Interview with Hu Chenyu
1. Is your work about abandoning the readability of images, or do you intentionally disrupt their original readability? I believe the readability of images never truly disappears; your creations possess a form of readability, even if it feels unfamiliar.
You could say that my intention is to discard the original readability of images and create a simpler, more personal, and non-universal way of viewing, bringing about an unfamiliar visual experience. Viewers can only rely on clues and flaws within the images to guess my actions and motivations. It's like placing hurdles on a track without explaining the rules and then asking athletes to start. Initially, they might be confused, but over time, they will experiment based on their experience and eventually form a new set of rules. I find this entire process fascinating..
2. Whether in your installations, videos, or photography, you seem to question the conventional truths of visual information. What are you questioning, and how do you address these questions through your work?
Questioning is part of it; it's more about exploring the medium of photography or images. Since I'm a photography major, photography, compared to painting and sculpture, has a stronger utilitarian aspect. It's purely a product of the Industrial Revolution, inherently designed to convey information, and it's more direct, efficient, and deceptive than any previous medium. Growing up in the image era, I've long lost the sense of unfamiliarity with this medium. Through my work, I aim to recreate that sense of unfamiliarity to reveal the medium itself beyond the so-called reality.
3. What is the significance of your questioning or your core creative concept in the present context?
Since photography was invented over 200 years ago, the medium has rapidly evolved, with its primary platforms continually changing—from print media to the internet and now social media. The pace of change in media forms is astonishing. When the power to create and publish images is equally distributed among everyone, our understanding of "truth" also changes.As someone born in the '90s, our generation's understanding of the world is largely shaped by photography. Photography has cleverly replaced the direct sensory experiences we once relied on. For example, growing up watching American Hollywood movies provided an official perspective of America, but with the advent of social media platforms, the public offered me another perspective. This redistribution and confrontation of discourse power is fascinating to me, making it an ideal time to explore the essence of the image medium.
4 Do you think images themselves don't represent truth? If so, what do images represent?
I'm also exploring this question, but I believe images are merely tools. Whether they represent truth depends on the creator's intent and presentation. Different intentions and methods produce completely different types of images—such as scientific, journalistic, pornographic, or advertising images. Despite their varied purposes, they all seem closely related to power.
5. From the birth of photography along with industrial civilization to today, when anyone can easily produce and obtain a large number of images, we will naturally think that images are a presentation of some kind of evidence from the sense of reality of mechanical reproduction. Is this related to your creation? Please talk about it in detail.
Yes, thinking about photography can be said to be the starting point of my creation. It has a very strong simulation and deception. Later, as I explored and thought deeply, I began to realize that many of the evidence and images in my mind are the work of power, so the images in my works are mostly images released by authorities. From another perspective, it can be said that my creation is to fight against the imprint left by these authoritative images on my way of viewing. I feel a little angry but helpless, so I want to provide a strange and absurd way of viewing through some attempts.
6. Do you care about the original readability of the image you interfere or the power context behind the image revealed by your artificial interference?
This is related to power. From altar paintings to portraits of dignitaries, images have always had the mission of recording, disseminating and persuading, and these missions were quickly transferred after the invention of photography, and became more secretive and unstoppable. It can be said that the way to view images is like the access rules set by the powerful - you must watch in a certain way, otherwise your viewing is invalid. I am a little scared of this kind of commonplace viewing. For example, power is like salt in seawater to images (but there is more than just salt in seawater), but what I want to do is not just to let the salt precipitate and see everything in the seawater.
7. You forged a certain realistic illusion in works like Stars Should Be Very Bright, Right? and One Thousand Stones, challenging our accustomed visual cognition habits. But you can also present a sense of clumsiness in other works, such as the Rhine River. How do you think about it?
Subjectively, I will try my best to restrain the intensity of my creative techniques in my creation. The challenge objects of these two works are different, so the scale of imitation will also be different. In "Stars Should Be Very Bright" and "One Thousand Stones", the object of my creation is not a specific image, but the universal experience engraved in our minds after watching a large number of such images or real scenes. This kind of experience cannot be simply summarized by keywords such as 1234, so these works need this realistic illusion. For specific classic images like "Rhine II", I only need to grasp the key points.
8. Your working method is very rational, but your creative behavior and purpose are very personal. Does this create some kind of contradiction? It's like each of us knows that photos or images cannot reflect the absolute truth, but at the same time we will naturally use certain images as evidence to confirm information. So what is the significance of your creation to the public?
The rational working method may be related to my early engineering background and family environment. My father is an architect, and I studied automation in college, so it may have subtly shaped my thinking habits today, but in fact I am a more delicate and sensitive person. I often describe my works as seemingly rational but actually very emotional, just like onion skin, you can choose to peel it but not peel it, and I want to leave this choice to the viewer.Regarding the meaning of creation, the meaning of my creation to me and the viewer is not so different. For me personally, I can say that my creation is a kind of discipline for myself. When I formulate many of my creation plans, I tend to choose a more clumsy and rational method. In this process, I will require myself to be a worker with only the minimum skills. Through complicated work, I get an image that looks ordinary at first glance. Then when the image is completed, my viewing of some daily images may also be biased. So many times, what I look forward to most in the whole work is not the finished work itself, but what I will see at the end of my labor. For the viewer, my private and simple labor will greatly limit my right to view the image in the work, and also give the viewer more room for trial.So when it comes to the previous question, in fact, in my creation, in addition to the work itself, my creative process (labor) is also a very critical part. I hope that the audience is not just a viewer of the work, but can become a witness of my labor in a sense by speculating on my creative process. Therefore, in order to allow the audience to see the creative process, I currently think that it is relatively appropriate to leave clues for speculation through a set of more rational creative methods.
9. What are your expectations for your first solo exhibition?
I used to view my works mostly on the computer screen. This solo exhibition gives me an opportunity to fully present my recent works in a real space. These conceptually related but independent works will have some interactions and possibilities in the space. This collective presentation gives me a sense of strangeness, allowing me to temporarily view these works as something other than a creator. I am very much looking forward to re-viewing, sorting out and thinking about the phased creations.
For a long time before this solo exhibition, I was in a closed-door state - few people have seen my works, let alone discussed them. However, my creations are closely related to viewing, and they need to be viewed. And viewing itself is a very sensitive and private thing. Therefore, this exhibition gives me an opportunity to communicate with the audience. I want to understand how everyone views these works, whether my labor has an effect on their viewing, and what this effect.