The boundaries of reality are the area of play…

Dear all,

To celebrate two events Zen Foto will hold closing drinks from 4pm this afternoon:

1.       the closing of our exhibition “A. Face to Face with Chin-Chin Wu” of works by Chin-Chin Wu and Nobuyoshi Araki;

2.       from the Tokyo Customs Bureau we received a charge of importing material “that could damage public decency” (風俗を害する物品). This relates to our little catalogue of Chin-Chin Wu`s works - why don`t you come and decide for yourself? We value your opinions!

kind regards,

Mark Pearson

Zen Foto Gallery, shibuya, Tokyo

www.zen-foto.jp

In front of Araki’s images © Benjamin Beller (please beware of important perspective distortions)

Finally a brief review of the show by art historian, Art Forum contributor and Waseda University assistant professor Julia Friedman, taken from the blog Contemporary Art Tokyo:

This is the first Tokyo exhibition of the Beijing-based artist Chin-Chin Wu. It features her 2006–2009 project Vis-à -Vis, Portraits of New Women, in which fifty young women from Paris and Beijing posed for their “intimate portraits.” Upon entering the gallery, the viewers are invited to gaze into an aperture in a red lacquered peep-box installed just high enough making it necessary for all under seven feet tall to stand on a small wooden stool. The voyeristic effort is rewarded with a tiny illuminated image set against the back wall of the box. This quick throw back to Marcel Duchamp’s in/famous Etant Donnés, seems to address the elephant-in-the-room inherent in any art featuring female genitalia. Wu questions the inherently voyeuristic nature of viewing nudity just as she asserts the agency of the woman who participated in the Vis-à-Vis shoots by engaging them in a dialogue about the meaning of these portraits. Many of their utterances are featured in the making-of video that is also part of the show. Wu’s photographs are further contextualized by a selection of ten silver gelatin prints by Nobuyoshi Araki, hung in two tight rows. Araki’s work makes for an interesting juxtoposition with Wu’s, in my opinion, because it accentuates the raw sexuality of his work. Next to his, Wu’s photographs, for all their overtness, appear almost chaste: the viewers of her portraits do not need to worry about participating in the predatory visual act, her focus is the aesthetic differentiation.

There are eight large-format inkjet prints on view, with the rest of the project available for perusal in an eponymous publication by GALERIE VEVAIS (edited by Alexander Scholz). The book will be on sale in about one month in both hardcover and softcover versions. You can find additional information about the publication and see more of Chin-Chin’s works on her webpage.

Due to the graphic nature of the show the gallery had to set a series of deterrents for visitors that might seek things other than art enjoyment. If you decide to visit the exhibition (you have to be over 20 years of age), please make an email reservation with the gallery (amanda@zen-foto.jp). When you arrive you will be asked to sign a waver stating that you do not find the contents offensive, and pay an exhibition membership fee of 3000 yen. Once inside you will have your pick of Zen Foto publication to the value of the fee. The show is at Zen Foto Gallery, on view through May 23.

Dear Friends, 

皆さんこんにちは。Zen Fotoのご案内をいたします。次の展覧会 ”A. Face 2 Face with Wu Chin-Chin” が５月14日から始まります。オープニングパーティは同日18:00から21:00で、ウー・チンチンさんも来廊され ます。彼女は中国の若い作家です。アメリカとフランスの教育を受けて、現在北京にお住まいです。今回展示する両氏の作品は ともに女性のポートレートで衝撃的なイメージを含むため、ヌード写真に敏感な方々はご遠慮ください。もしご高覧いただければ一生忘れ られない展覧会になるかと存じます。

なお、今回の展覧会では通常と異なり作品の性質から展覧会の会費を頂戴します が、展覧会場にて会費に相当するZen Fotoの出版物をお渡ししますので、なにとぞご了承ください。

Our next exhibition is titled: “A. Face 2 Face with Chin-Chin Wu ”. We will exhibit the works of Nobuyoshi Araki face to face with the works of a young Chinese photographer. Chin-Chin Wu was educated in the USA and Paris and she is now based in Beijing. Zen Foto is pleased to hold this first major exhibition of her series of intimate portraits of women, entitled “Vis-a-vis: Portraits of New Women.”

The content is not suitable for people under the age of 20 or for those sensitive to explicit images of the naked human body.

