On December 10, 2014, NYU Shanghai’s first floor exhibition room was transformed into the "Image Ination" gallery, where art professors Barbara Edelstein and Jian-Jun Zhang joined their students in showcasing an array of photography works.
Students used a myriad of tools learned over the course of the semester, creating compositions that detailed photographic juxtapositions, an implicit attention to textures, simplicity, symbolism, poetry, and even the combination of video and audio to evoke a fuller sensory experience.
Student Cynthia Chau’s photo installation, Looking Up, gave thought to "light as the subject of the picture itself" and featured a hanging photograph of a "1920s-styled stained glass chandelier" photographed in Shanghai’s Peace Hotel, interacting with its audience by casting light around them from the above fixtures.
Francis Lee’s The Five Second Rule is a series of Shanghai portraiture that "addresses the relationship between the photographer and a spontaneous 'subject,'" where the camera becomes a confrontational tool exposing more than the "formal, prepared expression" of traditional portraiture.
YaoFei Wu (Villa) was able to capture an unexpected elegance in her piece, a black-and-white series of photographs that explored the contours and beauty of none other than a trashed wad of tissue. Whether their compositions drew social commentary, reflected the nature of life and death, or captured a single moment's ephemeral beauty, the students revealed an acute thoughtfulness and meaningfulness in their work that delved beneath the surface of being just strikingly good photography.
View the Gallery
Written by Charlotte San Juan