Opening Ceremony
16.40, Sep.16th
Exhibition Venue
SCA North Wing Ground Floor West Side
展览前言
Introduction
This September, the School of Creativity and Art (SCA) of ShanghaiTech will have the first group of Smart Design undergraduates. To welcome our new arrivals, we hereby launch QU Xinyi’s photo exhibition. Ms. QU graduated from Cardiff University, majoring in International Journalism. She is the engineer at SCA who is deeply involved in the development of general arts courses. Her shooting style combines the documentary truth with artistic ingenuity. Her most recent project, This Equals That, is a new exploration which attempts to transform dialogue into visual language.
SCA has been offering a wealth of art courses and activities, and is committed to boosting students' aesthetic qualities and cultivating artistic abilities. We hereby welcome you to visit this exhibition, hoping that you can see the Ordinary Days and its ingenuity.
WANG Shouzhi,
Vice Dean of School of Creativity and Art
作者自述
Author's Statement
This exhibition presents my photography works and projects from 2018 until now. The photographs complement each other in both visual perception and artistic expression, so as to ignite a strong chemical reaction of 1+1>2. The exhibition contains two parts:
Ordinary Days. Over the past four years, I have photographed local residents and documented the changes of city. My hope was to capture the ordinary but memorable moments in the hustle and bustle life of a city. I walked through the rows of Shanghai longtangs (alleys) and left my footprints on the ruins of neighborhood demolitions. As the number of images increased, I found that these seemingly independent photos shared strong commonalities. They are silent but continuous images, narrating stories that transcend time and space, embodying an invisible connection between people and objects.
Left：Fantasies Behind the Curtain, 2020
Right：In Grey, 2020
Left： Hide and Seek 1, 2019
Right： Hide and Seek 2, 2019
This Equals That is an original photography project I initiated in November 2020, inspired by the photo book of the same name. Each work is composed of two photos. The second photo in each pair is a response to the first one, which was completed by me and another Photographer B”. Despite shot at different times and places, each group of works echo a certain point in structure, color, texture, metaphor or symbolism. It is a project that requires vivid imagination and creativity, and reflects the continuity of photography. Please note that Photographer B” have a wide range of backgrounds, ranging from professional artists to ShanghaiTech’s young scientific researchers. As a result, we can see their unique perspectives.
Left：Lemon Resonance 1 (QIN Qikai), 2021
Right： Lemon Resonance 2 (QU Xinyi), 2021
From the series This Equals That
The American photographer Joel Meyerowitz, when discussing his best photographs, said, “You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there. Art is the projection of real world, so these images truly recorded how I perceived at that moment, and what will others think of themselves when they walk in?
Welcome to the world of 1+1>2.
QU Xinyi
2021.08 Shanghai
关于作者
About Author
QU Xinyi, Cardiff University’s Photographer of the Year 2016, graduated from Cardiff University, majoring in International Journalism. She did a documentary film on assisted suicide and palliative care in the UK. In 2017, she joined School of Creativity and Art at ShanghaiTech as the first curriculum engineer, and helped the school to build up a series of art and design courses from scratch.
Exhibition experience: 庚——疫情中的我们，2020
