Awakening the Visual and Auditory Senses of Vegetative Patients is a cooperative and cross-disciplinary program involving medical science, psychology, Buddhism and art. In this program, personalized visual and audio works are created based on the main memories, emotions and images of the patients as adjunctive means to awaken them. This program is set to explore the primitive force of life.
Shanghai photography in the 1990s emphasizes more on the expression of personalized urban emotions. This dialogue mainly looks at Zhou Ming’s photography works taken in the 1990s’ Shanghai to uncover his inner reflections about urban life. It will also gradually further its discussion on the possibility of multiple changes coming to urban photography when entering into the 21st century.
How should art be historicised in its ‘contemporary’ and ‘global’ phase? What is to be historicized, if not the work of art per se? Where art history has shallow roots, the emerging paradigms of visual culture, curatorial studies and exhibition histories offer appealing alternatives. But their path is strewn with hazards, not least, the lack of that visual literacy and discursive space that art history, for all its sins, has long cultivated elsewhere.
In the 1990s, Shanghai photographer Xu Haifeng spent many years in recording the lively yet gradually faded life scenes along the Songhu Railway route, while the renowned scholar and historian Prof. Ge Jianxiong has also recalled in one of his early articles of the days he spent around the railway in his youth. In this dialogue, we are honored to invite Prof.Ge Jianxiong and Mr. Xu Haifeng, on the basis of these photos, to look back upon this not-too-distant history with the audience.
