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White Light, White Heat

Indefinite Beauty at White Factory - By Morgan, Sep 23, 08

A trip to White Factory, the new gallery space in 696 Weihai Lu turned out to be surprisingly worth it, and their opening exhibition, entitled "Indefinite Beauty," features five strong photography voices spanning a century and a bit of gazing at the female form.

I was up for a little star gazing, of course, and "Indefinite Beauty" matches up the iconic Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, and Nobuyashi Araki, along with female photographers Miyako Ishiuchi and Yuki Onodera, in an exhibition examining the depiction of the female form in modern photography: thinking man's smut.

It was the first time in a long time, I'd say, in which the purported contrasts of style and connotation in a group exhibition were actually detectable and palpable. On the one wall hangs the erotic antagonism and estrangement of noted Japanese crazyperson Nobuyashi Araki, featuring female nudes bound by ropes, clothes or not at all -- various stages of disempowerment.

Grouped with him on the same wall is the circus-like, serial-killerish grotesquery of Hans Bellmer -- his "notorious dolls" -- depicting the female form as the bulbous and fleshy fragments of destructed desire.

These raw images of power and destruction oppose the ethereal movement and fantasy of the works of Yuki Onodera, in the back section, depicting the shadowed female form in various emotive gestures of jubilation (see top right). This form is coupled with representative animals, imparting a sense of innocent naturalism. The pictures are bereft of the visceral sexualism of Bellmer's and Araki's, and the shadowed female form is personal, inscrutable, and evocative of a private catharsis.

I also liked these ones because they reminded me of music videos by The Cure.

The puckish photography of Man Ray bridges the thematic divide between the two, and it's a question from the American photog fantastique that serves as the precursor for the show: "I ask, how can we ever get together on the question of beauty?"

My own personal tastes had me lingering on the silvery grain works of Man Ray longer, as it seemed his ambiguous photos are rich not only with the weighted relationship between photographer and subject, but also with a certain bygone period of wistfully iconoclastic modernism. One can imagine the photographer clicking away backstage at some theater in Paris, playfully and honestly coaxing out his ideal fantasy.

So White Factory, which is really more of a white box than a factory, has a finely organized show on their hands and you should go see it before it closes on October 31.

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