We do not normally charge for entrance to Zen Foto but, due to the nature of the images included, we will invite visitors to become members of this exhibition. Visitors will be given Zen Foto publications of value equivalent to the price of membership. In case of hardship please let us know and we will happily make exceptions where appropriate.

Kind regards,

Mark Pearson

Zen Foto Gallery, Shibuya, Tokyo

www.zen-foto.jp

ANOTHER NUDE SHOW
April 3 - 30, 2010
D5 Gallery

http://www.robertbermangallery.com/robertbermangallery/exhibitions/nudeshow/selected_nude.htm 

A Group exhibition exploring the imagery of the nude form including works by

Robert Graham, Ruth Bernhard, Horst P. Horst, Man Ray, Joel Peter Witkin, Francesco Scavullo, Chin-Chin Wu, Sante D’Orazio, Raymond Pettibon, The Mac, John Altoon, Ben Talbert, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frederick Wight, William Tunberg, Ralph Goings, Stephen Verona, John Colao, Ron English, Manuel Ocampo, Jorg Dubin, Ellwood T. Risk, Britt Ehringer, Eliza French & Jeff Charbonneau, Robert Sean Coons, Dennis Mukai, David Trulli, Greg Gibbs, Andrew George, Vic Huber, Rafael Serrano, Jon Cournoyer, Sally Mann, Jock Sturges, Marc Fichou, Ken Aronson, Brett Aronson, Steven Teitelbaum, Randal Haworth, Tiphaine Popesco, Eric Schwartz,Hana Jakrlova, Christina Lissmann, David Ellingsen, Bill Durgin, Toby Burrows, Bill Phelps, Gail Greenfield Randall, Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, Edouard Chimot, Max Turner, Emil Jean Kosta Jr., Mel Ramos, Alejandro Gehry, Thomas Ruff, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tracy Nakayama, Tracey Emin, Vanessa Beecroft, Tom Wesselmann, John Valadez, Frank Romero, Claudia Kunin, Grace Oh and many more.

In conjunction with the MOPLA Month of Photography Awards & XTO Image Awards

Nobuyoshi Araki
Untitled (Nude in front of TV), 1996
Iris Print
Numbered 22/30, Signed and numbered on verso
Image: 8.5 x 12 inches; Framed: 18.5 x 21.5 inches

Robert Berman Gallery Presents:

«VIS-À-VIS, PORTRAITS OF NEW WOMEN»

«对视 : 新女性肖像 »

Pigment print, Edition of 5, 120×160 cm
© Chin-Chin Wu, 2006-2008

Catalog available upon request

photo MIAMI
Wynwood Art District, Miami, FL
(Enter on Midtown Boulevard)
BOOTH #304
Robert Berman GALLERY
www.robertbermangallery.com

December 3 - 7, 2008
Opening December 2th, 6 - 10 pm

Upcoming exhibitions:

photo LA
January 21-29, 2009
Downtown Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA
BOOTH #C109
laartshow.com

30th Anniversary Exhibition, Part 1

Robert Berman GALLERY
At Bergamot Station Arts Center, Santa Monica, California
January 24 - February 21, 2009

 

Group exhibition of selected photography and photo based works featuring:
Alex Prager, Jeff Charbonneau & Eliza French, Andres Serrano, Rafael Serrano, Man Ray, William Wegman, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, Edmund Teske, Shirin Neshat, Christopher Felver, E.T. Risk, Harry Bowers, Lauren Marsolier, Marc Fichou, John Colao, Marla Rutherford, Dietrich Wegner, Cameron Gray, Gerald Slota, Chin-Chin Wu, Hana Jakralova

Are you looking to push boundaries of your body and mind? Interested to get to know your body better? Want a better nude portfolio but haven’t found the right photographer? See how an artist works?

I am a Chinese-American artist living in between Beijing and Paris. Currently seeking women of all background and ethnicity for a large-scale conceptual art project – portraits of the female genitalia. The identities of the subjects will remain entirely anonymous and I offer to make other nude photographs or portraits in exchange. Length of time is estimated at around 1 1/2 hours (please plan extra time for other photo shoots).

