Compound Visions: Fu Meng and Hua Jin

John B Aird Gallery, Macdonald Block, 900 Bay St, Toronto

March 8-April 1, 2016

Compound Visions brings together recent lens-based works by two Chinese-Canadian artists, Fu Meng and Hua Jin, that examine the perception of time and reflect on the experience of place. Hua Jin's series pairs images of landscape taken at different times and in different contexts to foreground the relations created between the images. The pairings variously create narratives, evoke affects, and invite reflection by asking viewers to look between and across the images. Rather than allowing viewers to remain comfortably within the photographic frame they demand that we see across and between the works. Fu Meng's Illusions layer and overlap multiple versions of the same image to create abstract patterns that comment on the contemporary built environment. The redoubling of the image heightens our awareness of the frame and allows viewers to oscillate between seeing the pattern created by the composition and seeing through it to surfaces of the buildings the pieces manipulate. His Queue is a single, long image, algorithmically extracted from video documenting the progress of the 2015 Toronto Santa Claus Parade. By extracting a single pixel's width of information from each moment of the video, the work decomposes the movement of the participants by highlighting their passage across the artists vantage point. The piece exposes the fundamental strangeness of machinic vision while also retaining something of the emotion and atmosphere of the underlying event.

REVIEWS

“Review, Compound Visions: Fu Mang and Hua Jin,” Realty Weekly, B10, March 18, 2016.

“Review, Compound Visions:  Fu Meng and Hua Jin,” Fortune Weekly, C7, March 18, 2016.

“Review, Compound Visions:  Fu Meng and Hua Jin,” Home Weekly, C3, March 17, 2016.