Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Chester
Folk Songs, a set of photographic portraits that considers China’s retired generation, and the legacy of having experienced revolutions upon revolutions and counter-revolutions.
Folk Songs is a set of photographic portraits that considers China’s retired generation, and the legacy of having experienced revolutions upon revolutions and counter-revolutions. The work was originally commissioned for PHotoEspaña13, in which the prints were mounted as billboards, pasted onto the gallery walls. The intentions replicated the ‘dazibao’ or ‘big character posters’ style of the mid 1960s, when propaganda poster art was ubiquitous and posted up across China.
People born in 1949 correspond to the birth of the People’s Republic of China. At the time, babies born in that year were sometimes known as ‘Golden Children.’ This generation has lived through the epochs of China’s Great Leap Forward from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, and the decade of the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. Now in their 60s and having reached retirement, they find themselves negotiating a passage through an apolitical age of super consumerism, amongst a mass of disparate cultures with different customs and beliefs.
Shot in various People’s Parks around China’s mega cities - including Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing & Chengdu - the photographs focus specifically on the generation born in 1949. With excessive amounts of free time on their hands, this generation participates in whatever activities are available to them in public parks, such as singing along to outdoor karaoke machines.
Despite its title, Folk Songs resolutely eschews the sensory of sound. Apart from a single word inserted into each portrait - which represents part of the lyrics being sung - audiences have no other means of knowing the song’s full contents. The work relies on the minute detail of body language and facial expressions to form potential structures of meaning. Folk Songs examine the dynamics between one's public and private space, and the outward expression of internal emotions.
