Your City Is My City
Curator: Cui Bo
The city is not only a polygon mirror reflecting the many sides in the development of human society and civilization, but also an important soil for artists to draw inspiration for ideas. It provides vast space for artists to conduct ceaseless exploration into new thinking and interpret the concept of ‘city first’. How to structure the city in a sustainable way and render it a healthy soul is our longstanding dream for urban development. Shaping a benign relationship and interaction between people, the city and the earth, and creating healthy urban systems, is becoming a topic requiring urgent attention. Mr. Li Shufeng, Academic Director of the Exhibition, said, ‘We aim to sort out the historical memories of the city through the lens of photography, polish up the undertone of Shenzhen as a pioneer of reform and opening up, focus on urban ecology, enrich urban emotions, shape the city image, and build urban culture’, which is in itself a big topic.
This topic leads us to understand a city from strangeness to familiarity, from familiarity to strangeness, from whole to part, and then from part to whole. The faint sense of distance between people and the city allows the latter to become more and more inclusive, gradually fostering a mutually blending ecosystem with respective characteristics in each segment. This system contains both individual cognition and collective memories, as well as independent and shared spaces. Intricate social relations are formed among independent individuals in the interweaving of time and space. This project is about the exhibition of ‘relationship’. I would like to reconsider the historical structure of contemporary cities, the artistic creation of photographers and the idealistic practice of future city in the view of this academic theme exhibition.
This academic theme exhibition is more than a large photography exhibition, but a comprehensive art event of Shenzhen city with the exhibition as the center, consisting of two parts, ‘City Image Texts of 100 People’ and ‘Case Analysis of Two Chinese and Foreign Artists’. When artists walk and wander through the streets of a city, it is a continuous and progressive journey where we come to discover the artists’ critical thinking of social environment, urban spaces and crowds, where both individual and collective memories and experiences will be presented, and changes will be introduced into daily life. The ideological graphics and landscape symbols that have come into being in the context of fast urban development are actually redefining the relationship between images, the public and the city.
In the face of the globalized pandemic today, we hope to re-emphasize the importance of on-site observation with various narrative methods of exhibition, rather than simply creating visual indexes. The study of urban order, urban history and multidisciplinary fields of the city requires exploring and opening up more cognitive channels. Photographs can be used to break down the barriers of thinking in the inquiry into the social reality we are facing. Artists seem to be particularly sensitive to life and what is happening around them, as well as to the circumstances of our times. Their questioning and visual expression of current issues can prompt viewers to think further about the common problems faced by ‘city first’.
Your city is my city. Aim far, stay true.
