Originally working briefly as a news photographer in his native Guangdong, Wang Ningde’s photographic works are a departure from the underpinnings of documentary news photography. Photographing his "Some Days" subjects in Guangzhou, Beijing, Inner Mongonlia and Shenyang, these black and white photographs more resemble rescued fragments of layered childhood memories, fear, and reverie, reconstructed in the serene trappings of an anonymous historical past.
Read MoreAs an artist, Wang Ningde attempts to decipher and answer the unanswerable, peeling back the layers of memory and social façade, to probe and expose the more complicated and perhaps disconcerting elements of a personal past or collective psyche. The characters and caricatures photographed in “Some Days” can at once be taken both lightly and also with great gravity and seeming consequence. Stark shadowy figures, eyes shut, dreaming or in despair, vulnerable, disturbed, it seems these characters are from an unsettled history, or from an uncertain future. Are these characters feeling love or lust, friendship or fearfulness, hostility or the comforts of family and home?
Born in 1972 in Liaoning, China, Wang Ningde studied photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang and now lives and works in Beijing. This exhibition marks the first time the whole “Some Days” series of works have been shown together in China.
