Wang Qingsong: Fotofest

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Wang Qingsong, "Fotofest," 2005

inkjet print, 170 cm x 300 cm

This exhibition is selected in 2021 Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver. Wang Qingsong is Capture’s inaugural Printing Prize recipient. The Capture Printing Prize is generously supported by Wesgroup.

Seemingly a humanistic landscape, the photography festival has become an industry chain around photography in modern society. In China, this is referred to as "culture perform on the stage built by economy", but the traditional social form becomes strange under the impact of the western modernization wave. Wang Qingsong's works are deeply inserted into the current situation in China with his unique acumen. He uses images as a weapon and photography as a medium, trying to flip out a kind of criticism of reality, in order to let people laugh when facing his works, so as to experience the absurd essence in the confrontation. "Fotofest" is just such a type of work. The exhibition "Fotofest", taken from Wang's work of the same title, is used as the title of participating in the Capture Photography Festival 2021, giving it another dimension of thinking.

Living and working in Beijing, Wang Qingsong graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and began to engage in image creation in 1996. He has held more than 40 solo exhibitions in many art museums and galleries in domestic and abroad, as well as participated in many important international biennales such as the Venice Biennale. His works have been collected by more than 60 public art museums including the New York International Photography Center, MoMA, and the Getty Museum. As one of the most important artists in Asian photography, Wang Qingsong reshapes the rapidly changing of Chinese contemporary society through photography, with large scales, civilian perspectives and gaudy popular aesthetics, combined with painting, stage and among the other visual languages.

This exhibition is jointly curated by senior Chinese curator Yang Xiaoyan and independent curator Steven Dragonn. Picks from Wang Qingsong’s collection, eight large representative photography combine the context of art history, and two video works are selected to show as a tailor-made exhibition for participating in the Capture Photography Festival.

Curators: Xiaoyan Yang, Steven Dragonn

This exhibition contains work that may not be suitable for some viewers.