Strange Days
The wild, elegant, young, intimate, and rakish passions, the wasted intimacy of youth and love, the enviable aura and fashion, and the mysterious flowers deep in the Himalayas are all dreamy illusions.
Sun Ruixiang's impulse to take photographs started with runway shows, and his work is often driven by his innate intuition. His pictures have a fluid wildness, sincerity, and directness, full of sensuality and vitality. In contrast to other runway photographers, he was an insider because he was a model, so he was training his lens on his own world, instead of objectifying his subjects.
After several years of working closely with Karl Lagerfeld, he gained insight into this glittering world. Commercial photography became an important part of Sun's work after he returned to China, as well as his interface for energy exchange with the world. He always has an impulse to escape, hoping that it will allow him to constantly search for and explore the mysterious power flowing in his life. Reading Carl Jung's works of psychology and regular practice in the mountains are part of this search.
Strange Days reveals Sun Ruixiang's inner world. Whether focused on the backstage area of a Paris show, a happy hour with close friends, or the hunt for wildflowers at the foot of the Himalayan mountains and in the Golden Triangle, the works present the ideas of search and flow in his life. Every fragment of life blossoms, then withers.
His backstage shoots in Paris represent the end of an era. The models shine like goddesses on the stage; they are legends that have faded, and they represent moments full of sensuality, desire, and beauty. The fantastic nights he spent with friends in Shanghai were infused with youth, ignorance, intimacy, alcohol, dreams, and parties. The air was heavy with sweetness and squandered youth. These photos were taken within an emotional bubble, moving from one embrace to the next. However, all lights are extinguished in the end.
Sun Ruixiang says that he had been looking for the perfect "animus" to represent his lifelong yearnings, his fears, and his desires.
He seemed to feel that power when he captured the gentle sway of a Himalayan blue poppy. He said this poppy is what Green Tara holds in her hands, representing the past, present, and future. In life, blooming must be followed by withering, and a feast ends with a departure. All endings exist in synchronicity.
The exhibition "Strange Days" does not display Sun Ruixiang's three series separately; because they are synchronized, this moment of life must contain a future moment. What is loneliness, warmth, burning, and emptiness?
In a glitzy fashion show, we see a thousand beauties joined in sorrow. At the foot of an uninhabited mountain, youth blooms like wildflowers, but time is like snow burying them.
Strange Days has the living rhythm and melody of an impromptu jazz performance or a babbling brook. Emptiness is part of it, but its only purpose is, unquestionably, to manifest the full enjoyment of life.
Aticle: Shen Qilan
Photos: Sun Ruixiang
Dream.2009
Bubbles.2011
Friends.2011
