Shijia Song

Currently, I am doing MA art and politics at Goldsmiths in London and my undergraduate major was photography. My artwork takes a critical view of social, political, and cultural issues. In my varied and diverse approaches to making art, installations, public, curatorial, and web projects, the context of the work has an impact on the work’s relationship to the viewer. I am often looking for avenues of the unexpected. An ironic twist to images or things you might expect. Or their combinations. Provoking a participant to new and perhaps unexplored territories. In addition, I also try to create in the form of documentary films, and my work Tongzilou is one of them.

Statement

These 20 photos constitute a collection of my works, which is a microcosm of my photography journey in the past nine years. During this period, I have traveled to many places and taken tens of thousands of photos, covering a variety of subjects such as landscape, urban, street documentaries, and conceptual photography. Photography not only allows me to record what happened in those moments but also allows me to feel the passage of time when I look back. Each photo is like a specimen of time, which concretizes abstract time into a concrete spatial expression.

In natural landscape photography, I captured the changing seasons and the flow of light and shadow in nature; in urban photography, I recorded the development of the city and people’s daily life; in street documentary photography, I captured the reality and chance of the moment; in conceptual photography, I tried to use images to express my inner world and ideas. These photos are not only visual records but also witnesses of time.

Photography allows me to observe the world from a unique perspective and tell stories with a lens. In this process, I not only saw the diversity and richness of the world but also felt my own growth and change. These 20 photos are not only a review of the past, but also an inspiration for future creation. They remind me that time is passing and every moment is worth cherishing and remembering.