images_resistance

Images_Resistance “the disappearance of the instant” My work is about a conscious act of “resistance” ... it’s all about questioning the medium ... which is to push photography towards the contemporary. Gilles Deleuze thought “Art” as something that “resists” moved by what he called “an act of resistance”. Andre Malraux was even thinking that Art is the only thing that resists to the death. Regis Debray and Serge Daney talking about cinema was stating that “the real always resists”. “Resistance” is a key trigger in any Art practice and production, it applies obviously to photography. Across time, the “Image” has been viewed as Icon, Idol, Propaganda, Sign, Visual... and often Pretense. But, how much has the “image” been perverted and hijacked in our hyper- ego-era of social media today? Conventional photography aims to capture its “subject” to “report” or to “illustrate”. I tend to define my work as an open invitation to the audience to participate, to enter into a realm that transcends purely the “image” one perceives with one’s eyes ... demanding an “act of resistance” to reality ... simply by seeing beyond what is “just there”. I think the “image” as a frontier (like a door) allowing to welcome but also to magnify diversity when opened, making also possible the “necessary resistance”. The “image” becomes “sacred” in a sense that it is always within limit, framed, protected from any intrusion and suspended in time immortal. You may define me a photographer because I use a Camera but I rather define myself as an artist. I move around, to evoke the “senses”, to manufacture “events”, always with a sense urgency. At the end, the image is an “event”. The main theme of my work is about “the Image”, its influence, its relationship with “the reality” and its ambiguities also. I try to induce a dimension of “time” rather than only space, in other words, to eliminate the captive “instant”. In my work, these “images” evoke depth in the senses from multi-layers of reading and interpretation, which somehow makes them “alive”. Working “in series” adds to the dimension of time. My works are structured through a series of 9 images, more than 60 series to-date, usually big sized. All produced and edited in Asia over a period of more than 20 years. All of the photographic elements that compose my images are shot by me. The creation goes from shooting to editing to the final work.