Possible Past

On December 6, 2020, Star Gallery presents the three-man exhibition “Possible Past,”  with photography by No.223 (Lin Zhipeng), Peng Yangjun and Sun Yanchu.

The exhibition title “Possible Past” was taken from the title of Peng Yangjun’s 2020 photo album, bringing over ten years of his work.  Long stored in a hard drive file entitled “Failed Shots” before publication, these images included both “rejected” frames and casual snapshots from commissioned shoots, and even mobile phone pictures. In 2019, Peng Yangjun spent a year going through these images and editing them into an album. For the artist, these works that evince any creative theme while extending across time and various visual styles come closest to his instinctive reflexes as a photographer, defined by spontaneity and not relying on the sum of his reason and experience.  

Works exhibited by Sun Yanchu also stem from his prolific daily practice of photography. In 2016, Star Gallery exhibited his earliest breakthrough series “Drowning Here” at Art Basel Hong Kong: the artist selected around one hundred negatives out of over several tens of thousand black and white film shots for manual developing and gelatin silver printing. As a continuation of this series, Sun has chosen 31 photos to be shown at Star Gallery, thus commented upon his largest work, Flowered Back: “I find this photo neither beautiful nor ugly. As the man turns his back against the flower and the camera all while facing the wall, I feel great stability.”

The 24 color photographs shown by No.223 (Lin Zhipeng) come from his 2020 album, Grand Amour. In 2018, the artist completed a residency at the Paris Hôtel Grand Amour and presented his solo exhibition, “No.233@GrandAmour”: in different rooms of the same hotel, he encountered men, women and the objects with which they come in contact. The photographer is a like a doorman enabled with special powers or an invisible person holding a camera, stepping into stories concealed within hotel rooms. Having made use of social media in his previous work, No.223 had gained a large number of followers and was thus able to recruit Paris-based Asians to participate in his project within a short period of time.