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Emancipating imagesPublished: 09 Dec 2009 08:02:01 PST

Artist Wen Fang in front of her work.

By Wang Meng and Qiu Lin, China Features

Wen Fang used 1949 as part of her email address instead of her birth year, 1976. She said the choice was just an instinct. For her, 1949 means freedom and emancipation, a theme she has been trying to express in her photographic art works. Wen graduated from college in 1996, during China's Internet boom. She chose to be a website designer and six years later Wen's passion for art took her to France where she studied photography at Louis Lumiere College.

"The most important thing I learned from my two-year study in France is to be open minded," Wen said. "The experience in France has made it easier for me to understand others and their differences."

As a photographer, Wen is different, even counter-traditional. When she first started to learn photography, she was not interested in traditional techniques. "Printing a photo on a piece of paper and hanging it framed on the wall, to me, feels like a tomb. It makes the photo distant from people," Wen explained, adding that she likes to engage everyday materials with her images.

When Wen returned from France in 2004, she started to "emancipate" her images. Bricks on the streets of Beijing became her first experimental material and migrant workers, her subjects.

"Every material has its own uniqueness and every image has its own mind. When these two are combined, a brand new creation is born," Wen explained.

Wen found common ground for the bricks and migrant workers: a tiny room occupied by a dozen workers, their bunk beds almost touching, just like a wall made of bricks.

"Bricks are like migrant workers. The fate of a brick is like that of a migrant worker. Migrant workers are from the countryside while bricks are from the earth. Bricks are made as one of the cheapest materials to build a modern city. Migrant workers come to the city as the cheapest labor to build a modern city," Wen explained. "The feeling is the same."

In her photos, the migrant workers are sitting on bricks, smiling, as that was the first impression they gave Wen. "Their life is hard, but they are very optimistic."

Wen recently held an exhibition in Beijing's 798 Art District. The work, displayed on a brick wall, demonstrated 60 years of fashion from Christian Dior on one side of the wall and Chinese fashion from the same time period on the other side. A big hole in the wall seemed to explode from east to west, with fragments left dangling in the air, making it difficult to tell which side was French and which was Chinese.

"Chinese fashion used to be heavily influenced by politics. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, fashion was linked with politics. Being fashionable meant being the same as others; whereas in France, fashion was about diversity, difference and variation," Wen explained.

In the 1980s, China broke down its wall and opened up to the outside world. Fashion was no exception. In Wen's view, today's diversity is the result of political openness.

"Because of such an open gesture, Chinese have the opportunity to get a glimpse of the view beyond the wall and people outside the wall can come in to see a real China." Such openness in art has been demonstrated by freedom in creation, according to Wen.

She added that the development of Chinese contemporary art reflects the social change in Chinese society. Currently based in her studio in the 798 Art District, Wen is trying her hand at new types of materials to express her views on society and the future.

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