Photo © Jin Li
Talent of the Year 2020 - NOMINEE: Jin Li
Secret City
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The Secret City project started since 2015, it is an on-going work. It was developed through translating the memory of my personal experience into photographs. Memory for me is a dilemma, there are lots of experiences that I am unwilling to face but cannot be ignored, including leaving, losing and forgetting. This project is a way to face them. These 10 images in this group were selected. The works focus on three aspects: space, objects, and body. Each photo has an independent narrative, and the concept of a fictional city is formed by combining them. I am interested in things that has been both familiar and uncomfortably strange when I look at. Then I was attempting to associate the idea with my own memory to translate a reality that I feel both familiar and fearful about. In other words, I try to build a virtual city by using those real things. I deliberately erased the space-time relationship in works. Using different materials in scenes, such as sculpture, gunpowder, models, I tried to photograph them as fragments of my flashback by mixing colour and black-white films. Combining these fragments together, it produces a fictional city that explores the memory, emotion and history of an individual’s experience. Facing personal memory, I am interested in how functions of the image apply, and how scenery influences the image itself. And I am testing how an ambiguous narrative in my work can be taken shape when putting them together.
About author:
Jin Li(b.1988) is an artist and lecturer of an uni based in Hangzhou, China. She finished her Master’s degree in Fine Art Photography from Royal College of Art, London. She works with photography and sculpture and has devoted herself to focus on the research of the relationship between objects and individual history. She was a finalist for New Mountain Plan 2020 and one of the winners of outstanding award in China Youth Photography Exhibition. Her works has been featured in exhibitions in the UK and China, including:
2019 Secret City (Solo), Lishui International Photography Festival, Lishui, China
2015 Making Language, SiFang Space, Shanghai, China
2015 Royal College of Art Degree Show, Sculpture Building, London, UK
2015 Exit Strategies Book Launch, Le shop, London, UK
2015 Off Print, Tate Modern, London, UK
2015 Secret Card, Dyson Gallery, London, UK
2014 Working in Progress, Henry Moore Gallery, London, UK
2011 China Youth Photography Exhibition, The Beijing World Art Museum, Beijing, China
About author:
Jin Li(b.1988) is an artist and lecturer of an uni based in Hangzhou, China. She finished her Master’s degree in Fine Art Photography from Royal College of Art, London. She works with photography and sculpture and has devoted herself to focus on the research of the relationship between objects and individual history. She was a finalist for New Mountain Plan 2020 and one of the winners of outstanding award in China Youth Photography Exhibition. Her works has been featured in exhibitions in the UK and China, including:
2019 Secret City (Solo), Lishui International Photography Festival, Lishui, China
2015 Making Language, SiFang Space, Shanghai, China
2015 Royal College of Art Degree Show, Sculpture Building, London, UK
2015 Exit Strategies Book Launch, Le shop, London, UK
2015 Off Print, Tate Modern, London, UK
2015 Secret Card, Dyson Gallery, London, UK
2014 Working in Progress, Henry Moore Gallery, London, UK
2011 China Youth Photography Exhibition, The Beijing World Art Museum, Beijing, China