Liu Silin
Liu Silin, born in 1990, and grows up in Beijing. She studied in the Photography Department of the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. In 2016 she got a Master's Degree at the Information and Design Department of Tsinghua University Fine Arts College. Her practice uses digital images as well as internet transmissions, especially depicting the characteristics and heresies pervading in our consumerist era. At the same time, it tries to use the various conditions availed of forms of photography and images to reproduce the fate and the characteristics of people from different angles. In 2015 she exhibited at Musee de l' Elysee in Switzerland in a show held once every five years,with 50 artists been shortlisted to qualify for "Regeneration" exhibition and publication projects. In the same year, she was shortlisted to be part of the "TOP20" Chinese Pioneering Contemporary Photography.
From personal social network to transnational political affairs, performativity is at stake in almost all aspects in our contemporary world, and Liu Silin’s practice is a reflection and representation of the symptom. In her work, Liu reveals the paradoxical nature of photographic images as “real” media through scene building, rehearsing, role-playing, and other performative activities, blurring the boundaries between the actual and the fictional, the mundane and the ritual, and the private and the public. Whether in photoshopped stills, or as a popular livestreamer, Liu turns in the image of herself to Internet circulation, thus testifying the fate of the image today.
Tang Chao
Tang Chao’s practice surrounds photography and video. A member of the Enemania theater collective, Tang graduated from the experimental images studio at China Academy of Art and is now living and working in Shanghai. His recent works are exhibited at The Nightmare of the Exhibition Part II (Power Station of Art, 2015), Hinterland Project (Guangzhou Times Museum. 2015), and others.
Tang Chao pays great attention to the image ecologies in our daily life. He invites himself to participate different social or corporate affairs, such as criminal police operations in his hometown, and the ID photo machine network in the subway. Through examining and interfering the production, circulation, collecting, displaying and other links in these image ecologies, the artist proposes to ask: what is photography other than being a medium for artistic expression? Tang’s practice not only seeks to answer the ontological questions of photography through investigating its external communication, but also, provokes creativity in these image ecologies which are otherwise austere or mechanical. The artist delves deep into the social scene of the image and contributes to classical photographic discussions with contemporary perspective.
