Press release
Yuan Yanwu found some old yellowed photos of her childhood when she was living with her maternal grand parents in Shanghai. She is two, five, nine, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen or sixteen years old.
Moments of self-rediscovery, as when, little girl sitting on a small stool, she was secretly looking at herself in the mirror. An installation recreates the device at the origin of the work while in a video, Yanwu talks to the spectator. Today, facing these pictures, Yanwu interrogates this image of the self as the Other (the child) in the mirror. More than a memory to be reactivated, childhood is for her an ideal to be created.
Photography? Painting? Yanwu goes beyond photography; she paints with her computer, and then comes back to photography; She recreates from the photo, going further than visible reality. She slips into the Other, the Other whom she was and whom she is not anymore. More than photography, more than painting, her work tends to give another status to images.