My studio is in the historical center , 2 minutes from the Drum Tower（鼓楼) subway station, very close to Nan Luo Gu Xiang（南锣鼓巷）, Hou Hai (后海）， and other major tourist attractions. You can find information for this project on:

http://www.chinchinwu.net/?page_id=98

including a making-of video where the models who have participated talk about their experience and their views on the subject matter. You can also find some pictures and background info on the site. There’s a Chinese article in the magazine Hope／希望杂志报导 about the project:

http://www.chinchinwu.net/?page_id=191

39 women world-wide have already participated in this project. I hope that you will decide to participate in this very important project! This work will be edited into a book published by Trolley Books (London, www.trolleybooks.com) in May 2009 and exhibited in Photo Miami, Photo LA, etc.

Contact me at:
mail@chinchinwu.net with your phone number and I will call you.
Also Skype handle: chinchinlive

Thank you,
Chin-Chin Wu

As the laureate of Mission Jeunes Artistes (Young Artists Mission), I am invited to meet the following professionals over a period of three days in Toulouse in September:

I was selected based on my female genitalia project - Vis-à-vis. I really had trouble finding a space to exhibit this work in Paris. I will be exhibiting it in Arles, along with other more recent work. I also have a ongoing book project with a German editor near Berlin. Does anybody have any advice?

Many thanks go to Franck Maindon, Claire Bras, Linda, Jean-Marc Sanchez, Didier de Faÿs, William Ropp, Maxime Lacolley, Pierre Marilly, Sandrine D., Natacha.., and all the models.

I got this in the mail last week from Better World Inc., the other half of our collective of two named “Etranges Etrangers.” By the way, he is in my opinion the most cutting-edge French photographer living in Copenhagen. I’ve been trying to persuade him to move to Paris, but ok I’ll stop digressing…

Better World explained to me that they are images taken from erotic magazines in the 60’s, although I am very sceptical - some of these images are as erotic as medical records of mutilated genitalia…

I have not been very active on the blogging front, as I have been mainly doing research, script writing, and quite a bit of journaling to clarify directions I want to take next season.

The female genitalia project has taken off and I’ve been receiving more responses than I could possibly reply to individually. I do try when I feel it elicits a reaction from my part. I’m a bit amused that most of these tend to be private, either via private msg in MySpace or e-mail, and am definitely touched when I see that there’s a confessional element, a therapeutic process that is taking place. Some of these msgs are 5 or 6 pages long, and I think I’m going to post them anonymously somewhere here.

This and the overwhelming response that I received from the models have brought me to the decision to post a series of theorical texts on the female genitalia, starting from excerpts from my thesis. I think the logical place to start would be the beginning of photography in the nineteenth century, Over time, I’d like to compile the largest online resource available on the subject.

I was interviewed by Gildas from www.chictype.fr yesterday. For those who don’t know, it’s a Parisian Bobo (bougeois-bohème) website on fashion, culture, and dandysm. I think the video will come out next week and you will see me in all my 70’s geekgirl glory. There’s something about dandysm that’s so intellectually sexy that I even forget my feminist stance against the blatantly misogynistic aspects of it. I mean Baudelaire was such a woman hater, yet such an intellectual turn-on (no, no him, his ideas). At this day and age, finding great mental fucks is infinitely more challenging than finding fulfilling/satisfying sex.

Conversation inevitably turned to Lacan, his famous claim that the female sex organ is an emptiness to be filled, the drawing that he asked André Masson to make as a wooden sliding door for the famous painting “Origine du monde” by Gustave Courbet, and numerous (un)ethical practices including the stealing of Georges Batailles’ wife via analysis. Other discussions that were completely off-camera and off the record included pedophilia as the one label that prevents all meaningful dialogue and discussion on the sexuality of children, all in the name of”protection”. This is a subject that can get me ranting to no end, much like “patriotism” in the context of Iraq and 9/11, or “freedom of choice” in the context of health care reforms in the US. So I think I’ll stop spilling and start my day.

Currently reading:

The Unknowable Gurdjieff (Arkana)
By: Margaret Anderson
Release date: 06 August, 1991

Women In Antiquities
By: Charles Seltman
Release date: 1956

&

Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas By: Paul Wood Release date: 01 October, 2002

 

CLICK TO VIEW PORTFOLIO
Chin-Chin Wu © 2006-2008

The exhibition contains 15 life-size photographs, sound files audible through headphones, one cabinet de curiosités, experimental videos, and the making-of film.

