Chen Ronghui 578 Prospect St, Oct 22, 2019
Chen Ronghui 85 Howe St, April 22, 2020
Chen Ronghui 470 College St, Jan 27, 2020
◎Black and White
Exhibition: New Haven ’s ordinary night—Chen Ronghui’s solo exhibition
Exhibition period: 2022.10.06-2022.12.04
Location: Sanyingtang + 3 Gallery
"Youth is only a few years, and the epidemic has taken place for three years." This buzzword is joking and refreshing, but it cannot summarize the campus life in the past three years. Worldwide, the mental health of students is under excessive pressure. Photographer Chen Ronghui studied at the Department of Photography at Yale University in 2019 and encountered a global pandemic in the second semester. Chen Ronghui lives on Dwight Street and is a 10-minute walk to the Art Academy where the photography department is located. He can click on the APP to place an order and take a free police bus shuttle, but he rarely does this. Exposed to the threat of public safety, Chen Ronghui walked quickly with anxiety. During the steps recorded by the 3D camera, he walked heavily through the hazy and quiet square and was blown by the cold wind.
1
New Haven is one of the highest crime rates in the United States, and guns are daily routines in New Haven. According to data, the city is only safer than 6% of American cities. What's worse is that the epidemic has disrupted the governance of public safety and the crime rate has risen again. In 2020, there were 20 murders and 121 weapons attacks in New Haven, an increase of more than 50% compared with 2019. During his time at school, Chen Ronghui received a total of 58 security warning emails from the Chief of Police Ronell Higgins.
In the second part of "Ordinary Night in New Haven", Chen Ronghui exposed the "warning state" in the room. The kitchen, curtains, trash cans, and bathrooms are all occupied by car shadows, trees and people in the environment. Human residence is filled with shadows of the world. If you want to feel beauty, you must be afraid. New Haven Mental Hospital, used car dealers, Tongren Cafe, vacation home, funeral home, Saibrook College, bus stops, student apartments, concert halls, elementary schools, Latin American restaurants, all these crime scenes and faits images are registered in a quiet indoor space.
"A Common Night in New Haven" has made it very obvious to learn from Aberado Morell. Morel invented a room concealer that exposes outdoor vision into the room. In 1991, black plastic sealed Morel's living room window, leaving a hole in the window through which light flowed through the incision, carrying inverted images. A camera aimed at these images for eight hours, forming what Morel calls the scenery in the living room or the scenery across the street. Private spaces and public spaces, internal and external worlds, marriage took place through Morel's secret box .
"A Common Night in New Haven" is from the collection of poems published by Wallace Stevens in in 1950. This collection of poems consists of 31 poems, of which the twelfth is most valued by Harold Bloom (literary professor, critic). "Finally, in complete psychology, self/town, weather, in arbitrary garbage/together, speaking the language of the world is the life of the world." Like many of Stevens' poems, this poem is difficult to summarize the theme. To summarize in particular, we can only say that the theory of poetry is the theory of life, which is created in visible and invisible food, from nothingness, heaven, hell, the world, and the land of thirst.
1948, Stevens was invited to give a speech at Yale University . The following year, Stevens was invited by the University of Connecticut’s School of Arts and Sciences to write a poem, which was later "A Common Night in New Haven." That was when New Haven’s violent crime rate began to rise. This poem is full of the atmosphere of Stevens writing poetry when he walks. He has the habit of writing poetry while walking, and when he is inspired, he takes the envelope in his pocket. "Professor Eucalyptus said: 'Explore/Reality is like/Explore God.' It is the philosopher who explores/the inner shaped by the outside/the poets explores the outer shaped by the same/the inner …"
Going to the first step, Stevens said: "Reality is the beginning and not the end."
2
At eight or nine o'clock in the morning, you were haggard and raised from the high bed. Will you see the wardrobe, tables and chairs, and the surfaces you look at are covered with shadows, and they are flashing. When you get home after class, a green monster invaded your room, and its thick flesh is crowded on the quiet balcony. Have you ever read such a good poem? "Furniture stands in the moonlight and wants to fly/passes an unequipped forest/I slowly walk into myself. "From a psychiatrist. When you look hungry and look at the shadow of the kitchen utensils hanging on the wall, what level will your heartbeat or palpitations? They talk to you about love, you slide the screen and listen to it depressedly.
