Qingyang Chen is a London / Shanghai based photographer. She graduated with an M.A in Photography from the University of Arts, London in 2020, after which she gained experience as a curator working for the Arthill Gallery, London. In the past two year, she exhibited her works in China, Korea, New Zealand, and the UK.
About Embrace – words by Qingyang Chen:
Embrace based on the experience felt of being ‘embraced’, this shoot started on the imagination of creating a sense of comfort and warmth, through depicting the fragment of the body, gesture, movement, consider physical intimacy with one’s own body, with the hand recurring as a comforting, protective and expressive tool.
Qingyang’s images invite the viewer to respond to the image as a tactile experience, so that a sense of touch is triggered by the visually.
The tactility of her photographs creates an intimacy with the sensorial world. The body, its gestures, its reactions, its vulnerability. She directs her camera over it to feel and discover, often in close-up, with subtle control of focus and depth of field, waiting for a transient play of light.
Her works provide a new way to experience and enjoy what we see and how we feel. Greatly influenced by Phenomenology, Qingyang builds her view of life and art on sensory experience, in which touch plays a major rôle. She says, ‘Touching evokes closeness and intimacy for me. I use the camera to capture this from both my feeling at the time and also from my memories.’ These images are to be experienced rather than understood. The viewer’s eye becomes like fingertips caressing things that were and which now exist as an image.
