Photos: Yishu Wang
Text: Gina Doubleday, UNESCO
It’s the art of elevating the ordinary: a sea of colourful hats, an empty bridge in a mountain landscape, a crowd of executives in dark suits. In the images of Yishu Wang, everyday objects and settings hint at a separate world. Figures are often photographed from the back, their faces obscured or perhaps shown in a mirror. Images are seemingly random and evoke different moods, from a man holding a goose on a city street to a flurry of snowflakes viewed through a window at night.
Born in Gansu in 1973, and studying literature at university, Wang trained as a photojournalist and travelled across China, photographing major cities, remote villages and everything in between. Yet his own work is the opposite of precise reporting. Although its focus is the ordinary, objects and settings are rendered evocative and elusive, sometimes with a dose of humour. He documents random images which, taken out of context, create their own mysterious world. Even the names of his collections – Borderless, Open ending, Untitled Film – hint at a universal inscrutability and lack of clear definition in everyday objects and locales.
He sometimes shoots fashion, requesting models to be more “real”, rather than favouring classic fashion poses, and his favorite subjects for his own work are fire, clouds, winds, animals and human faces. For all of his photos, he prefers working with natural light and occasionally uses a flash, with little to no post-processing.
His images are scenes in isolation that evoke their own universe, allowing the viewer to project their own interpretation and experience upon them.