 

/le film 0307 avec ST1.flv

Making of - Femmes: Portraits Dé/Visagés

Camera: Linda

Editing: Jean-Marc Sanchez

 

Musician, psychoanalyst, graphic artist, police woman, professor of French, photographer, journalist, students in fine art, philosophy, literature… 15 women from different walks of life have accepted to pose for this series Vis-à-vis, a series in perpetual construction.

The exposure of the female genitalia implies an ontological vulnerability. Is this why it has remained as one of the last bastions of censorship in the field of representation? It seems to me that the female genitalia have suffered from the polar treatments of paternal protectionism, which excludes them from the social field, or male exploitation, which has demands perfectly “cultivated” and remolded vulvas. I wanted to see if there was a strategy that could neutralize traditional diametrical views of the female genitalia operating on these paradigms of attraction-repulsion. This series came into being in order to examine our capacity to look at the female genitalia as they really are, without resorting to a ready-made alibi.

Several axes of reflection were explored in this series:

Horizontality, verticality. I think this is the key axis of reflection when it comes to how to show the female genitalia. The vertical axis is considered the “noble” axis because it distinguishes us from all the quadrupeds. It is also the position that “condemns” the vagina to its invisibility. For this series, I have established a horizontal position of the body that aligns on the same horizon the face and the genitalia, the mouth and the vagina. At the same time, we have a sensation of verticality given that the frame is tight and that the frontal point of view forces us to “face” the picture.

Human, animal. If the vertical position renders us human, are the genitalia not the last vestiges of our animal nature? Simone de Beauvoir describes this ancient struggle of women between the propagation of the species and the desire for individuation and transcendence as such: “Woman’s individuality is constantly combated by the interest of the species; she appears possessed by strange forces… It is not without resistance that the woman lets the interest of the species settle in her body.”

Nature, Culture/Raw, Cooked (Lévi-Strauss). If nature condemns us to animality, the human species attempts by all means to erase traces of our animal nature: clothing, accessories, piercing, waxing, paranoia of body hair… The ultimate step would be to cultivate or “cook” our genitalia, supposedly the rawest part of our body.

Face, genitalia. The personification of the female genitalia is a very ancient theme (Baubô the mythical vulva). If we operate a 90° visual rotation of the photograph, we can see, by a visual contamination of sort, a face that superimposes on the structure of the genitalia. The face is often deemed the most human and the genitalia the most animal part of our being. This visual confusion destabilizes established hierarchies.

Baubô, the mythical vulva

Mouth, Vagina. In the essay “Mouth” by Georges Batailles, the mouth is a high place of individualization in human beings because it is capable of words, whereas in animal life, the mouth is understood as “the principle element in the system of capture, killing, and ingestion of preys where the anus is the point of accomplishment.” In these portraits of women, the “lips” of the genitalia are open and expressive, allowing them to ascend to the same status as the mouth.

Masculinity, femininity. The “faces” that we see superimposed on the structure of the genitalia convey very “masculine” traits. This questions the validity of the foundations that separate the masculine and the feminine.

Eroticism, academicism. The pelvis that one perceives as toppled over reminds us of the arched back that eroticizes the pose according to conventional erotic codes, whereas the frontal viewpoint neutralizes the images (a form of academicism since the Dusseldorf School). This provokes an instability in the reception of the photographs and leaves space for ambiguity and hesitation.

I invited my models to stay open to these tensions, fragilities, and paradoxes of existence that constitute us as women.

Photographie, France’s premier multimedia magazine on everything photographic, has covered our projections at Rencontre Internationale de la Photographie d’Arles 07.

At the projection this evening, we will be interviewed by Photographie.com. Rendez-vous at 10:15 on the façade of Théatre d’Arles, near Espace Van Gogh, rue Molière.

A few screen shots:

Read the rest of this entry »

A four-minute clip made in 2005 of some stunning endoscopic images:

 

 Maiden Voyage, Endoscopically (4′00″)

Endoscopic images of a woman’s body - a hypnotizing voyage into a landscape of the Uncanny/Unheimlich/ Inquiétante étrangeté.

A Louis Lumière Production. © 2005-2007 Chin-Chin Wu aka. Post-Modern China Doll, Aurélie, Marie-Laure, and Emilie. All Rights Reserved.

Many Thanks to Olympus France for the generous loan of 2 endoscopic tubes, a camera, and fiber-optic lighting materials.