Fan Xi’s imagery has always been free-spirited and widely practiced, from portraits, architectural ruins, wilderness, botany to homemade scenes, and still life. Over a long period of time of exploring the game theory in different photographic subjects, her image practice is always full of dramatic tension. Fan Xi has been trying to provide people with a new way of image perception by using a variety of materials, keenly focusing and amplifying subtle differences in detail, disrupting and reversing the customary image cognition order.

In this exhibition L’s living Room, Fan Xi created an abstract set and placed blurred imagery in it. The abstraction and blur here point to the paradox of photography as a real medium: movement and stillness, reality and fiction, privacy and publicness. The clock, the floor, the plants, and the woman's silhouette in the space seem to imply that we have entered a living space that exudes a familiar scent, but under the artist's ingenious conceal, we cannot identify any exact details. Memory has failed here, as we have always maintained a sense of alienation under our familiar emotions. The artist invites us to enter, but makes the entrant a strange intruder.

Through specific construction of scenarios and atmosphere, Fan Xi tries to search and create misplaced time and space, and psychological illusions; thus, tearing the objective perspective and true appearance of the photographic images apart. The artist explores what has been formed in front of the camera with a penetrating gaze. As the investigation deepens, Fan Xi's field of vision extends beyond the present—the past and the future that is forming. Under highly intensive observation and shooting, Fan Xi's creation is no longer limited to the reproduction of the instant image, but show the process of creation and generation. Different from the reality that is expected to be reproduced in Photography Ontology, which excludes human intervention, and is different from the decisive moment in historical time and space that documentary photography expects to capture, Fan Xi's image practice emphasizes the absolute position of the subject in transition. The state of change, which comes from the loose time in individual memory, confirms the persistence of objects, and at the same time establishes an open-ended and uncertain narrative structure.

Han Xinyi