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Art Review: JR's Photo Food Truck

The French artist’s "Inside Out" project lets you print and paste your own selfies around the city. But how are you going to use it?
Last updated: 2015-11-09


Fedora-wearing French artist JR touched down in Shanghai last Saturday, and will take off again on Sunday May 18. In the short time he’s here, he’s doing his damnedest to saturate the city in his familiar large format, black and white portraits on paper. This time, he wants your help.

As well as showing works from the past ten years at the Power Station of Art (from Friday, May 16) and new works at MD Gallery (from Saturday, May 17), he’s sending out a photo booth truck (through July 12) so people can shoot giant selfies and have them pasted in more than 50 locations around the city.



The truck launched at Xintiandi on Monday morning, where members of JR’s team were using a 9.75 meter tall JLG series 10RS electric scissor lift to rapidly disguise the shopping complex’s heritage architecture behind dozens of A2 posters. They even covered doors and shutters, using a box cutter to reveal elements of the architectural skeleton beneath.

JR himself sat at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf nearby, doing a few interviews and looking very, very relaxed compared to the sweaty, bearded Frenchmen on the lift.

“This project really doesn’t need me because we set up the basics three years ago,” he told me. “It’s happening as we’re talking in a lot of other places around the world. A few years ago I gave my process away. I make sure that even though I’m here, I’m not helping, because I want the people to take control of it.”



The truck itself is cool. A production team of ten has been in China for three weeks getting it set up, decorating it in the halftone dots of blown up newspaper print and filling it with reams of paper and gallons of ink.

In a shallow, curtained off bay at the back, a touch screen asks participants for their names and email addresses and then shows them their faces during a ten second countdown before taking a flash photo. A minute or so later, the image peels out of a wide slot in the side of the truck.



The idea here is that people come together, share a creative act and the walls of the city get covered, not in government or corporate messaging, but images of us. It’s wholesome, ‘like’-bait humanism.

Social isolation is one of JR’s main concerns. He’s already used photographs of people distracting themselves with cell phones on the Shanghai metro to cover a wall in Yangpu improvised from old doors. According to Magda Danysz, director of MD Gallery, the owner was worried that the doors were being ‘ruined’, and she purchased them.


Courtesy JR’s Instagram

Yet the truck project, entitled “Inside Out”, seems less likely to connect fractured social groups than some of JR’s earlier works. In 2005, he introduced images from housing projects in Les Bosquets to swankier Parisian neighborhoods, highlighting the marginalization of poor migrant groups that contributed to the city’s riots. He likewise tried to build empathy between Israelis and Palestinians in 2007, and bridge the huge generation gap here in 2010, when he chose to photograph the city’s older people, who largely missed out on the sorts of opportunities contemporary Shanghai provides.

This time, because the images are shot and pasted in the same place, you end up with shoppers at Xintiandi seeing pictures of other shoppers at Xintiandi. Museum goers at a museum.



The trade-off here is that JR can solicit much broader participation with tens of thousands of people able to shoot themselves over the duration of the project, which he says provides a platform for expression, something analogous to Mark Zuckerberg setting up Facebook. That leaves the level of engagement and quality of expression up to us.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s normal. Don’t fight it. We could introduce migrant workers and their children to the truck to increase their visibility in the city. Haha, jk. I know that didn’t cross your mind. But yeah, now that you mention it, you could conceivably print and paste a dick pic.

The camera is set up to take pictures of seated people’s faces, so just think what you could achieve standing up. Entire buildings pasted over with paper cocks. Sure, no one wants to see dick pics, but everyone wants to take them. Or imagine Shanghai’s sexually repressed streets paved with vaginas. That’d be a start. But really, any diversion from the predictably harmonious assemblage of smiles and cute, goofy faces would do. Come on Shanghai. What you got?

For full details of when the photo booth truck will be where, visit www.jr-closeup.net.

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