Ji Zhou Fiction

Exhibition Dates : 2019.8.3 - 9.1

“The credence that could no longer be given to realities understood in the form of images, was now being given to realities understood to be images, illusions.”

- Susan Sontag

“Photography is a way in which to observe the world, and it is the photographer’s job to frame it.”
- Ji Zhou

Boers-Li Gallery is delighted to present Ji Zhou’s solo exhibition “Fiction” on August 3, showing the artist's most recent series of photographs and light box installations.

Compelled by a personal sentiment towards a world that is becoming increasingly fragmented, segmented and dissonant, particularly as a result of constantly renewing technologies, Ji Zhou adopts the medium of photography to convey his mediations between reality and illusion, nature and artificiality, as well as the mutual impacts from these dichotomies.

Through his observations, the artist noted that the impetus of capturing a scene or an object with a camera often comes from the appeal of a specific detail within a larger context. However, the photograph taken would encompass myriads of details to constitute the entire image. The variations in the perception of these details hence alter the understanding of the whole. To translate these notions into his practice, Ji Zhou addressed two of the most fundamental variables, temporality and spatiality, and both are represented through the three series of works on view in this exhibition.

For Park (2019) and Greenhouse (2017-2019), Ji Zhou takes pictures of a place, ranging from public parks to greenhouses, at different times and alternative angles. Then, he disassembles these images into fragments and recombines them into a collage to show the integration of time and space. Ji Zhou intentionally chooses locations such as greenhouse and public parks for their ambiguity in artificiality and nature. His interpretation of these composite sites through the approach of collage further enhances the fragmentations of reality. Although Fiction (2019), adopts a similar approach, the artist demands the viewer to engage optical tactic in perceiving the relationship between the image in the light box that the image would only be seen at a specific angle, to its backdrop.

Previously, his photo series Maps (2013-2017) has already given us clues for shifting towards exploring the dichotomous relationships between the real and the fictional, nature and artificiality. By constructing these hollow sculptural forms of natural landscapes, and covering them with maps (a translated perception of nature), and then captures them on photographs, Ji Zhou asks the viewer to re-examine our perception of these seemingly opposing notions through these layers of mediation. Furthermore, his earlier practice includes Dust series that explores the perceived image of hand-assembled objects, rendered in monotonous grey as a mean to focus on the shape and form of these sculptures; Civilized Landscape, where he explores illusory landscapes created by mankind: using maps and books, he sculpts mountains and skyscrapers in carefully placed installations before photographing the compositions. Through these illustrations of the world, Ji Zhou constructs an understanding of the world around us.