Yijun (Pixy) Liao

[Steve M.]

I stumbled onto this photographer/artist whilst looking up Helen Levitt strangely enough. I like her stuff a lot. This series is called Experimental Relationship. Aren't they all :]

http://pixyliao.com/experimental-relationship/

 

[Colin Corneau]

New or titillating in China (or here 30 years ago) but not actually terribly interesting as a concept, or certainly pictures.
Kudos to her for getting a lot of play for the series, though. That's pretty much Job One for art now, anyway.

 

[Archlich]

New or titillating in China (or here 30 years ago) but not actually terribly interesting as a concept, or certainly pictures.
Kudos to her for getting a lot of play for the series, though. That's pretty much Job One for art now, anyway.

Being based in NY, she is obviously well-versed in contemporary art discourses. Nothing in these pictures are Chinese - except perhaps the race of the characters and the author's name.

So what actually being played here is the identity card. Which has been trendy enough, here, in the past decade.

 

[Agiknee]

Being based in NY, she is obviously well-versed in contemporary art discourses. Nothing in these pictures are Chinese - except perhaps the race of the characters and the author's name.

So what actually being played here is the identity card. Which has been trendy enough, here, in the past decade.

She identifies as Chinese and all her abstracts mention a point of view as a Chinese immigrant. She discusses power, autonomy, sex, gender, and geography and clearly implies a dichotomy between the east and the west. "identity card" calling is not only a ignorant claim but it's discriminatory. As there is no absolute or empirical way of taking photos in the east or here in the west. Chinese photography and art is barely being tapped into. Like you said, the "in the past decade" chinese photography has barely entered our periphery and scope here in the west. Through magazines like aperture and art in america, there has been exposure of avant garde artist from china, and it's barely the tip of the iceberg. To allude that these types of photos were taken in the west first is just foolish, as we have yet to discover photographers out there.


In the 60's and 70's, american art critics and photographers assumed the same thing about soviet photographers and thought western europeans were at the forefront of photography. Then we saw the works of J. Koudelka and it changed everything.

Just within the last year, Aperture discussed soviet works that had never been mentioned or exposed to the west, and it was truly beautiful.

 

[Karlovak]

^Do you have a link for that Aperture discussion?