10 Chancery Lane Gallery announces their participation in The Armory Show New York 2020 on Pier 94. The Hong Kong based gallery is proudly presenting new photography works by Shi Guorui and sculptures by Wang Keping.
Shi is one of China’s highly acclaimed contemporary photographers and this series entitled, Ab/sense-Pre/sense: Camera Obscura Images of Hudson Valley is a continuation of his body of works utilizing early photographic technologies known as camera obscura to create large-scale pinhole photographs and photograms. Shi has travelled the world transforming a hotel room in Times Square, a guard towers on the Great Wall of China and the San Francisco from the Island of Alcatraz into a light proof room to create his singular long-exposure large-form prints.
Shi Guorui emigrated from Beijing to Catskill, New York in 2014 and became engrossed by the wonders of the landscapes. Shi found a kinship in the hyper-detail of the landscape works by 19th century painter Thomas Cole. Due to the nature of long exposure the photograph is steeped in the essence of still objects while fleeting objects like animals and hikers disappear like ghosts in the photograph, “It reveals so much more than the naked eye can see…That’s why I’m so obsessed with the process,” Shi explains. Kaaterskill Falls, Catskill Mountains entailed 34 hours of exposure alone. Through this technique the image projects a reverse and inverse image of the landscape. The once white waters of the Kaaterskill Falls cuts the image down the center with its inky blackness while the leaves of the surrounding forrest appear like scattered feathers upon the landscape .“The unaided human eye could not register the same depth of focus or level of detail standing in front of the same scene. This extension and expansion of vision offers an opportunity to see the landscape in a new way.” Despite the boundaries of time Shi is uninterested in mere mimicry and instead sees Cole as a contemporary. Shi explains, “Time flies and things change. All the way through history natural scenery and constructions remain, while relevant people disappear… Living in the present, how can we recapture and reproduce historical thoughts, opinions, feelings, or memories by means of photography? And what new experiences and feelings can we come up with during the process of recapture and reproduction” Shi perhaps takes the notion of depiction further as with a new medium comes an expanded worldview.
Wang Keping is a renowned sculptor who lives and works in France. His sculptures are figurative and representational and have a sensuous quality to them. He works primarily in hard woods paying particular attention to the natural elements of the wood itself and incorporating them into his work, such as woodgrain patterns, knots, boils and branches. With a natural intuition of space and balance, his sculptures convey a highly sensual representation of the female body, of couples, mother embracing her child or birds. By revealing the essence of the wood with its grain, knots, curves, or even its flaws, he gracefully inspires subtle emotions that bring the works to life. He describes his sculptural process as a collaboration of what the wood has to give him and what he can bring to the wood.
“These enormous images also request a different relation with time. With so much detail in their panoramic expanse, Guorui’s landscapes cannot be seen all at once. …he is both a viewer, composing and seeing the picture, and also a participant within the camera, existing between the light and landscape. He is both inside and outside of the picture.”
- Thomas Cole Museum
