Confucius said, “while your parents are alive, it is better not to travel far away.” But what is “home?” This is my past; and I ultimately have to face the future. Every generation has its own dreams, though bounded by the time. Maybe one day we all need to come back. 
-Travel Journal Jiehao Su

 

Actual Size is pleased to present In Search Of Home: New Work by Jiehao Su. This is the Beijing based artist’s first exhibition outside of Asia. Like classical Chinese paintings these large color photographs portray the landscape of a changing nation with a perspective that is simultaneously formal and personal. The grey skies that unite Su’s images of urban and rural China provide a backdrop to consider our relationship to landscape, identity, and memory.

 

Between 2012 and 2013 Jiehao Su drove alone across half of China with the aim of documenting the contemporary Chinese landscape. Su’s journey through Eastern China endeavored to explore the landscape, the individuals he encountered and his place within it. Personal and political in their quiet observations, the series recalls Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and William Eggleston in its nuanced approach to landscape, nationality and the individual.

 

Eastern China is the fastest growing part of a nation that has transformed dramatically since 1978 in pace and scale beyond any historical precedent. This change is evidenced in the landscape, environment and daily lives of individuals. Through his photographs Su shares his journey though the country as well as his quest for identity within China and the global landscape.The images are lyric renderings of a contemporary China, a transforming world, and the spaces between that the individual must navigate.

 

Jiehao Su, B. 1988 Guangdong, China, Lives and works in Beijing. Su studied at Bejing Film Academy and Sun-Yat Sen University in 2009 and has exhibited his work in Jinan, Shanghai, Dali and Southeast Asia.