Fotografiska Shanghai

Fotografiska Shanghai is a chain art institution dedicated to photography and visual art exhibitions, along with related merchandise. Since their official website and social media do a relatively thorough job of promotion and marketing, I won't repeat that here. You can refer to https://shanghai.fotografiska.com/en, where you'll also find detailed introductions to the current exhibitions.

When I visited today, perhaps because it was a weekend, the art center was quite crowded. Compared to many contemporary art exhibitions that see very few visitors, Fotografiska Shanghai benefits from being housed in a historic building along Suzhou Creek. The ground-floor café and creative merchandise shop attract many passersby, which in turn builds foot traffic for the exhibitions upstairs. Currently, the center is hosting four photography and visual art exhibitions: 1) Tony Oursler's "Machine Crystal," a large-scale art installation combined with video projection; 2) Vivian Maier's "Unseen Works," a photography exhibition; 3) Lin Zhipeng's "No Privacy Under the Sun," a photographic art exhibition; 4) Huang Peishan's "Check in the Curtain," a photography and installation art exhibition.

Since the official website already provides introductions to the exhibitions, I'll skip the basics here. I'd like to briefly share my impressions from viewing the shows, all based on my limited experience appreciating visual art.

Exhibition 1 is an extremely visually engaging work. Light and video are projected onto dark backdrops and crystal-shaped installations, creating dreamlike colors that are both dazzling and mysterious. After looking for a while, viewers inevitably begin to wonder why the images projected onto the crystal surfaces overlap and layer the way they do. This is, of course, one of the artist's intentions: to merge art with engineering, to let images reveal more possibilities through the unique structures of crystals, and to offer viewers a richer experience.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/84548f_7819c41192bb4715b44caef522ed7ff1/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Exhibition 2 documents and showcases the photographic works of Vivian Maier, a French-born photographer who lived in America. This "ordinary" photographer used her delicate eye to capture the urban landscapes and human character of New York and Chicago from the 1950s through the 1990s. The people in her works are mostly everyday citizens on the street, and the scenes are mostly slices of daily life. In an era when photography technology advances rapidly, what we feel most from these works is how one ordinary "amateur" photographer used her passion and persistence to record a chapter of history.

Exhibition 3 forms a stark visual contrast with the black-and-white works of Exhibition 2. Its highly saturated visual impact conveys the theme the artist wishes to express: all that is hidden in desire.

Exhibition 4 is my personal favorite. Artist Huang Peishan uses Photoshop and AI technology to combine subjects of different sizes photographed in different settings through editing and compositing, blending them into a single work. The results appear seamless at first glance yet convey a certain surreal atmosphere. The artist uses gauze, wood, metal, and resin to create frames, window mullions, curtains, or neon letter signs, layering them at different depths to give the images a sense of three-dimensionality and space. It is very novel and captivating.

Here, weekend admission costs 100 RMB per person, and a visit takes about an hour and a half.