YAN YIBO: CHAOS

YAN YIBO

CHAOS

CURATED BY SHI HANTAO

There can be no doubt that Yan Yibo’s guerrilla photography of streets and parks belong to the canon of urban photography. This is particularly true of modern Shanghai, where he follows the photographic tradition begun by Zhang Cai and Jin Shisheng in the thirties and forties: capturing everyday moments with a camera. What is being created is not simply a record of daily life, but more a way of representing an essentially urban form of vitality.

Walter Benjamin quoted a passage from Baudelaire’s poem “The Sun“ from Flowers of Evil which goes, “I alone try my fanciful fencing, scenting in every corner the chance of a rhyme.“ Then there was the day when I pushed open the door to Yan Yibo’s apartment, and saw a bamboo sword leaning there. Ever since, his photos have brought this poem to mind. The poet imagined himself as an urban swordsman. However, when the Parisian arcades of the 19th century morphed into a Shanghai or a Tokyo of the 21st century, people could no longer escape the randomness of the countless strangers that surrounded them. What better than to use a handheld camera as one’s weapon? 

Despite Benjamin’s nostalgia for classical heroism and Baudelaire’s taunt on a desolate urbanity, under their pens, the 19th-century European capitals lacked neither romance nor a sense of hope. As with Erwitt's New York or Bresson’s Paris, even lonely and absurd scenes are em- bued with warmth and humor. Yan Yibo's "undercurrent", the dark- ness he teases out from the shadows, is forcefully depressive. His subjects are inexplicably embedded in their gloomy backgrounds. The blurred images of the Chaos series are captured in the click of a shutter, revealing only an outline, details and truth disguised. Yet the blurred field of each photo resonates with power, as if a sc-ifi monster might appear at any moment. The tension takes us close to Weegee’s late night Paris, Diane Arbus’s Central Park, or even the basements of Roger Byron and Sodeck. As in the words of the artist himself, "Maybe, or definitely, I’m one of them."