition gave the visitors an insightful view into Yueju Opera, a local theater genre of Zhejiang Province. She grew up in Zhejiang and the Yueju Opera plays she saw in and outside theater is part of her precious childhood memories. In college, she got the idea of photographing the young artists of the Yueju Opera. Her photos showed a strong sense of aestheticism. She had processed the photographs with chemicals, adding special effects to the images.

Chen Ronghui is now a photojournalist for The Paper, an internet news port based in Shanghai. He studied journalism at Nanchang University. He had won some awards at national and international level. His photos on display featured some theme parks in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, vividly showing the urbanization over the past 30 years. These parks are not just places where people hang out and have a good time. They are physical expression of desires of the whole society. To capture them well, Chen used a Linhof large format film camera. The photographing experience made him slow down in a bid to find the unusual in the usual.

The ten young photographers are young, born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They are professionals with college credentials. Their works showed their personalities, aesthetics and ambition.