Tan Chui Mui

  • Tan Chui Mui Just Because You Pressed the Shutter? 'A photo captures a certain landscape. But the landscape is always...

    Tan Chui Mui

    Just Because You Pressed the Shutter?

     

    "A photo captures a certain landscape. But the landscape is always there.
    You didn’t make the camera. So why is the photo yours?
    Is it because of your composition? Just because you pressed the shutter?"
    —— Tan Chui Mui
     
    Before answering the question pointed out by Tan Chui Mui, we could, perhaps, think a little further into the essence. A mechanical shutter can be barely seen today, while an electronic shutter is evolving into a touchscreen and an electromagnetic mechanism beneath the surface. The "window" through which people used to capture images has been diasporic and embedded into the image itself.
     
    With the development of imaging technology, the physical imaging method originating in the 19th century has been replaced by mobile communication devices of the 21st century. Today, perhaps it is technology, rather than freedom, that leads the people. Everything is ephemeral in a time when everyone can be a photographer. However, what remains eternal in our times? Will the human passions and desires hidden behind imaging technology always remain the same?
     
    When I discuss photography art, I find that it has diffused into everyone's daily lives and works. Today, the art of photography is the art of image making. In that case, I try to focus my curatorial lens on non-traditional photographers in “Discovery Award” so as to open up our understanding of contemporary photography by presenting the thoughts and works of the image makers.
     
    Thus, I am wondering how a filmmaker understands the image. I suppose director Tan Chui Mui’s images are inseparable from her experience, literature, and day-to-day observations of life. How does she make images?
     
    Tan Chui Mui’s solo exhibition is an answer to that. It’s a multi-dimensional experience - about her hometown Kinmen. The exhibition, at the same time, seems like a monumental image with multiple layers, both visible and invisible. Ones can be seen in the exhibition space include a video tour based on Google Maps, an old black-and-white family photo giving a sense of history, several photocopies of maps, a short film and several documentary footages, and an image of two people standing in a sorghum field... While the others are not in the exhibition space and remain invisible to the naked eye: satellites in low-Earth orbit, a camera disappearing in space and time, boundaries determined by agreement and blood, screen acting and travels, and photos generated by artificial intelligence... Corresponding to each other, the visible and the invisible reflect Tan Chui Mui’s emotions about her ancestral hometown in the visual forms and the image making mechanisms, respectively.
     
    In Just Because You Pressed the Shutter? a map is an image, a film is an image, and the sun, the air, the rain, the soil, potatoes and sorghum surrounded by a fence are all images. Hometown is also an image.
     
    However, Tan Chui Mui never pressed the shutter to obtain these images.
  • ARTIST: Tan Chui Mui At the age of 5, Tan Chui Mui made a small wooden stool. At 8, she...

    ARTIST: Tan Chui Mui

     

    At the age of 5, Tan Chui Mui made a small wooden stool. At 8, she drove a pick up truck onto a column. At 9, she printed a children's magazine. At 12, she finished reading an Encyclopedia. At 17, she had a column in a student weekly paper. At 21, she received a computer animation degree. At 27, she made her first film LOVE CONQUERS ALL. At 38, she gave birth to a child. At 41, she decided to learn martial arts.

  • CURATOR: Wang Yiquan Wang Yiquan is an active figure in China’s contemporary art scene as a curator and an artist....

    ©Wang Yiquan. Photo: JJYPHOTO

    CURATOR: Wang Yiquan

     

     

    Wang Yiquan is an active figure in China’s contemporary art scene as a curator and an artist. His creative practice and research interests lie in film, performance art, urban space, and the relationship between art and economy. Having devoted himself to a diverse set of intertwining issues for over a decade, Wang's artistic approach and development are multi-faceted yet highly integrated.

     

    Curating exhibitions and planning art programs are integral aspects of Wang's artistic practice. In 2018, he served as the co-curator of the second Contemporary Theatre Biennale, Shenzhen, where he produced a series of performance art by artists in parks, urban villages, and squares outside the theatre and white cube context, reflecting the new directions of Chinese contemporary art. In 2019, he presented a city curating project titled Streetwise, in Shanghai’s Xintiandi, featuring live art and happenings with the street as the background by creative practitioners and artists. In 2021, jointly commissioned by Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum and Shanghai Vanke, he curated the survey exhibition Meditations on the Urban Spectacle in the historic building of Sun Ke’s Villa, reflecting the relationship between the city and art. This year, his research and curatorial project FELLOWS opened at the SNAP(The School of Visual Arts New York City’s Art Platform in Shanghai), focusing on Chinese Post-1980s artists and investigating this unique generational and cultural phenomenon.

     

    In the 8th Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, Wang Yiquan takes image making as the key curatorial concept and explores the new mechanisms of the production of images in today’s contemporary life and future imaging. He nominated and curated Malaysian Chinese filmmaker Tan Chui Mui’s solo exhibition Just Because You Pressed the Shutter? and Shanghai young artist Xia Chengan’s solo exhibition Xia Chengan: Artificial Charisma to compete for the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award. The former uses maps, live surveillance video, and AI-generated images to recall the memory of the hometown. The latter starts from individual experience and expresses the charisma and allure of global circulated images with the artist's maximalist more-is-more aesthetics.

  • Tan Chui Mui, Scattered Lands, 2022. Documentary film, 2 min 28 sec, 1080P, Colour, Sound. Courtesy of the artist and Da Huang Pictures.

  • Tan Chui Mui, Scattered Lands, 2022. Documentary film, 2 min 28 sec, 1080P, Colour, Sound. Courtesy of the artist and Da Huang Pictures.

  • Tan Chui Mui, South of South, 2006. Still short film picture, 11 min, 1080P, Colour, Sound. Courtesy of the artist and Da Huang Pictures.

  • Tan Chui Mui, South of South, 2006. Still short film picture, 11 min, 1080P, Colour, Sound. Courtesy of the artist and Da Huang Pictures.

  • The cadastral map of Tan Chui Mui’s property in Kinmen, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

  • Tan Chui Mui, /imagine prompt:  "a photo shot in 2004 in Kinmen Island of two men determining boundary of two sorghum fields --ar 3:4--upbeta", 2022. Digital image, generated by Midjourney AI. Courtesy of the artist. 

  • Tan Chui Mui, /imagine prompt:  "a photo shot in 2004 in Kinmen Island of two men determining boundary of two sorghum fields --ar 3:4--upbeta", 2022. Digital image, generated by Midjourney AI. Courtesy of the artist.