Liza Nguyen
10 Oct - 15 Nov 2008
© Liza Nguyen
Shangri-La
October 10 - November 15, 2008
Figge von Rosen Galerie, Cologne
Installation shot
Shangri-La
October 10 - November 15, 2008
Figge von Rosen Galerie, Cologne
Installation shot
LIZA NGUYEN
"Shangri-La"
Opening on October 9, 2008 at 7.00 pm
Exhibition from October 10 to November 15, 2008
We are pleased to inaugurate on October 9 at 07.00 p.m. the exhibition Shangri-La with photographic works by the French artist Liza Nguyen (*1979), former student of Thomas Ruff's class at the Art Academy Düsseldorf.
We will show for the first time a new group of 14 works that are based on photographs that have been shot in 2008 in India and Nepal. Nguyen shows us, e.g., 5 large portraits of juve¬nile Tibetan exiles who wear sandals or contemporary sneakers as well as jeans and – what was interesting for the artist – T-shirts on which activist slogans are printed. Accordingly, they can be considered politically active members of their society, fighting for their rights in a globalized world. Works showing more or less romantic landscapes, a souvenir-store with "free Tibet"-slogans or a plaza dedicated to prayers complete the depiction of people that are – very much down to earth – searching for freedom and autonomy and that do not – in the first place – crave for enlightenment, eternal wisdom and longivity free of mundane longings. The Tibet-clichés, like Buddhist monks or wise old men, do not appear in Nguyens images.
Nguyen worked on the photographs digitally and abstracted them respectively their representational meaning. The result of several such steps has been printed with an ink-jet printer on strong paper that reminds us of watercolor papers or drawing board. It is possible to talk of photographic drawings, because spatial representation and the depictions of planes have been reduced to lines and contours, planes have been – if they are still part of the representation – digitally hatched and the photographic aspect of the images, the representation of meaning and the index-function of a photograph were subverted by the digital technique. Through these procedures the images have also lost their reportage-character and have been transferred into a draught memory, controlled by the artist, of what Nguyen has seen. It is not the fascination of the unknown, the brutal, harsh reality of the exiled Tibetans or the contingence of the photographic shot that is standing in the foreground, but the condensed view on activist young people and their land- and cityscapes.
While the works on the ground floor of the gallery are having Tibetan subjects and – there¬by – have a direct reference towards the idea of "Shangri-La", we show in the basement the large, spectacular, and complex installation The Shipwreck that consists of 12 light¬boxes and 9 photographic portraits of black juvenile Africans that stranded in Gran Canaria. For these 9 Africans, they are standing for thousands of other African refugees and millions of migrants in general, their passage to Europe and the Canary Islands ended well: they did not die, they were not sent back – because of their young age –, and they even receive an education. What kind of apprenticeship they were assigned to can be told from the colors of their overalls: red stands for construction worker, grey for electrician, and green for plumber. Nguyen shows the individuals in front of a grid that suggests imprisonment, right so, because the building that houses the teenagers is a former prison. With her photographs Nguyen counters the classical portrait: instead of showing the people as individuals with their proper character and history of life, she de-individualizes them in a way that makes us think of the Dusseldorf school of photographers. This esthetic relation becomes visible also in the images of de-contextualized objects on white ground that are depicted in the lightboxes. These objects can be found at the beach of Gran Canaria and they are related either to the dreamt-of paradise respectively to the dangerous passage of the refugees (a bodybag, a set of hygienic articles of the Red Cross, handcuffs, flip-flops) or to the tourists that are recreating themselves on the beach (a beach-ball-set, bikinis). The combination of the portraits with the objects that are either dealing with the failing of the passage or with the administrative treatment by the police or with the tourist parallel life on the islands leads us to rather threatening thoughts, threatening, because the self confidence of western, civilized life – we have the right to recreate ourselves from the daily drudgeries we experience during the year – is questioned by the dreams and hopes of the refugees that cannot be fulfilled.
Both groups of works – the photographic drawings of the exiled Tibetans and the installlation The Shipwreck – have in common that the protagonists are driven by the wish to find their very specific and personal paradise, their redemption. The search for salvation was fueled in Western societies by the ideas and fantasies that were related to the word "Shangri-La" which gave our exhibition its title. While the concept of "Shangri-La" was introduced by James Hilton with his best-selling novel Lost Horizon. Welcome to Shangri-La, the film adaption by Frank Capra enlarged the knowledge of the place and further on it was further massively circulated by pr-campaigns and pop culture. However, for Liza Nguyen the myth of "Shangri-La" remains a powerful metaphor for the search for salvation. Alas, she knows that for the exiled Tibetans as well as for the migrant Africans "Shangri-La" will always remain a kind of Utopia.
