Introduction
The Egotist in the Darkroom is the title of Sun Yanchu’s photo series completed in 2015, which might be the most accurate conclusion of his practice in photography. His passion towards the “traditional” gelatin silver prints, which is growing away from our daily life, has never been weakened. Star Gallery is proud to present his photography and darkroom production related works at “Insight” section of Art Basel Hong Kong 2016.
The focus of this show is Sun Yanchu’s recently completed 130 pieces of gelatin silver prints. In 2004, Sun Yanchu bought a second hand 135mm portable camera with all his savings, and thus began his drifter like adventure of photo-taking. Ever since then, he made it a habit to bring the camera with him whenever he went out. In about eight years, he has taken over 20,000 pieces of black and white photos. Although these photos have noticeable features of documentary, yet they have evidently difference with documentary photography (news photography). For Sun Yanchu, photo-taking has no particular purpose. In stead, it is more of an excuse for him to escape from real life temporarily. In 2009, he began to name these 20,000 pieces of photos as Obsessed.
Only until 2015, Sun Yanchu has made his ultimate selection of 130 images as his works from these 20,000 pieces of photographs, and developed them in gelatin silver prints. Meanwhile, he has completed the editing of a new book of photography for these 130 images, as the full stop for Obsessed series.
In 2012, Sun Yanchu began to build his own darkroom with his very limited incomes, in his words “shabby but sufficient for me”. Ever since then, he “amplified” his imagination and creativity based on traditional gelatin silver prints, and started new series including Motorcycle Girls, The Egotist in The Darkroom, The Wildness, and Einstellung etc. Some of these series will be presented in this show.
