The Garden of Earthly Delights_LDN2022
The picture material for this work came from the WeChat trading groups where Londoners sell second-hand items. Looking at the broad collection of items for sale, images of the vendors appear to materialise. A student, selling a guitar and textbooks and another person offering whiskey and a designer leather jacket. Each image triggers Sophie Calle-style voyeurism: who is the vendor? What are the stories behind all those poor-quality, mediocre photos of used things? Could a person be defined by the objects we buy and sell? The nervous thrill of observing people's private lives through the WeChat 'peephole', which keenly tracks the daily changes, mixes with the moral dilemma of plundering real life for the sake of art which is not immune to the voyeurism embedded in our online culture. I use Hieronymus Bosch's “The Garden of Earthly Delights” as the base of his work, using archival photographs and collages in a Dadaistic contrast to the early triptych form. I try to explore the relationship between consumption and identity while faithfully documenting and analysing real life, as well as provoking discussions of privacy and boundaries.
Although I'm not the one who presses the shutter to take the photos, this piece fits some of the qualities of the medium of photography: evidentiality and low barriers to entry. The work takes advantage of the fact that everyone can now easily take pictures with their mobile phones. And it discusses the evidential force of photographs.
exhibited at:
NordArt 2023, Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf/Rendsburg, Germany
I SAW IT ON TV - International Body of Arts, Copeland Gallery, London, United Kingdom
The picture material for this work came from the WeChat trading groups where Londoners sell second-hand items. Looking at the broad collection of items for sale, images of the vendors appear to materialise. A student, selling a guitar and textbooks and another person offering whiskey and a designer leather jacket. Each image triggers Sophie Calle-style voyeurism: who is the vendor? What are the stories behind all those poor-quality, mediocre photos of used things? Could a person be defined by the objects we buy and sell? The nervous thrill of observing people's private lives through the WeChat 'peephole', which keenly tracks the daily changes, mixes with the moral dilemma of plundering real life for the sake of art which is not immune to the voyeurism embedded in our online culture. I use Hieronymus Bosch's “The Garden of Earthly Delights” as the base of his work, using archival photographs and collages in a Dadaistic contrast to the early triptych form. I try to explore the relationship between consumption and identity while faithfully documenting and analysing real life, as well as provoking discussions of privacy and boundaries.
Although I'm not the one who presses the shutter to take the photos, this piece fits some of the qualities of the medium of photography: evidentiality and low barriers to entry. The work takes advantage of the fact that everyone can now easily take pictures with their mobile phones. And it discusses the evidential force of photographs.
exhibited at:
NordArt 2023, Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf/Rendsburg, Germany
I SAW IT ON TV - International Body of Arts, Copeland Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Installation photos at NordArt 2023:
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