Yang Weihan Solo Exhibition: Slow Sketching

The sun-drenched window, a row of ceramic still-life, an elder in the valley, a young person doing basketball shooting without a real ball, a woman under a chaste tree, a universe of stars captured in a piece of glass... Slow Sketching features over ten works, some massive in scale with meticulous detail, while others are small and exquisite, imbued with meanings that extend beyond the frame. Dedicated to exploring the possibility of image making and the materiality of the photographic medium, Weihan keeps capturing moments in continuous memory that flows like slow moving water. The exhibition thus transforms into a surreal scene that compresses time and space.

These works express themselves rooted in narrative and temporality: In the diptych Ceramic Art & Design Lab, Tsinghua University, various ceramic pieces briefly meet on wooden shelves - some might win awards for their creators, while others might be forgotten or even discarded here. The Barefoot Man depicts a person wanting to feel the nature with his naked body, but his momentary impulse is suppressed by his civilized size. Worrying about getting himself dirty, the man in the end compromises by placing his bare feet on his shoes in an awkward position. In Basketball Shooting, a man suddenly does a basketball shooting action on the street - perhaps he is still immersed in a recent game, or the action has already evolved into a personal habit. On the contrary, his companion in front shows no response. In The Retracing and Tian Mi Mi, the artist attempts to reconstruct scenes to physically realize images in the memory, only to find that details cannot be confirmed, and the authenticity of the memory cannot be verified. In Untitled (Eclipse), handmade glass plates are used to capture a partial solar eclipse. In the final print, it is as if the sun becomes a crescent moon, while the impurities and bubbles in the glass transform into a brilliant starry sky.

In Weihan's practice, photography no longer functions merely as a tool for capturing the present moment or reproducing and preserving what is before our eyes. Instead, it becomes a means of perceiving and understanding the everyday. Through his approach, he can repeatedly reflect on the mundane, retrace the encounters between the film and viewfinder, make the present moment an extension of both the past and the future. Weihan summarizes his way of working as "slow sketching," a process through which he suspends and extracts everyday scenes, creating independent spaces seemingly free from the constraints of linear time. In these spaces, he slowly depicts landscapes of his memory. This echoes Roland Barthes' description of the punctum in Camera Lucida: "However lightning-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic."