‘Landscape’ consists of 5 different platforms that are dedicated to the imagery of Shanghai: Here, the city is captured photographically in a both poetic and realistic form of aesthetic. The show consists of tableaus that each tells a different story about contemporary life in this fast changing urban environment. The artists themselves call this approach ‘memory creation’. The images of the city come to symbolize the characters that inhabit it.
In one picture in the series titled “Zhongshan Park”, a-wide-angle-shot captures kites, kids, parents, and old men on the green meadow, and among those a common girl was taking a portrait shot of herself. In the world of the girl, she herself was the center, she was the landscape. But from the perspective of Birdhead, she was just the periphery.
The video installation ‘Landscape’ was conceived in Britain while Birdhead was traveling there as tourists. Here, they attempted to switch the identities around, and actually photograph the natives portrayed as tourists. In front of a tricky white board with only the Chinese characters “feng jing”, i.e. “landscape” written on it, people posed with pleasure as if situated in a real landscape.
“Garden” consists of a series of extraordinary light-box installations. Five boxes feature Birdhaed, a garden and their toys. The light-boxes picture these scenarios from dusk till down, and the work can be seen more as a rite de passage than merely an image of childhood games.
Ji Weiyu (1980) and Song Tao (1979) were both born in Shanghai where the artists today also reside and work. The artists graduated from the Shanghai Arts and Carafts School (2000). Recent exhibitions include The World of Other’s, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2008), China Power Station II, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007), Bird Head 2006-2007 Photography Show, BizArt Art Center, Shanghai, China (2007), and Individual Position II, ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai, China (2007).
