MFA Art Thesis Solo Exhibition
Feb.26-Mar.9 2024
The Goodan Family Graduate Art Gallery 950 S Raymond Ave, Pasadena, CA
In Of Course, Still Here, I use a medium format camera with the Pixel Shift technique to create 400-megapixel images. Through synthesizing and manipulating dozens of photographs into one final image, I collapsed time and space within the photograph, what appears to be authentic and reliable landscapes hide countless artificial compositions and modifications. I aim to create a space between the realm of existence and the photographic illusion. The landscapes indicate a vast artificial reality shaped by collective imagination and rules. These photos question the presence of individuality and authenticity in consumer behavior.
Entertainment activities are a form of commodity in contemporary society. As capitalism tends to commodify everything, it calls out its authority—the authority behind technology, and societal planning—which guides and educates the consumer's mind. Under commercial operations, man-made spectacles emerge, waiting for people to gaze and possess them. As in the caves, lights meticulously craft a sense of mystery and sublimity, inventing, manufacturing, and marketing the relationship between the viewer and the commodities. The commodity is the cave itself as a spectacle, a hyperreality. Even though I'm in Carlsbad Caverns, it feels like I'm at a vista near the Dodger Stadium, watching a noisy carnival. The deliberately arranged lights, narrow crowded pathways, and prominently introduced signs all seem to encourage my gaze and drive my steps to capture everything I see. Such gazes are omnipresent in my life and creative process; I seem to see everything, yet nothing at all.
For me, the process of photography is a critical observation of these scenes and a reconstruction of my past experiences. I have participated in, felt, and perhaps enjoyed, these events as extensions of my will and body, as McLuhan would say, these experiences are massaging me. But what happens outside these seemingly natural and rightful social activities and environments? I am drawn to the occurrence of these events and the social reality they point to. I aim to document and preserve these current thoughts and complex experiences. Thus, I raise my camera to shoot, just like tourists in caves, viewers of SpaceX launches, and concert attendees. I am looking at it from their perspective, but I took a step back and tried to experience the experience itself. As Sontag gave pointed out in On Photography, "Photographs are experience captured, and the camera is the arm of the consciousness in its acquisitive mood." Traces of Bauman's liquid modernity might be found in these photos, where not only people and capital are in flux, but experiences are too, existing in the processes of consumption and tourism, and changing with the collective narrative.