PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
In July, the gallery will be open Monday to Friday from 12 noon to 5 pm

8.7.-6.8.2010
Saana Wang
H U J I A L O U

Neon lights glow in the dark in tones of green and blue. It is my first night in Beijing, the year is 1991. All the determinants of time and place have become contracted. What is near is near, but not because of the shortness of distance – what is near may in fact be distant. My eyes roam around walls worn by time.

Saana Wang’s Huijialou series is inspired by a residential district of the same name in East Beijing in China, where the old is seeking to find its place along the new. Centrally located, Huijialou is changing rapidly as residential buildings make way for offices and shopping malls. This change applies not only to the local landscape and living environments, it has much broader implications that penetrate deep into the social, cultural and historical layers of the area.

Saana Wang’s work moves across the boundary between documentary and fiction. To distance her pictures from the traditional documentary aspect of photography, Wang introduces a fictive dimension in them. The purpose of the new element is to express the layers of time present in the picture and to emphasise the possibility of addressing things on a broader scale.

The traditional Beijing opera masks introduced into the photographs are an element that in itself refers to its own tradition. The painted faces dissociate the persons from the space they are in, turning them into figures that allow us to consider the theme on a broader scale, while also expressing the ongoing cultural change.

Time is an important element in the pictures. Looking at them, one becomes aware of a dialogue between different layers of time, how the past is inscribed into the surface of the images and how it stands in relation to the present. The momentary photographs record a multilayered reality that expresses structures of power as well as tensions between the different elements in the picture.

Photographic Artist Saana Wang was born in Helsinki in 1979. She has recently completed a one-year residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Wang has a BA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She is currently completing her MA studies at the Aalto University School of Art and Design in Helsinki. Wang has lived in Beijing for several periods of different length.

Saana Wang, Hujialou#80, 2009

For more information and press images, please contact:
Petronella Grönroos, exhibition co-ordinator / Photgraphic Gallery Hippolyte +358 9-612 33 44, firstname.lastname@hippolyte.fi