MUGE “ASH”

Dates: January 10 (Fri) — February 8 (Sat), 2020

Closing Party: February 8 (Sat), 2020 18:00-20:00

Zen Foto Gallery is pleased to present “Ash”, a solo exhibition by Muge from January 10 to February 8 to commemorate the publication of Muge’s photobook under the same title. This is the third solo exhibition of the artist presented by the gallery. His previous exhibition “Ash” was presented in 2013 and “Go Home” was held in 2009, the first year Zen Foto Gallery was founded. Muge’s series “Ash” was photographed from 2010 until the recent years and is divided into three parts: “Still Life”, “Shan Shui” and “Scenery”. Portraying still and moving objects in daily and natural spaces, the series reveals their transient changes—weathering, decaying, aging and growing. and this exhibition will be a rare opportunity to look at the series with traditional platinum prints, exquisitely handmade by the artist through complicated procedures.

“Ash” refers to the ashes of death: “In the cycle of life, one goes back to where one came from, all souls return to their creator.”

When I used the large format camera to re-understand my hometown as it is now, I’ve discovered that all things in the real world derive from our internal desire: the Karma cycle of yearning for nature, destroying nature and mending nature (...) These images are taken from the understandings gleaned from my daily life, conveying the traces of time and history in nature, and a person’s thoughts of the future when faced with reality. —Muge

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Artist Profile

Muge

Born in Chongqing in 1979, Muge currently lives in Chengdu, China. Founder of Muge Gallery. He received the Photographer of the Year Award from American photography magazine PND in 2013, and was selected as one of the most notable photographers born in the 1970s and 1980s by IMA Magazine, Japan.

Since 2005, Muge started his “Go Home” project to document the drastically changing landscapes on the way back to his hometown in Chongqing due to the Three Gorges water conservancy project. Facing the contradictions and hopelessness brought about by the tremendous changes in China’s social environment, Muge rethought his way of photographing and viewing and eventually started using a large-format technical camera to observe the still life at home and various things in nature. In his “Ash” series which began in 2010, Muge focused on three unchanging elements – mountain, water, and stone – through observing the traces of time and history, he attempted to comprehend the true essence of nature. Muge’s recent project “Behind the Wall” recorded his journeys around China from 2013 to 2018, traveling 128,658 kilometers along the boundary of the Great Wall and visited the villages in the north as he photographed the sites of the Great Wall and the people he encountered. The aim was to create a portrait of his home nation through its symbolic icon, attempting to develop a deeper understanding of China, his “home at large”. The concept of “home” which Muge has been continuously concerned with has expanded beyond his hometown. Beginning in 2019, Muge started a new project called “Bow Wave (Huí Liú)” along with photographers Feng Li and Zhang Kechun. They are traveling to bigger and smaller cities in China to present the current state of China through fieldwork, exhibitions and publications.

Muge’s photographs were featured in The New York Times; Le Monde magazine and Photography of China. His works have been exhibited in and out of China, including his solo exhibition “Behind the Wall” at Format Photo Festival in 2019; “40 Years of Chinese Contemporary Photography” at OACT Contemporary Art Terminal Shenzhen in 2018 and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre Beijing in 2017; “Chinese Contemporary Photography Exhibition” at Kunstraum Villa Friede in Germany in 2015; “The Rising of Dragon: Contemporary Chinese Photography Exhibition” at Katonah Museum of New York in 2012. His main publications are “Ash” (Zen Foto Gallery, 2013 for the first edition, 2019 for the new edition. Japan) and “Going Home” (Jiazazhi, 2014. China).

Publications & Prints