Lishui Photography Festival: Fused’s pick of the photographers.
Heading to the Chinese province of Zhejiang to check out the bi-annual Lishui Photography Festival takes some commitment. Following the completion of the visa paperwork and permission to travel, once landed in Shanghai it’s a three-hour bullet train past the impressive and never-ending rows of towering skyscrapers that eventually lead to hills and mountains and lush green landscapes. It’s our third visit to the festival (heading there first in 2017) and while it certainly takes a bit more organising to attend than festivals closer to home, once in the city of Lishui it feels like an unknown find; a secret treat that the rest of the creative world hasn’t yet stumbled upon.
Selfishly we’d like to keep it that way, but we know that as the festival grows and matures so does its reputation beyond the Chinese borders. Increasingly adding more Western photographers to its (huge) list of exhibitors makes it difficult to pick out just a few favourites. The inclusive approach to the festival means that there are thousands of works to see but due to some great global connections and some smart curation, there are some real stand-out photographers.
We spent four days walking the halls, museums, shopping centres, parks and warehouses and picked out our favourite, stand-out pieces to share…
American photography royalty; Stephen Shore was invited to Lishui to share a retrospective of his work ‘The Enduring Present’ as well as being the keynote speaker of the event. From his 1970s colourful snapshot of Americana through to his recent landscape drone images, there was a breadth of work that shows Shore’s commitment both to the craft and the techniques and technology that go with it. For us, the ‘Uncommon Places’ series of images and ‘American Surfaces’ are the stars of the retrospective, and while we have the deepest respect for his ever-changing style, we can’t help but enjoy that glimpse of a world we didn’t get to be part of.
Derby’s Format Festival was back again to represent seven artists in their curated exhibition [Re]Source which looked at our connection with the land around us with each artist delivering a very different style and approach as to what this means to them. One of the standout exhibits was by MD Fazla Rabbi Fatiq of Bangladesh who showcased a series of ghostly nighttime images.
Pablo Zuleta Zahr travels the world to capture portraits of people in busy transport terminals as they pass through for the Global Identity Project. Capturing thousands of individuals by video he then (what we assume painstakingly) arranges them into patterns grouping them by their clothing colour or body shapes but managing to make sure no one is overlooked, duplicated or categorised due to potential discriminatory criteria.
The 10th Annual Photography Rankings of China exhibition held at the city’s Photography Museum is a showcase of ‘outstanding works which emerged in 2022’. Highlights of the exhibition included the series of Black and White images of Shanghai at the turn of the century by Zu Haifeng (below and featured) and the hyper-colourful series ‘Garden in the Mirror’ by Yi Hui (above) which sees models dressed in bright clothes against a muted landscape.
On our visit to the festival in 2019 an off-site exhibition was held in the city’s Seven Alleys; a charming historical old town area of small homes, stepped walkways and alleys that lead to streets and dead ends.
Works were displayed on walls all over the area however as the city made repairs to some of the roads in the area the exhibition was recreated inside a modern shopping centre. Featuring the youth of Lishui 20 photographers were chosen to share their work in the re-created alleyway installation. A particular favourite image was Sun Mao Yicheng’s ‘Spoilt Pet’ featuring the portrait of a young woman and her very cute dogs with matching human and dog outfits.
‘The Youth Soars’ was an eclectic and beautifully curated exhibition featuring mixed-media and artistic photography styles by ten young photographers of Lishui. Photographer Wang Huaping placed images of young people on a long, scrolling illustrated piece of paper depicting a Chinese Palace mixing fashionably styled youth with traditional style art.
Photographer A Yin goes to some of the most wild and inhospitable areas for his art. To shoot Mongolian horses he went into the grassland in the biting cold wind, snow and ice capturing the animals who moved together in packs with strength against the extreme conditions. The exhibition was both a stunning backdrop of Black and White imagery blown up large-scale, as well as a showcase of A Yin’s own personal endurance. A film shares the conditions that the photographer worked in – often getting his truck caught in the storms. Not one to shy away from difficult conditions he has also photographed Nomadic communities of Mongolian China.
For ‘The Conch Girl Project’ when photographer Liu Sidian moved to New York two years ago she felt lonely and disconnected, so in an act of socially engaged art, began visiting stranger’s homes to cook them a meal in their own kitchen. The images show the photographer cooking and posing in the kitchens of other New Yorkers and sharing the emotional bonds among people living in densely populated cities.
Walking past Zhang Chauanyang’s images of skyscrapers you’d be forgiven for thinking they were just sharp, crisp photographs but on closer inspection it becomes obvious that the image is made up of hundreds of individual buildings that have been deconstructed and stuck together to make fantastical large-scale towering structures. Like a game of Tetris, the blocks are placed vertically and horizontally to offer up an endlessly evolving supersized landscape.
The highly anticipated Lishui Photography Festival 2023 took place in November and captured the attention of photography enthusiasts from around the world. The next Lishui Photography Festival will take place in November 2025. You can follow the festival on Instagram where news, callouts for submissions and up-to-date information is shared @lishuiphotographyfestival.
