Infamous Tea & Honey show
You can’t pass Maleonn’s photos without recognizing his playful, sometimes sardonic style. One picture shows a girl holding a notebook with its inside facing the ground; countless black “梦” (dream) characters are falling on the ground, some of them having already transformed into black fish, which are swimming away through the air. Another presents white sheets of paper flying above a field; men in white shirts, black trousers and white masks are trying to catch them and read from the unwritten pages.
Maleonn photographs as if he is painting dreamscapes, directing post-modern dramas, writing poems, riddles and fables. He doesn’t believe recording reality is the mission of photography.
Growing up in a family of artists, training 11 years as a painter, making a name for himself as one of the top advertising directors in China over nine years — all this, together with a persistent pursuit of the simple and the beautiful in human nature, have made Shanghainese Maleonn a magician who is powerful enough to conjure up a surreal new world.
It is a world of bright colors and dramatic light, where his heroes and heroines are sunk deeply into the stories of another dimension. “I never emphasize the visual perspective,” he tells us. “There is always just a flat surface in my photos, which gives the feeling that these people are presenting their entire selves to you. It’s as if they are saying, 'This is me. I am right here. Look at me.'”
When viewed closely, it almost seems as though the characters are in a trance, whether they are flying an unseen kite, kneeling down with a pale mask before a huge Buddha’s head or blowing a trumpet across a waste land, naked. In Maleonn’s own words, “they often look so stupid. But soon the stupidity becomes touching, because you recognize yourself in that reckless passion of commitment, even to something meaningless.”
Then there is the omnipresent sense of nostalgia in his works: the dark corners shading the gorgeous colors and the absolute silence over the seemingly noisy scene.
But Maleonn is not defining nostalgia in any melancholic sense. “It comes from our care for human beings,” he insists. “We want to seek our origins. We want to figure out where we come from, what leads us to our existence today. We want to go back to the simple and the pure.”
To elucidate his concepts, he is in constant search of suitable props and costumes. Walking into his studio is like suddenly falling asleep –your sight is filled with such stuff as dreams are made on: tiny suits of armor; walls with all kinds of mailboxes nailed on; a pig standing on its hind legs and wearing goggles; a four-meter-tall man made of cotton held aloft by bamboo-boned wings; a wooden stool with a sunken seat filled with acorns. Hanging above this marvelous cornucopia is a board fully covered with white and yellow bulbs of different sizes, atop which a stuffed doll is lying on its stomach, its head and one arm shown from the side, as if peeking at you. The whole workshop is redolent of a Tim Burton-directed fairytale.
“Sometimes hyper-realism has this charm that makes you feel warm,” claims Maleonn.
Occasionally, as with his upcoming project, his vision simply outstrips the possibilities of his secreted objects. For My Moving Photo Studio, Maleonn is painting his imagined settings on wooden boards and his garage is often filled with the noise of sawing. “What fascinates me most in my current job,” he recently posted on his blog, “is the labor. I’m most myself when I’m in a paint-covered work suit and kneeling on the ground amid the dust. That’s the only valuable part in my life.”
His plan is to carry his backdrops and equipment in a large van, traveling around more than 50 cities in China over the course of eight months, taking photos for his friends and followers.
“It is all a simple, personal wish,” explains Maleonn. “So many people appreciate my photos and keep inspiring me. Besides my friends in real life, there are also strangers who have left messages on my blog and my website. I want to meet them in person, ask them which of my photos they like best, take a photo for him or her according to that style and then give it to them as a token of my gratitude.”
Echoing the view of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, Maleonn believes that, in a modern world filled with the trivial, one can no longer write or make pieces of art that speak universally. “I’m more than satisfied if I can do something to please the people I like,” he says.
The original inspiration for his imminent pilgrimage came from images taken in old Chinese photo studios; Maleonn has been collecting them for five years. “Everybody has a camera nowadays,” he says, “and photo shooting is no longer that serious a matter. But back in the past, when people dressed themselves up and walked into a photo studio, they believed at that moment that they were beautiful and life was perfect, and wished everything could stay that way. It is the comfort and warmth in this illusion I want to capture. It is the most romantic duty of an artist.”
He was so strongly touched by the sense of time changing and lives passing, as well as by the sense of ceremony during the shooting, that he created a series entitled My Photo Studio. Met with an enthusiastic response, Maleonn decided to take the idea one step further: My Moving Photo Studio was born.
After Spring Festival, the photographic artist will set off with six assistants and a choice of 25 backgrounds, all packed into his van, for a prolonged road trip. The budget for the entire journey is in excess of RMB1 million, around half of which will be used to film a documentary of the journey.
Maleonn also hopes the adventure will prompt a rediscovery of himself as an artist. In recent years, he has been disturbed by his doubts over the meaning of 'art' and 'artist.'
“But Moving Photo Studio has led me back to labor and to my original reason for learning painting: I wished to make people’s lives more beautiful. Some of the people who love my photos are not wealthy enough to buy a piece of artwork. I wish to make them happy by driving to the cities they live in and giving them a little present.”
// A solo exhibition of Maleonn’s previous work is showing until Jan 31. 18 Gallery, 4/F, 18 Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu, by Guangdong Lu 中山东一路18号4楼, 近广东路 (6323 8099, www.artatbund18.com)
