Fotopub

Evaporation

Kulturni center Janeza Trdine
opening: thursday, 25th of July, @19.30

Chang's exhibition entitled Evaporation represents a series of images selected from photographer's older projects: revealed to the spectator is a rich collage of images, mostly shot during the period of six years that Chang spent at the FAMU academy in Prague. Photographs were selected both from his several trips around Eastern Europe and those long term projects he had been working on since he moved to Prague in 2003. As the author stated, they represent a kind of a road movie edited and printed on the photographic paper.
Chang's images document his journeys thru this part of the world, yet the context of their emanation remains willfully concealed, if not at least ambiguous and mysterious. The author was not interested in the specifics of individual cultures, events or social topographies: unity of the otherwise fragmented worlds in these images is marked with the vulnerability brought over with every single experience of living in that same world.
Main focus of the series is aimed towards the people in different environments, caught in various situations that further underline attention given to their psychological characterization and interpersonal relationships. The world revealed by these photographs seems often cruel and relentless, but in it one can also discover petite moments of peace and tranquility. Rhythm of the narrative is sometimes calmed with still-lifes or scenes from nature, the ensemble of work being designed as a set of pairs of images that due to their semantic openness form the foundation for a variety of associative transformations and intriguing narrative constellations. The project gains a poetic touch recognizable of the author's style that Chang underlines with intimate textual notes. Handwritten at the edges of the images those bring in additional layers of meaning. Chang's work passes between the subjective and the tendency of lyric descriptionism, between attractiveness and aversion; viewed as whole the exhibition is turning into an intriguing mental map of space and time, where the "evaporation" into the impermanence is bounded by documenting important subjective experience.
Matjaž Brulc

about author:
Simon Chang (Taipei, Taiwan; 1978) is a graduate of the Department of communication arts at Fu-Jen University in Taipei. In 2003 he moved to Prague in the Czech Republic, and enrolled in Master's program in photography at the Prague Film and Television Academy of the Performing Arts (FAMU). Simon has taken stories with deep cultural depth and the reactions of people to different environments as the main topics of his creative work, focusing on marginal people overlooked by mainstream society. Simon was nominated for the Joop Swart Masterclass 2004. He made a record of his time in Prague with two photography books with text: Evaporation and 6 Years in Bohemia.
Simon moved to Slovenia in 2010. For his third volume Midva, which was published by Locus in September of 2011, he turned his focus to the most ordinary and yet most dramatic elements from daily life all around him.
Simon's photography series and video work has been collected by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan, and also the Transitland EUROPA video archive (1989-2009). For his work in the field of photography he received numeruous awards.

odpiralni čas:
23. - 27. july: 12.00 - 20.00
30. july - 17. august: 16.00 - 20.00 (saturdays, sundays & mondays closed)