Tong Fang

 

Fang Tong | Arte Laguna PrizeFang Tong
Shanghai, China 1969


Swimming pool

Art selection: Photography

Dimensions: 150 x 100 cm

Year: 2021

Technique: Digitally reworked photography

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Description

Silence, mystery, imagination, reverie… antechambers of the illusory, materials with which we must unite the manifestations of the real in order to project our own interpretations, perhaps the last components within our reach that we have left to stop the vertigo of the present and thus be able to would a new universe. Photography has long since ceased to represent reality and entered the path of production of «the real», a kind of elusive, kind and generous chimera with which we can console ourselves from the daily setbacks that overwhelm our lives. If art is a system of representation and, in turn, representation is a system of meanings that questions itself, then photography – as an image – as a way of producing the real is a way of constructing and producing the real, photography – as an image – by confronting the limits of the real with the limits of representation itself, not only becomes a system for creating meaning, but also emerges as a system of production of the real that will allow us another way of seeing and accepting reality perhaps because, in the end, we know that nothing is real. In this series, I added more surreal elements. Just like its title appears, there is a paradoxical meaning. The imaginary world is strangely familiar while the narrative arc takes audiences on a hyper-visual ride through people’s sub-consciousness. I think it is interesting to break photography, which is a very realistic art form, to create a world that looks similar to reality, but is on the edge of surrealism, to embody something deep in people’s minds. I like to explore the world by taking us into the territories of the indefinable and the untranslatable, almost the unreal, as if time and space stopped in a frame of celluloid film, leaving us in suspense as to the resolution of the plot and inviting us to be the ones to decide for ourselves the end of the scene.

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