Li Lang + Yuki Onodera
26.02.2022 – 22.05.2022
Curators: François Cheval and Yasmine Chemali
The third exhibition of the Mougins Center of Photography has been conceived through the prism of chance. Through it, we approach a relationship with the unexpected and with the tenuous quest for balance between mastery and letting go that is constantly challenged by photographers.
Who better than the Japanese photographer Yuki Onodera or the Chinese photographer Li Lang to plunge us into a work in progress?
In the time of Pliny the Elder, the idea of chance was already associated with the act of creation. In his work, Li Lang (born in 1969, Chengdu) let chance enter the field of the making and let it provoke the action through a suite of questions that are a priori irrelevant. Li Lang captures one image per minute as he travels in a high-speed train for 4600 kilometers. His journey is accompanied by personal questions asked to fifty volunteers. Is Li Lang the author of an algorithm or the victim of chance?
Fortuitous chance. Lucky/Happy chance. Well-thought chances. Yuki Onodera creates a precise framing to offer a tangible reality that has nothing real about it. In her series “Darkside of the Moon”, she invites the viewer (or imposes to the viewer?) anew temporality, fluid territories, that of a square. The square is by essence the only figure that is not present in Nature; it is contrary to the order of things and a manifestation of Man’s suprematism over Nature.
Both Li Lang and Yuki Onodera remind us, with each gesture and each print, of our relationship to the world. They remind us that “we have modern tools to see everything in the world, to apprehend everything, but [qu’] in fact we see nothing”. (Sophie Riestelhueber in her commentary on Marcel Duchamp’s and Man Ray’s “Dust Breeding”)
Li Lang
Born in Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province in 1969, Li Lang began his career as a photographer in 1990. He currently lives and works in Chengdu.
Through his images, Lang has often explored humanity and desires. Photography serves as a trigger for the awakening of a long-suppressed self.
Lang captures real life events with calmness and precision. He draws inspiration from and includes in his work the life experience of others, with the aim of obtaining more diversified existential experience of ourselves, of others and of life. Lang creates an intangible relationship between people and photography, and makes us think about the relationship between modernity and photography.
Lang has won The Punctum Award at Lianzhou Foto Festival (China, 2019) and the Special Jury Prize (Lianzhou, China, 2015). In 1998, he recieved the top prize of Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography Awards and “The Mother Jones Medal of Excellence” (1998). His works have been collected by many institutions including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (USA), Shanghai Art Museum (China), the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (Spain), Guangdong Museum of Art (China), LUXELAKES- A4 Art Museum (Chengdu, China), White Rabbit Gallery (Sydney, Australia).
The exhibition at the Mougins Center of Photography is his first show in France.
Yuki Onodera
Acknowledged for her original and hand-made work (manual prints on large silver paper, drip painting on black and white prints), her works are present in numerous collections and museums throughout the world (Centre Pompidou, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Shanghai Art Museum, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, etc).
Her main monographic exhibitions took place at the National Museum of Art in Osaka (2005), the Shanghai Art Museum (2006), the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2010, “Yuki Onodera: Into the Labyrinth of Photography”), the Seoul Museum of Photography (2010) and the Musée Nicéphore Niépce of Chalon-sur-Saône (2011, “Yuki Onodera, La photographie en apesanteur”). She also received the Iheï Kimura Prize (2003, Japan) and the Niépce Prize (2006, France).
Yuki Onodera
“Darkside of the Moon” No.3
2021
gelatin silver prints, drip painting, collage on canvas
Triptych 130 x 390 cm
©Yuki Onodera
“Darkside of the Moon” No.5
2021
gelatin silver prints, drip painting, collage on canvas
Triptych 140 x 420 cm
©Yuki Onodera
“Twin Birds” R006
2021
gelatin silver prints
31 x 24 cm
©Yuki Onodera
Cahiers #3
La clairvoyance du hasard
Authors:
François Cheval, András Páldi, Jean Daunizeau, Takayo Iida, Yasmine Chemali, Li Lang and Yuki Onodera.
176 pages
29€
Isbn : 979-10-90698-52-9
Cahiers is a new print journal – independent and quartely.
It positions itself at the intersection of luxury photo book, exhibition catalogue of limited longevity, and book for the general public. Cahiers is simple and spare, a cross between a novel and the reproduction of a probing image.
On sale at the Centre’s shop of photography.
Upcoming Exhibitions
Every day is Saturday
18.06.2022 – 16.10.2022
Photography was not an obvious choice for Tom Wood; his initial training was in painting at Leicester Polytechnic (1973 to 1976). Fascinated by experimental cinema, he then turned to photography, learning about the medium alone.
Self-taught, he remained faithful to chemistry, paper, and the darkroom. He experimented relentlessly with technique, from the simplest to the most elaborate (from expired film to panoramic photography). This is how he developed a style, a unique personal register somewhere between distanced analysis and empathy, between documentary and art, an instinctive photography that mixes the harshness of its settings – we are never far from drama – with tenderness for the people he is photographing. Between 1978 and 2001 Tom Wood, whose Irish family had moved to England, roamed the city of Liverpool with his Leica 35. He painted a portrait of the city and its residents, a modest people, a cohort of unpretentious people, with no other ambition than to capture them as they are. But he is one amongst them, an actor aware of the emancipatory role of photography. For Wood, the photographic act is a narrative whose scope, an epic of everyday life, meticulously, almost obsessively, establishes an anthropological inventory of contemporary culture. A visual anthropology that returns year after year to the same subject, noting the constants and the slight variations. While some documentarians are happy with one narrative, Tom Wood steadfastly explores the situations he photographs. Nothing escapes his incisive regard, the relationship between men and women, solitude but also solidarity, the harshness of times that being part of a community makes more bearable. This candid portrait of the working-class populations in industrial wastelands and abandoned places forms a body of work without equal in contemporary photography.
Tom Wood’s work has only been shown in a few exhibitions in France. At the Centre Photographic GwinZegal in Guingamp, at the Château d’Eau in Toulouse, in 2005.
Curators: Jérôme Sother, François Cheval, Yasmine Chemali
Past Exhibitions
- Date