Jin Jiangbo is one of China’s new generation of media artists. He visited New Zealand last year as the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s International Artist in Residence and to exhibit his work in China in Four Seasons, a year long project at the GBAG comprising four residencies and exhibitions of selected artists working in China today.
These unworldly images have a magical aspect that is very much drawn from New Zealand as well as layers of another, less familiar world.
Leaving his familiar mode of new media technology and taking up the historic process of analogue photography, images are shot using a medium format panoramic camera and then digitally manipulated into large format panoramas that offer a response to the socialist economic landscape of China as it negotiates within the wider frames of globalisation, integration and the recent global recession.
From his biography: “Art should follow the age it belongs to and reflect the society, its structure, context and changes.”
Jin Jiangbo approaches art by way of a formidable intellect. A doctoral candidate at a Beijing university, he says his work is driven by ideas rather than personal experience, and his conversations often sound like sociology or economics lectures. He is equally drawn to new media, which “connect art and technology”, and to photography, which is both objective and “sensitive enough to capture small traces of this fleeting world”. He is best known for his panoramic photographs of abandoned factories and silent market halls, which he calls “my review of the craze and spuriousness of the deceptive commodity economy”.
Born: Zhejiang province, 1972. Lives and works in Beijing and Shanghai.
Tags: artist, china, Jin Jiangbo, new media, panorama, photography
