Under his lens,
has China that you don’t have time to look closely.
- Life Aesthetics -
This article is reproduced from Yi Feifan (ID: efifan)
NO.1 | 1
His name is Michael Wolf ,
was born in Munich, Germany, and died at the age of 65 on Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong.
times won the Dutch competition award top photographer,
His name may be unfamiliar with, but many people have seen his works.
big suits, bell-bottom trousers, fashionable leather jackets from the 1990s,
various stools and folk artists "on-site assembly" on the street,
high-density residential buildings in Hong Kong,
inches of land, Hong Kong high-density residential hm l6 and old grassroots buildings
and , which once poured into countless people, " world factory "
......
Portraits Made in China Portrait
Portraits Made in China Portrait
Architecture of Densitiy Building density
Toy-Factory-Portraits Toy Factory Portraits
4 years he has traveled all over China's cities and villages,
constantly looking for the human touch behind buildings, streets and items.
"The changing city and the lives of people in it"
is his eternal theme.
Some people say that he became evil in China and was just picking behind the scenes.
also had security guards detained him and confiscated his film.
The world's "misunderstood" and could not stop his recorded footsteps.
Toy-Factory-Portraits toy factory portrait
He said he never wanted to laugh at or tease anyone,
only wanted to be an "Urban anthropologist holding a camera"
The rapid development of cities, lonely villages, creations from the people
Under his lens, There is China that you don't have time to look closely.
Wolf and his studio
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"I have the same leather jacket with a fur collar as a belt!"
"So real, my dad likes to wear it like this before."
"Why were the pants so long at that time..."
Portraits Made in China
It seems that every once in a while, this set of photos can be discussed on social media. There are many people watching it, but few people know that these photos were from a German.
From 1997 to 1998, China was in a stage of rapid development. The ever-changing changes made Wolf full of freshness for everything. Looking at countless young people in towns flocking to the city, Wolf saw in them a kind of "neglected fashionable feeling". he hoped to record everything he saw.
Wearing leather jackets, large suits, bell-bottom pants, denim jackets that were popular in the 1990s... The youthful appearance of the face, together with the unmodified rural background, presents the real scene of urban and rural China in the late last century. 20 years later, it still makes people feel moved.
Although some people don’t like this “not brilliant”, , under the torrent of the times, the attitude of small people chasing each other cannot represent the booming China.
NO.3 | Three
Hong Kong is one of the most dense, most populous and most vertical cities in the world. There are nearly 7 million people living on the 1,108 square kilometers of land. There are more than 6,500 tall buildings in Hong Kong. far surpasses New York and is a veritable city of "skyscrapers".
Architecture of Densitiy
994 Wolf came to Hong Kong to live because of his work: Although he has lived in Hong Kong for nearly 10 years, he has only worked day after day and has never really known this city.
Since then, he has moved against the current, and records this "folded" city.
The boundaries of the building cannot be seen in the photos. Wolf eliminated the sky and the horizon, and only horizontal and vertical lines that continuously extend and grow. They record the airtight architectural layout of Hong Kong. is shocking and repeating again and again.
The picture conveys the fateful oppression of the big city, but the camera pushes a little more, and the "grid" under the night sky exudes the details of life and the atmosphere of fireworks. There are countless families with birth, old age, sickness and death. The subtle signs of life surface: the shirt hanging on , the silhouette behind the blinds, the lights of different colors...
Everything is not just a building, but a metaphor for big cities.
NO.4 | Si
NO.4 | Shenzhen Hkka Village - Dafen Village , actually hides thousands of "peasant painters". In order to support their families, they picked up their brushes and transformed into China's Van Gogh, Monet , Andy Warhol ... In just a few hours, famous paintings that became famous overseas were replicated.
Real Fake Art
According to the data, 70% of the oil paintings in the European market come from China, while 80% of the oil paintings are produced in Dafen Village. In 2006, Michael Wolf came here and took a few days to complete this set of "Real Fake Art".
In this " Chinese oil painting first village", Wolf felt an unprecedented impact. When he asked one of the painters how to complete Van Gogh's masterpiece " Sunflower " , he replied: "This picture is very simple, just draw about four hundred strokes and it will be completed!"
In this series, Wolf hopes to explore how views such large-scale production in the modern art world, think about the creative motivation and artistic value hidden behind the paintings, and also evokes communication between China and the West on culture and business.
Today's Dafen Village is slowly transforming towards the road of originality. The unique artistic creation atmosphere also attracts young painters from all over the world. Dafen Village is no longer the Dafen Village recorded by Wolf, but his images record a microcosm of the development of China's oil painting industry at that time.
NO.5 | Wu
Once upon a time, about 75% of toys in the world were "made in China", Countless toys require countless workers to make, but only when you witness it with your own eyes can you fully understand the concept behind this data.
Toy-Factory-Portraits
Because he was fascinated by plastic toys since he was a child, in 2004, Wolf, who was working for the German magazine Stern, filmed a set of special works by "China: Factory of the World" , showing the true status of a group of Chinese workers working in a toy manufacturing factory in China.
The faces of the nameless person displayed in the photos are enough to make people realize that behind countless little dolls are real people, not machines. Wolf also hopes to use the camera to tell the world: behind most of the toys that bring happiness to children in the world, there are Chinese people working hard. In the later exhibition of
, Wolf also specially found a large number of toys and put them together with this series of "toy creators" for exhibition. Of course, the gaze of these workers makes the toy ocean human, and also prompts us to reflect on what role people should play in the globalized consumer-driven trade and how to deal with the endless desire for products.
NO.6 | Lu
NO.6 | Lu
NO.6 | Wolf came to Beijing in 1996 and noticed a special type of chair when he was walking in the alley: some were transformed from broken chairs, some were made of local materials, and was made of wood, stones, bricks, wires and rags. He found it very interesting, and he picked up two handfuls and brought them back to Hong Kong.
Sitting in China
By 2002, Michael Wolf published his first photography collection "Sitting in China". The difference between and other portrait photography collections is that his protagonists are these "homemade" stools in the streets and alleys of China.
" San Francisco Chronicle " once described these stools as "China's Folk Wisdom". Most of the chairs in this series have been repaired and reconfigured, and some have even been "replaced" more than a dozen times, but these second-hand items have inadvertently released the "inner beauty" of .
At that time, a policeman asked him why he didn't go to the hotel to take pictures of the new chairs and said: "No, you think China is very backward, you want foreigners to make fun of us."
But Wolf always felt: "These chairs are 'designs without designers', each of them reflects the owner's personality, I am very concerned about them The aesthetic is impressed by the aesthetics. "
In addition to putting your perspective in China, Wolf also created the "Unfortunate Events in Google Street View" series , use Google Street View to intercept private moments captured by electronic machines; and the shocking "Tokyo Compression" series, under the lens is the crowded morning rush hour of Japan's subway...
It can be seen that the theme of Wolf's works is almost related to people, which is the creative impulse arises after long-term thinking and walking around. ultimately focuses on people and the surrounding environment.
-END-
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