by Jasmina Trifoni
A couple of weeks ago, we at Frames were at Paris Photo, the world’s most prestigious fine-art photography fair. There, beneath the monumental cast-iron and glass vaults of the Grand Palais, we discovered several extraordinary artists whom—culpably—we did not yet know. Artists we are delighted to introduce in this and the upcoming posts of this column.
We begin from afar, by telling you about RongRong & inri, the Sino-Japanese couple who have played—and continue to play—a pivotal role in contemporary photography in China, overturning the established ways of reading a form of expression that until then had been largely Western. Since the 1990s, they have made a decisive contribution to photography’s triple somersault, renouncing its traditional documentary role—and, in the East, its function as propaganda—to transform it into an utterly original art form, capable of capturing with explosive force the rapid social upheavals, forced urbanization, and the search for a new cultural and national identity. They explored new conceptual modes of expression, making extensive use of performance.
Their partnership, in art and in life, began in 1999 when RongRong—born in 1968 in Zhangzhou, Fujian province, and trained in Beijing within the community of artists on the fringes of what is now known as the capital’s East Village—was invited by a Tokyo gallery thanks to the reputation he had gained abroad as editor and author of New Photo. This publication (perhaps more accurately described as a fanzine), issued for two years and immediately censored at home, featured his own photographs and those of fellow artists from Beijing’s underground art world, accompanied by brief, incisive articles of fierce, dark-toned social critique.
Titled Wedding Gown, the exhibition brought together a series of images—of RongRong, naked, alongside a woman in a wedding dress, set in the landscape of an abandoned village gradually engulfed by flames—that reflected his state of mind at the time, as he was being sought by Chinese authorities on charges of pornography and antisocial behavior. Among the visitors to the show was inri, a young woman (born in 1973) who, after working as a photojournalist for Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s leading daily newspaper, had chosen a freelance career to focus on a more intimate and experimental photographic research. Deeply struck by what she would later describe as the “irrecoverable loneliness” of RongRong’s photographs, she approached him, overcoming her characteristically Japanese shyness. She did not speak Chinese. He had learned only one word of Japanese: arigatō (“thank you”). Yet, despite the lack of a shared language, they recognized one another instantly and began to communicate by tracing ideograms on each other’s palms.
In the months that followed, the two maintained an intense correspondence by fax, exchanging hundreds of photographs—and falling hopelessly in love. A year later, inri flew to Beijing: their first work together dates from 2000 and is titled The Great Wall, where the camera acts as a third eye, portraying the two lovers in the immensity and solitude—almost post-apocalyptic in feel—of the Great Wall landscape and the Jiayuguan desert.
Just twelve months later, it was RongRong who flew to Japan to marry inri. Their decidedly unconventional honeymoon is narrated in the series In Fujisan, Japan (2001), in which the couple staged a performance on a frozen lake beneath Mount Fuji, appearing naked in a hostile environment to symbolize timeless love and, at the same time, the vulnerability of their era—also shaken by climate change.
While this work, now exhibited in major museums worldwide, is among the most famous by RongRong & inri, the most poetic and heartrending is Liulitun (2003), which captivated us at Paris Photo. It takes its name from the neighborhood—a sort of village within the metropolis, made up of small, traditional brick houses—where they lived in a kind of happy creative utopia during the first two years of their life together. When they learned that this cluster of houses was to be demolished to make way for skyscrapers, they gathered intimate images imbued with urgency that force us to confront the human face of what is lost in the name of progress. The small, individual stories of daily life and loss experienced by RongRong and inri thus become metonymies—parts standing for a whole—of the widespread and aggressive phenomenon of massive demolition and reconstruction that characterizes contemporary China.
The project culminates in a moving performative series: on the gray winter day when the workers arrive with bulldozers to raze their world to the ground, RongRong & inri stage and photograph a performance that, with two hundred white lilies, celebrates the funeral of their beloved home. And when nothing remains but bricks and pieces of wood, shattered glass, they curl up together in the gutted womb of their house’s structure, literally clinging to the bouquet of funeral flowers, like a pair of exhausted, disoriented refugees.
Later, RongRong & inri found a new home in the Beijing district of Caochangdi (itself a relic of traditional China), now a vibrant artists’ community. Here they expanded their family—they now have three children—and in 2007 founded the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, the country’s first independent center dedicated, of course, to supporting emerging talents in Chinese photography. The center’s name is inspired by a phrase from the 6th-century BCE Chinese mystic and philosopher Laozi: “The Way gives birth to One; One gives birth to Two; Two gives birth to Three; and Three gives birth to the ten thousand things.” Hoping that shadows—namely photography—might be a source of infinite possibilities and cross-pollinations, the center’s architecture was designed by the most famous contemporary Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei. In 2015, they also founded a branch in Xiamen, Fujian, where they have since organized the Jimei × Arles International Photo Festival every year—the most important photography event in the East—in collaboration with Les Rencontres d’Arles.
Crowning this extraordinary partnership, in 2016 RongRong & inri received the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award from the World Photography Organisation (WPO), an honor previously bestowed on giants such as Marc Riboud, Eve Arnold, Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt, and Sebastião Salgado.
In China, however, they continue to be obscured—to put it mildly.
This Post Has 0 Comments