Sep 18th
This weekend I went to see a Chinese artist Xiuwen Cui’s photography exhibition called “Existential Emptiness”. Her works gave me a really deep impression.
Overview her works are totally black and white color. In my opinion, this series works has a really specific artistic conception, which is a traditional Chinese landscape-painting feeling through the whole series works. These beautiful works combine Chinese ink landscape painting with conceptual photography together. One of the important elements in Chinese painting is negative space. It can make the artwork have blank space to make people think more about the work and themselves. Negative space can add more artist feeling and good composition for the artwork; at the same time, it can have a communication between artwork and viewers. So, Cui used those advantages of negative space in her own works. In her exhibition, most of her work has a wide negative space like a quiet space to make viewers to fall in her work and try to figure out what she try to tell us through the picture. In this series works have a lot of strong contrast in color, in space, and the elements of the works. As for color, black and white use their strong contrast to the time and space directly separated. Everything is really quite and looks stop in the picture. In visual, the color is really simple and clear, but it already shows you everything in a strong way. For space of her work composition, she used a lot of blank space. It looks nothing in there, but actually that is important. It is the place to let you communicate your idea and thinking with artwork. In some case, that blank space even important than other color images. The main characters in this series works are two short hair girls with skirts. One of them is a real person and the other one is a plastic model with the looking as that real model. This strong beauty contrast looks tell us more stories about this work.
Xiuwen Cui has a good skill to show her work in a strong way. I like the way she shoot. When I try to understand more about her concept, she just told me she shot this in a really cold and high altitude mountains in north of China. The white negative spaces which viewer interested are all snow. This answer prove my personal understand about those negative space. Blank is a high artistic level. Simple, but it has more stories to tell you and attach you.
After I do some research about this artist, I found she has graphic design and painting background. More experience and different background always helps more about create artwork. Different perspective understanding for one work can make artwork’s meaning go deeper, so that’s why her work looks so different. When I was little, I dreamed to be an artist in the future. Later, I became a designer, but I never give up my artist dream. Now I am working on fine art with design thinking. I wish my photography work could more thoughtful.
