Here I am focusing on the last word of the show&#;s title &#;Inspiration&#;. One of the contemporary artists included in the exhibition was Shi Guorui, a Chinese American artist who uses a camera obscura to create very large images. The name of this show within a show is &#;Ab/sense-Pre/Sense&#;. Shi&#;s images in this case were based on the landscape paintings of Thomas Cole (), founder of The Hudson River School.
The camera obscura was the forerunner of the cameras we know today. The earliest known reference was provided by a Chinese philosopher called Mo-tzu (or Mozi) in BC. He noted that light from an illuminated object that passed through a pinhole into a dark room created an inverted image of the original object. Later on, the concept was recreated using a box or tent as housing.
Shi Guorui was photographed by Nathan Bajar for The New York Times, building his camera obscura out of a tent in a forest near Kaaterskill Falls in the Hudson River Valley. The artist spent 34 hours in that tent to get his time lapse photos of
Shanghai, China, 15–16 October
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Title:Shanghai, China, 15–16 October
Artist:Shi Guorui (Chinese, born )
Date
Culture:China
Medium:Unique camera obscura gelatin silver print
Dimensions:Image: 50 3/4 in. × 14 ft. 1 1/4 in. ( × cm)
Classification:Photographs
Credit Line:Lent by M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong
Rights and Reproduction:© Shi Guorui
Acquired directly from the artist in by Uli Sigg, a Swiss private collector. Donated to the M+ Museum of Visual Culture in
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China," December 9, –April 6,
Hearn, Maxwell K. Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China. Exh. cat. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, [], pp. –, fig.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
Selected Group Exhibitions
Beginning with his conversion of one of the Great Wall’s watchtowers into a camera obscura (also known as a pinhole camera), Shi Guorui has employed large-scale, often site-specific camera obscuras as his primary method of artistic production. He added the photogram to his repertoire of techniques in , when conceptualizing works for his solo exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Confining his artistic practice as he does to methods favored during the nineteenth-century, Shi Guorui stands in opposition to the tide of digital photography and all that it implies, most notably speed and convenience. Not only does Shi Guorui pursue a slow process; that process is also markedly inefficient. His output as a photographer remains small, due to the fact that each exposure is unique. If he produces a series of four images of a particular vista, each image will be slightly different depending on light conditions, and they will not be reproduced in an edition because there is no negative from which to create additional images. Photographing the Great Wall, for example, in five days he was able to complete only
Shi Guorui
Shi Guorui was born in Shanxi, China in and currently lives and works in the U.S.. Regarded as one of China’s most famous photographers, Shi Guorui takes large-scale iconic photographs using the technique of camera obscura with a pinhole camera. His images include the Shanghai skyline, Hong Kong skyline and the famed Bird’s Nest Stadium designed by Ai Wei Wei.
Shi Guorui’s interest in using the camera obscura method goes deeper than documenting monumental city scenes. In showing the cities, void of distraction, he steps into the realm of explaining or observing different cultures and social or political issues. The black and white, large-scale images challenge the viewer to look more closely at familiar scenes.
The process of making of his photographs is as important to Shi Guorui is as the photos themselves. He looks at it as a spiritual and meditative process and appreciates the way it allows him to escape the ever-fast-growing world around us, especially in China today.
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