Yves Gellie

Tableaux chinois

This work apprehends the Chinese society in its daily reality as well as its diversity. The images on display depict the worker’s world as much as that of the farmer, the middle class on vacation — a privileged moment —, students studying and living, rich families of Beijing, state employees, artists, sportsmen and members of ethnic minorities. The artist’s choice is to concentrate on the visual field of the Chinese population, to show their daily environment and focus on objects since they reflect a personality and lead to one’s intimacy. These images form a collection of clues based on elements as varied as a napkin, curtains, a desk, a ceiling, a floor, elements which reflect the daily life of Chinese people and reveal what their eyes see every day. The image focuses on elements which, because of their extremely common nature, become almost invisible in one’s daily life, but which are signs of individuality, of a strong culture and of a changing way of life.

The frames are simple and rigorous, they continue without distorting the vision of each character during these moments of life: that of a worker during a break, of a railway man setting the table for a family breakfast. The perspective of all the images allows impressions to penetrate within the living places’ privacy.

It reveals a multitude of entangled signs whose common media are the trace, the wear and tear, the color, the matter. Objects and places, freed from all human presence, translate with great precision their closeness with the characters involved. The accumulation of a priori trivial details allows a more pertinent approach of a life that is often impervious to western culture and a more accurate comprehension of the sense they are bearing. The images are characterized by the stillness and stability of the composition which allows to concentrate on a detail. Moreover, this shooting mode neutralizes the photographer’s emotion and subjectivity and releases with more acuteness the proper presence and signification of objects, colors and matters.

Isabelle Bernard