Luo Dan — China : In The Eye — Laure Roynette Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 31 → February 22, 2014

Born in 1968 in Chongqing, not far from the Three Gorges Dam, he was gratuated from the Sichhuan Fine Art Institute in 1932, Luo Dan worked as a photoreporter since 1997 for Chinese newspapers and magazines (Chengdu Evening Paper, Huaxi City Paper). Passionate about Diane Arbus and Robert Frank, he photographs movie stars for the “Shanghaï Evening News” until 2006, year during which he presents his collection On The Road.

His work stops on the landscapes of the Popular Republic of China, far from the Chinese megalopolis. Face to the immensity of the country, he seized the Chinese in their daily life with “melancholia, or even nostalgia, behind the beauty of the faces, the landscapes assaulted by the omnipresent pollution” wrote Christian Caujolle. Luo Dan is qualified of a “Humanist to the white pictures as the fog on Shanghaï, Gold Award of Lianzhou Festival in 2008”. This son of the Maoist China, converted to protestantism by reading the Bible, explain what he saw on his way :

“Everything disapears in China, at the humans being image, condemned to disapear. The traditional values are out-of-date. The only value that matter today, is dollar. The joys produced by money are ephemeral. That’s why people are feeling miserable”.

It is with soft and natural colours that Luo Dan photographs what surrounds him with sincerity and simplicity. Everyone’s life portrayed in its hardness and with moments of joy during a trek all across China. He has chosen a method which is at the same time simple and effective, that of a traveller almost disabused of the impossibility of circumscribing the immensity: he has travelled in his country from North to South and East to West.

The photographs transport the viewer into a changing China, without certainty, in places far from the effervescence of the big cities like Shanghaï or Beijing.

“He summons us in an unreal country, more resigned than sad, that may look like to what does feel the majority of his contemporaries who haven’t been invited to share the sudden and spectacular enrichment of a few”.

These photographs show a China full of charm, natural and contradictory.