In a state of confinement at home, Chen Ronghui lay on the sofa, feeling the light of his childhood again. At that time, his parents were working outside, Chen Ronghui lived with his grandparents, and he couldn't bear to turn on the light at night. He used the moonlight or fireflies explores this vague world. Before
, light and plants were in conversation, and the soul was merging. If life was dismantled, there would be nothing else besides the body and actions, besides the body and action, there was no such thing as calm love, or such approximations. But life never ends here. How vast the life that humans experience should be described in words. What is missing in
? It is the things that have never expressed to people. They are those existences without history and future, and they are also those simple scenery that lack imagination. Beyond people, there are such fantastic winds and waves, such high-level time and place, and such a slender fate.
There are too many signs that plants also have souls. naturalist Ernst Heckel once proposed a theory of cell soul. In his opinion, any living cell has psychological characteristics, and so does plants. In La Li and Roman , the word breeze evolved into the later word breathing. Their extended meaning is vitality and spirit. The wind of nature enters the human body and becomes spirit, and returns to nature and turns into ghosts.
The secret words of light and plants come from behind the image, while penetrate the image directly from the side of the image. They are the same. But through rooms, windows, and space, people see two, one on the front and one on the negative, and the other on the surface. A shadow. Facing the front of the light, I feel like I am wrapped, and facing the back of the light, my mood is depressed. However, another I corrected the previous thought, and what I feel is the fluctuation of my own, the surging of light: light only has one language, and light has languages that countless people do not have.
People's eyes shoot outside light every moment, but the eyes are not like dark boxes and cannot focus on only one technical expression. Therefore, people's eyes see endless light and eyes. The result of the technology. Usually, only when the light hits the surface of the real thing, people's perception catches up, but light is always before people's perception, just like poetry is always before people's language. Young poetry chases light with strong energy, and at this time, the light seems to be still, like a legend like pig iron; the old poetry sighs as far away as it is, at this time, the light waves respond delicately.
Will you be moved? This is not inner, nor rational, this is ignored nature. Perhaps language is difficult to form But the images are revealed so much by the human eyes.
3
. Let's choose one from Mikel Boymans, Valentine Alexenovic Serov, Rembrandt, and Chang Yu.
In the Chinese context, photography consists of a pair of paradoxes. On the one hand, rough production is rare, and words like sugar water tablets fade out of people's vision, exquisite images are filled with sweat The body and scenery with high saturation and high definition flows on the platform and screen like a fleeting flow. On the other hand, images as art are rarely watched, understood, and liked. Public opinion complains about the disgust of the aesthetics and popularity of the current era, and is unrestrained and clamoring, becoming farther and farther away from art. However, reality is not the tug-of-war after the split, but what caused such a tug-of-war. Since the winning work of the
Dutch competition, Chen Ronghui's photography has gradually become wider.He disrupts style, disrupts metapropositions, and gradually reaches an open photography practice. Before Yale, Chen Ronghui had been conducting his cross-regional photography practice in the form of series, and was getting closer and closer to the current trend of world imagery and its inner definition. Before Yale, he mainly focused on urbanization, and "Daydreamer", "Petrochemical China", "Modern Shanghai, a world that is out of control", and "Empty City Scheme" are all propositions that are concerned by the media or the photography circle.
came to Yale and the United States contemporary imaging scene, and Chen Ronghui began to place the language of photography (genetics or anthropology ) at the same core position as the proposition. "Letter from the United States (Double Selfie), "Meyer Lemon", "Reconstructing the History of Photography Invention", and "19 Ways to Watch Wang Wei" all have the duality of photography and metaphotography, and this depends on his deepening aesthetics. "A Common Night in New Haven" is not exactly like this. It will be without it. With the scenery, people are not there, and from portrait to face.
Gregory Cruderson, director of the Department of Photography at Yale University, mentioned in the 2021 graduation album that art is about three types of struggles: fighting with technical media, fighting with private stories, and fighting with cultural background. He experienced flexibility, patience, and dedication from his students' works, and saw the beauty and mystery of the small universe they discovered and created. During two years, the photography students experienced banning, escaping, and joy.
Despair? fail? die? During this period of time, everyone has felt the cruelty of the world and the sadness of nature. Yet this is their meaning, their meaninglessness, the love they will achieve.
Photo provided by Sanyingtang Photography Art Center
