Image Tremors (The Wasabi Experiment)
Based in Shanghai I am specialized on capturing common people in their natural environment and circumstances. As documentary photographer I care about an on-par mindset towards my subjects to share the dignity and nature of every single being. My previous work was inspired by the portraits of the 20th century photographer August Sander, who took images of German working class people after the First World War. At that time, photography was not accessible to everyone, and people faced the camera without having been confronted with their own photographic images before. Striving to preserve people’s characters and personalities, I found it particularly difficult to get this kind of portraits in times when social media and digitalization tend to produce a high awareness of one´s personal "image" and a drive to control and build a public persona.
My research is guided by the question of the relation between the freedom to create oneself and the fear of an existence that would be too normal, random or banal. Through my work, I interrogate the relation between the drive to share a controlled image of the self and the question of whether something can exist without being perceived!
In my latest projects entitled "The Darkroom Experiment" and "Image Tremors" I scratch the surfaces of the staged "I" in our contemporary society. In my first experiment, I explored it with enabling people’s ability to orient them visually by situate participants into a totally dark space. What you can see are expressions of fear, anxiety and tension. And in my second experiment, I explore this through the relation with the sense of taste. By asking the participants to eat Wasabi, I managed to loosen their control over their facial expressions and set them out of the comfort zone of their staged self-image. What you can see are spontaneous, deeply honest grimaces and caricatures of themselves.
