Organizer: Three Shadows Xiamen Photography Art Centre
Artist: Dang Jiahui
Curator： Xiao Ruiyun
Duration：September 5，2020 - October 8，2020
Opening Ceremony：September 5 15:30
Venue：No. 301, Building 2, Xinglinwan Business Center, Jimei District, Xiamen
Preface
Text/ Ruiyun Xiao
At my first glance at Dang Jiahui's work, it was as if looking at the inside of a kaleidoscope: she extracts emotional fragments out of the relationships, and behind those splendid colors there is a speculative mirror that reflects a unique visual expression. This exhibition can be seen as a private space created by the artist. Women are often regarded as emotional beings, Dang, however, maintains her rationality, intuition, and logical thinking as a creator. With the use of visual languages, she captures those emotional fluctuations in an instant, and presents their complex and fluid states using a different method.
Dang extracted "the most intense feelings and found the connecting point between feelings and the visual language."1 In the series of I Was Wondering, no matter what it is, the melting ice or the crossed lines, they all become metaphors and enters into her work—heavy memories dissolve into water and air, and the lines of relationships tie up the unbearable weight..…. The physical reactions to these emotional relationships describe the ambiguity and struggle experienced by women. If the previous series of work is considered as Dang's fragmented thoughts on relationships, then another series of her work regarding family relations truly explores the nature of family relations to a further extent. Kinship, starts from a set of documentary photos to a complete project concerning behaviors. This series of work defamiliarizes the daily relationship of a family. By adding records of other family interviews, it sorts out a "top secret document" of the family of origin.
Where is the subjectivity of everyone in various relationships? In her work Close Your Eye & See Something, when going deeper into one’s own self, the image one creates according to free will and the image one sees when having the eyes closed combine with the objective portrait of oneself end up reflecting multiple angles of introspection. Intimate relationships focus on the connection between the individual and the other, Dang, however, looks inward from the different dimensions of external relationships. She reflects on the influence of these relationships on women themselves, and at the same time inquires into how to participate in various relationships. No matter what it is, family, friendship, love, or individuality, these units constitute our cognition of the cultural order in a society. Throughout the exhibition, on the one hand, Dang’s work restores and even deconstructs the diversity and complexity of relationships; on the other hand, she breaks away from personal emotions or fragmented expressions through a subjective and introspective perspective. With the use of metaphorical and visual vocabularies, she restructures abstract relationships.
Note: 1 A Solo Exhibition of Dang Jiahui—Interview with Artist
Artist Bio
Dang Jiahui was born in 1998. She explores different possibilities of photography through the extension of personal feelings and emotions. She expresses her explorations and thoughts concerning various problems with the use of image language. She makes efforts to capture fantasies and finds herself in her own work.