Arles 2018

Feng Li brings « White night » to Arles this summer!

After winning the Jimei X Arles Discovery Awards last November (2017), Feng Li will be showing the « White night » series at Les rencontres de la Photographie (Arles 2018)   under the Emergences section featuring a trailblazing festival that seeks tomorrow’s talents.

The show, curated by collector and artist Thomas Sauvin, the french man behind Beijing Silvermine, will show some of Feng Li’s classics as well as new shoots, all photographs being part of the same, consistant and continuous work labeled as White Night.

« White night »’s  classics and new shots

The exhibition intends to mirror Feng Li’s abundant production and uses a straight forward display, just as dense as on his Instagram account. Big and small pieces of the series will be showed, including some seminal shots dating back from 2005 and some others shot during the last 6 months. Abundance and straight forwardness, these are the two main lines of the exhibition.  Not that stage design isn’t taken into account, but just because it is mandatory to translate the continuous flow and fluid approach which characterizes Feng Li’s  practice.

Feng Li’s talent indeed relies on the stubborn regularity of his photo practice. Every single day, may he be in his hometown Chengdu or in some spooky new town of China, he just catches weird, beautiful and awkward people and scenes. Within his lens, reality just goes over to the fiction side even though it is never really planed or intended. Can things really look that weird? Obviously, yes.

And don’t think that Feng Li’s distorting eye only works in China, it functions anywhere people are, anytime they put their bodies in strange postures without realizing; sometimes, even landscapes too have a fixed grin on Feng Li’s photos, that’s just how he sees things and how they appear to him. So if you see an agile Chinese dude moving swiftly through the crowds of photo people and audience with a camera and a flash, you’ll know it’s Feng Li. Watch out, you might be in his lens already without knowing.

Where, when ?

Feng Li’s exhibition will run from July 2nd to September 23rd at Maison des Lices.

Stay tuned for more information.