From scholars’ rocks to the fossils of the future: Five contemporary artists who appropriate the mineral element
From scholars’ rocks to cabinets of curiosities, the curators of the exhibition “ROCKS” offer a cross-section of the rock.
Five artists that reinvent ceramics
Fragile yet solid, traditional yet contemporary, the artists of the exhibition « Bing! Bing! » play with the history and materiality of ceramics to reinvent it.
Zhang Kechun: “It was a form of emotional catharsis.”
Winner of the National Geographic Picks Global Prize (2008) and the Prix découverte des Rencontres d’Arles (2014), Zhang Kechun photographs the landscapes of contemporary China. He became known for his series The Yellow River, created between 2010 and 2015 around the Yellow River.
Zhang Xiao: “The coastline also represented a long journey for me — a search for my own identity.”
As a photojournalist in Chongqing, Zhang Xiao combines a documentary approach with aesthetic exploration to address the human and social consequences of Chinese modernity. He has gained recognition in China and internationally, particularly for his series on China’s coastline.
Chen Ronghui: “The river is not only a reality, but also a metaphor.”
Chen Ronghui’s work focuses on the place of the individual and environmental issues in China. In Freezing Land (2016–2019), he created landscapes and portraits of young people in Northeast China, a former industrial region now in decline.
Luo Dan: “Whether road or river, it doesn’t matter — these places are like stages where different reality shows unfold.”
After years working as a press photographer, Luo Dan traveled across China from east to west, photographing people and landscapes. From 2010 to 2012, he lived in a remote valley in Yunnan within a community whose way of life has remained almost unchanged for a hundred years, and revived a forgotten photographic process: wet plate collodion.
