At 3:00 pm on July 1, 2014, “Starting Point – 2014 Exhibition of Works by the Students that Majored in Photography of the School of Design, CAFA” opened in the Yanhuang Art Museum, the exhibition is jointly organized by Yanhuang Art Museum and Speciality Photography of the School of Design, CAFA, and Yao Lu, Associate Professor of the Department of Photography of the School of Design, CAFA serves as the curator. The exhibition presents the works by 14 young photographers including Chentian Qiutao, Gong Zhe, Hou Shuai, Huang Ben, Lai Xuexiu, Taoge Rule, Wang Binzhang, Wang Chutian, Wang Runxi, Xu Hanwen, Yan Baoshen, Zhang Chao, Zhang Qingpeng, Zheng Haoshan, to systematically fully showcase the teaching features of the Speciality Photography, CAFA.

Founded in 2001, Speciality Photography of CAFA is a relatively young speciality. After 10 years of professional teaching, based on the pursuit of the professional, diverse and contemporary teaching ideas, on the basis of absorbing the essence of international photography teaching, dependent on the profound academic accumulation of CAFA, it explored and achieved a scientific and reasonable teaching structure for a perfect system, producing an extensive academic influence in the field of international photography education.

Cui Xiaodong, Director of Yanhuang Art Museum, curator Yao Lu attended the opening ceremony. Cui Xiaodong addressed the audience gathered at the opening and praised the achievement of more than a decade of professional teaching by the Speciality Photography of CAFA, highlighting that the participating works revealed a very solid professional skill, rich imagination and creativity by the students, and the diverse creative styles, to reflect the current young students’ different understandings of life and art. Yao Lu introduced the background and the organizing process of the exhibition, and then he thanked the museum that supported the teaching of the Speciality Photography of CAFA, and hoped to establish a long-term cooperative relation with Yanhuang Art Museum, and also hoped the students can cherish such a platform for display, to enjoy self motivation in learning and creation, taking every photo as a new starting point.

The 14 photographers are composed of both graduates and students of the Speciality Photography, linearly showcasing the teaching achievement of Speciality Photography of CAFA. “The Shadow of War” by Zheng Haoshan, from South Korea, performance by the North Korean defectors, desalinated the political factors in the creation, but these were changed to express the care of human nature, through filming their backs to reveal the war scars and suffering. In Taoge Rule’s works “Elapse Space”, he took “collage” as the main technique, cutting the old family photos into fragments, creating a collage and restructured them to produce a new work again, by which he questioned his current self status. Zhang Chao’s work “Focus on the Country – Nets, Slag, Rockery, and the Tripod with Two Handles” emphasized the construction of urbanization, dissociating a kind of symbolization from a variety of construction sites, which was finished with the changing form from figurative to abstract. Chentian Qiutao focused on flowing children's groups in the form of photography, whose work “The Flowing Hope” is full of humanistic care, the children themselves recorded their own life state with the use of the camera distributed by the artist, who also shot a single portrait of each child at the same time, thus these two parts were integrated to one work.

The exhibition is themed on a “starting point”, which also reveals the hope of curator Yao Lu, he wrote in the exhibition preface that, “The presentation of the work is the most important thing, the exhibition doesn’t mean the end, it is just the beginning, the display of a work is the starting point”.

The exhibition will continue to July 16.

Text by Zhang Wenzhi, translated by Chen Peihua and edited by Sue/CAFA ART INFO.

Photo by Quan Jing/CAFA ART INFO.