My works in the past few years mostly tried to tell stories about a person or a place, and communicate with viewers about some issues happening around us (environmental crisis, gender inequality, discrimination, cultural differentiation, etc.); in order words, they all brought up some stories that require people to think about it, question about it, and find an answer for it.
When I first started to conceptualize this project, landscape wasn’t my first choice as I had no intention to represent any stories significantly. However, I somehow got exhausted of looking for specific meanings to put onto my projects. I finally ended up with taking photographs of nature by the way it is. In my opinion, nature itself has million stories that would personally connect to each individual person.
In this project, I am hopefully able to introduce landscape photography in different perspective – more abstract form compared to traditional landscape photographs, but less industrial form than present contemporary practices by Edward Burtynsky or Andreas Gursky. At the same time, I was inspired by Claude Monet’s painting, Water Lilies, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s landscape painting, Country Footpath in the Summer – Chemin montant dans les hautes herbes (both paintings are included in my reference source below). I love the representation of Impressionist paintings as they brought mixed feelings of both realistic and abstract images, as well as I really appreciate their artistic practices. Walther, Ingo F. (2013) wrote in the book, Impressionism, about Impressionist practices: “The Impressionists set great store by their craft, and by new and attractive style of form. The claim that subject matter was unimportant in assessing artistic quality was of course first and foremost a youthful protest against tired old subjects. Of graver consequence was their rejection of the philosophical or literary.” (p.393) and “The Impressionists introduced ways of suggesting motion through sketchy, open composition and brushwork; used evocatively unusual sectional views taken from a spatial and chronological continuum, discovered how dependent color was on light, and established a hitherto unknown brightness, purity, and vigour in colors; found new ways of relating painted surface, spatial illusion.” (p.394).
Unlike my first project which straightforwardly communicates to viewers with a heavy subject matter, this project hopefully will connect to my viewers in such distinct, personal, and emotional feelings (for each individual).