"Shangri-La"
Opening on October 9, 2008 at 7.00 pm
Exhibition from October 10 to November 15, 2008
We are pleased to inaugurate on October 9 at 07.00 p.m. the exhibition Shangri-La with photographic works by the French artist Liza Nguyen (*1979), former student of Thomas Ruff's class at the Art Academy Düsseldorf.
We will show for the first time a new group of 14 works that are based on photographs that have been shot in 2008 in India and Nepal. Nguyen shows us, e.g., 5 large portraits of juve¬nile Tibetan exiles who wear sandals or contemporary sneakers as well as jeans and – what was interesting for the artist – T-shirts on which activist slogans are printed. Accordingly, they can be considered politically active members of their society, fighting for their rights in a globalized world. Works showing more or less romantic landscapes, a souvenir-store with "free Tibet"-slogans or a plaza dedicated to prayers complete the depiction of people that are – very much down to earth – searching for freedom and autonomy and that do not – in the first place – crave for enlightenment, eternal wisdom and longivity free of mundane longings. The Tibet-clichés, like Buddhist monks or wise old men, do not appear in Nguyens images.
Nguyen worked on the photographs digitally and abstracted them respectively their representational meaning. The result of several such steps has been printed with an ink-jet printer on strong paper that reminds us of watercolor papers or drawing board. It is possible to talk of photographic drawings, because spatial representation and the depictions of planes have been reduced to lines and contours, planes have been – if they are still part of the representation – digitally hatched and the photographic aspect of the images, the representation of meaning and the index-function of a photograph were subverted by the digital technique. Through these procedures the images have also lost their reportage-character and have been transferred into a draught memory, controlled by the artist, of what Nguyen has seen. It is not the fascination of the unknown, the brutal, harsh reality of the exiled Tibetans or the contingence of the photographic shot that is standing in the foreground, but the condensed view on activist young people and their land- and cityscapes.
While the works on the ground floor of the gallery are having Tibetan subjects and – there¬by – have a direct reference towards the idea of "Shangri-La", we show in the basement the large, spectacular, and complex installation The Shipwreck that consists of 12 light¬boxes and 9 photographic portraits of black juvenile Africans that stranded in Gran Canaria. For these 9 Africans, they are standing for thousands of other African refugees and millions of migrants in general, their passage to Europe and the Canary Islands ended well: they did not die, they were not sent back – because of their young age –, and they even receive an education. What kind of apprenticeship they were assigned to can be told from the colors of their overalls: red stands for construction worker, grey for electrician, and green for plumber. Nguyen shows the individuals in front of a grid that suggests imprisonment, right so, because the building that houses the teenagers is a former prison. With her photographs Nguyen counters the classical portrait: instead of showing the people as individuals with their proper character and history of life, she de-individualizes them in a way that makes us think of the Dusseldorf school of photographers. This esthetic relation becomes visible also in the images of de-contextualized objects on white ground that are depicted in the lightboxes. These objects can be found at the beach of Gran Canaria and they are related either to the dreamt-of paradise respectively to the dangerous passage of the refugees (a bodybag, a set of hygienic articles of the Red Cross, handcuffs, flip-flops) or to the tourists that are recreating themselves on the beach (a beach-ball-set, bikinis). The combination of the portraits with the objects that are either dealing with the failing of the passage or with the administrative treatment by the police or with the tourist parallel life on the islands leads us to rather threatening thoughts, threatening, because the self confidence of western, civilized life – we have the right to recreate ourselves from the daily drudgeries we experience during the year – is questioned by the dreams and hopes of the refugees that cannot be fulfilled.
Both groups of works – the photographic drawings of the exiled Tibetans and the installlation The Shipwreck – have in common that the protagonists are driven by the wish to find their very specific and personal paradise, their redemption. The search for salvation was fueled in Western societies by the ideas and fantasies that were related to the word "Shangri-La" which gave our exhibition its title. While the concept of "Shangri-La" was introduced by James Hilton with his best-selling novel Lost Horizon. Welcome to Shangri-La, the film adaption by Frank Capra enlarged the knowledge of the place and further on it was further massively circulated by pr-campaigns and pop culture. However, for Liza Nguyen the myth of "Shangri-La" remains a powerful metaphor for the search for salvation. Alas, she knows that for the exiled Tibetans as well as for the migrant Africans "Shangri-La" will always remain a kind of Utopia.