About this photograph :
Lost in China
During the summer of 2005, I left for a residency at the Museum of Art of Guangdong, city of Guangzhou (Canton). I took the Transsiberian to Peking and then travelled China by train.
During this long and impressive journey I turned my attention in the silence of shapes, the density of substances, the sensuality of bodies and the radiance of souls. What impressed me in this country overcome with a frenzy for everything modern, was its intact power to fantasize and imagine, something the Westerner I am always dreamt of. I chose to transpose the rawness of what I perceived into a symphony of colors and sensations, a kingdom of poetry and dreams.
In trains (compartments, corridors, railway platforms) and in towns (hotels, restaurants, museums, parks) one new window on China after the other opened before my neophyte eyes, but deformed, altered, sublimized by the reflexion of my imagination. Faced with a strongly architecturized and socialized China I wanted to show the extraordinary power of seduction and the astounding ambiguity of this deeply changing country which day after day drew simultaneously on the magic of its past and the revolutionary strength of its future. My aim was to render, in the present body of photographs, the traces, fragrances, and impressions of this both ancient and extremely contemporary China - far from the habitual documentary.
While roaming day after day the streets of Beijing, Guanzhou or Shanghai, I was overcome with the strong feeling of a sort of persistance of chinese aesthetics, the power of a « look » peculiar to this country, that came from old ages and durably marks present-day China. Strongly influenced by Asian cinema, I conceived my body of works like just as many movie sequences, trying to transmit, via my centrings and coloristic approach, an infinity of spots of liberty , far from the intellectual orthodoxy that is still so strong in this country.
By losing myself in the urban arcanes of a subliminal, dreamt and fantasized China I gave life to this imaginary voyage .
François Fontaine
About the artist :
François
Fontaine
François Fontaine was born in 1968 and lives and works in Paris. Editor in chief of the magazine "Exporama" and director of photography of the magazine "Palace," his journey as a photographer has not ceased to grow since 1991, through many press publications as well as multiples exhibitions, in France and abroad.