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By: Damien Worst
Date: 11th Jan 06
Medium: Photography
Drink: Herbal tea
What:
Xing Danwen, duplication/disCONNEXION
Where:
Chinese Museum 22 Cohen Place
When:
January 6 – February 9,
10am-5pm every day
With all the warmth of a forensic investigation, acclaimed Beijing photographer Xing Danwen explores the impact of modernity on an increasingly global China in her back-to-back exhibition duplication/disCONNEXION.
Duplication, looking like toyshop genocide, shows doll's heads en masse, a tangle of golden hair with beady eyes peering out from underneath. Similarly, other images such as tiny doll's arms piled and awaiting assembly are perverted and captivating; the result of Danwen’s exploration of the pressure to conform to both aesthetic and social standards in the quest for modernity.
disCONNEXION is a collection of once desirable objects of consumer culture that have since been discarded. With clinical sensitivity, Danwen has transported her subjects from simply banal, to dark and alluring. Images of tangled and broken mobile phone carriers entwined in a mass of cords could almost pass as a lab tissue sample or a slide of a sinister parasite.
Danwen’s images of the fruits of modernity in their darker, colder forms are irresistible. More sophisticated (and lighter on the gore) than an episode of CSI –duplication/disCONNEXION should not be missed.