1m - The Scenery Behind Me

The series “1m - Scenery Behind Me" (1988-1989) can be seen as Mo Yi's first attempt to use a camera as a prop, integrating performance art with photography. At this time in China, the camera was regarded as a status symbol, and those who had one would hang it prominently on their chests. A chance encounter made Mo Yi realize that he, who had always watched others, was also often surveyed and observed by passers-by. He again explored a question in light of this discovery: since everyone's behavior is a 'work of the other, why can't l express myself with my body's behavior by talking only with photographs? Isn't behavioral art about making people think something through their bodies?"

This idea inspired the artist to go to a crowded shopping street at the weekend, fix his Minolta camera on the back of his neck and walk forward with the crowd. In deciding to make this action, Mo Yi recalls hesitating to load the camera with film and actually make photographs. In his writings from the time he asked, 'Should I just flirt with the people on the street? Or should I truly capture what the camera would record without passing through the eyes?" He chose the latter. The resulting images are, therefore, unlike anything seen in his works before; intimate, ominous and expressive images. Most often the subjects in this series are oblivious to the presence of the camera. Some are caught in a moment of joy, while others show the creases of fatigue or the melancholy of an exhausting urban life. People in the crowds move forward with great purpose; their troubles or intentions are unknown to the observer. Occasionally, one catches the eye of the camera.

At first, Mo Yi only saw these photos as "by-products" of his actions, as he was fascinated by the game-like release of the shooting and process. This was the first time Mo Yi had experimented with detaching his gaze or "photographer's eye" from the moment of capture. In doing so, he redefined the position of the photographer as an artist, emphasizing the gesture, movement, and passion of the photographer as equally significant elements of the creation process, as they may be for the painter, musician, or dancer. This work represents the beginning of a visible articulation of Mo Yi's questioning of photography, its form, its definition, and its reception.

"Of the photos in this set, the two selfies are my favorites. Typical urban environment, urban mentality, urban state. These photos also illustrate that when I am photographing others, I myself am simultaneously in the same context and situation as they are. I am as despicable or glorious as they are. The difference is that I feel it too.”

 - Mo Yi

My Illusory City (Urban Tumult)

Mo Yi's earliest street photographs were shot in parks and public spaces where he would spend time looking for people and expressions that he felt were appropriate to capture. By 1986, he became dissatisfied with the limitations of shooting in the streets. He realized that this kind of creation which relied on chance encounters, was a short, fragmented process insufficient for the kind of release and expression he craved, and incapable of capturing the urban agitation and atmosphere he felt. In his writings from the time, he posed the question of "how to make photography sincerely related to (one’s) life trajectory" This became a focal point that constantly tormented his thinking during those years.

These ideas initiate Mo Yi's first experimentation. He installed a motor in his camera to allow him to press the shutter continuously, enabling repeated exposures. With this newly hacked camera in hand, Mo Yi went to the center of the busiest camera at the buildings, streets and people and submitted to his feelings, with urban space as guide to press the shutter and to rewind the film. The number of exposures per film was irregular, some involve seven or eight, some ten or twenty, “like shooting continuously at a target.” The resulting blurred images are not produced by optical inaccuracy or physical shaking; but the result of the intentional repeated superimposition of the same scene, a photographic technique referred to as “multiple exposure.” These early conceptual works made his daily shooting process more structured and controlled, chance no longer prolonging the process of creation, which felt sometimes misaligned with his motivation and desires. The resulting illusory effects in his works aptly reflect on many levels the restlessness of the mid-80s in China, both as it relates to the society as well as to the individual human heart.

Mo Yi's experimental street photography was in great contrast to the picturesque landscapes and images aspiring to a modernist aesthetic that the mainstream photography scene produced at the time. The works were nonetheless popular among the burgeoning photography establishment.

Landscape Outside the Bus

After five years of travelling across China's rural west, Mo Yi returned to Tianjin in 1995. The healing power of nature had allowed him to regain a certain patience he had previously lost in observing the city. During this time, Tianjin was undergoing unprecedented urban development and the streetscape was in constant evolution. Mo Yi found himself unsatisfied with the “traditional" frame of documentary photography in recording the appearance of change, and he chose to use the bus to visualize and visiblize the changes. Travelling, with his lens positioned to capture the frame of the bus window, he creates the experience of a passenger. The scenery outside the bus, and inside, are brought together into the picture. Unlike "Tossing Bus" of a few years prior, this time the artist is clearly looking at the city, and the windows and the passengers are related prospects: the passengers are looking out to their city, and Mo Yi, our guide, has reframed our perspective on them.

I am a Street Dog

“l am a Street Dog” is a project shot on Tianjin's main intersection and its nearby streets. The first of three series created with the same experimental technique, Mo Yi fixed the camera at the end of a modified tripod (monopod) and carried it upside down while walking down a busy commercial street. Randomly pressing the shutter release while walking, the artist's resulting images convey a hurried, disorderly, off- kilter panorama. With this almost “game-like” approach, Mo Yi flirts with and provokes the pervasive photographic didacticism of his time, creating a body of work far estranged from the mainstream aesthetic. His creative method may seem cynical or anachronistic, but according to the artist, it felt like a true reflection of people's living conditions. Furthermore, the photographs aptly express the state of mind and emotional perception of both the people at that time, and Mo Yi himself: roaming from place to place amongst noise, disorder, and fragmentary understandings. lt is a world as seen by a frightened, helpless stray dog.

Me in My Landscape

Returning to Tianjin in the late 1990s, Mo Yi observed the city rapidly transforming. In 1997, the artist began to photograph himself around the city in various environments, in areas that can, in many cases, be considered representative of these material changes. In "Me in My Landscape" (1997), a series of black-and-white self-portraits shot amidst urban space, Mo Yi represents himself facing forwards, in profile, and in three-quarter view. Here, he retains the idea of documenting the environment, in which immense cities and cramped buildings symbolize social control, depression, or anxiety. Rather than using the selfie as a way to situate the artist within the scene of the cityscape, here the presence of Mo Yi within this cityscape is the subject. In Mo Yi's opinion, the self-portrait pairs well with the environment as the expression of a face is impacted and influenced by its surroundings, Similar considerations would motivate his "Calendar: Landscape with Me (1998-2003), wherein the artist posed with public announcements or with daily newspapers, bearing witness to the gradual evolution of the city and its culture. This documentation of the artist within the image frame at tests to his presence, and to the effect the changes of the period would have on him, as if he were one with the flesh of the city and the country writ large, feeling its joys and sorrows. He grows older, however, while the city and country are being reborn as something shinier, faster, and less burdened by the presence of history.

Dancing Streets

Photographed three years after "l am a Street Dog," "Dancing Streets" takes a similar approach in terms of the camera positioning, but employs an appreciably different intention and mood. Mo Yi's choice to shift the composition to vertical and to shoot at dusk using a bright flash and longer exposure time creates a unique vibrational energy. More than “l am a Street Dog," this series conveys the movement, rhythm, and pulse of the city at the transition between day and night. Bicycles feature across the series as they were omnipresent in China's cities during this period. Their wheels serve as a frame through which we discover the metropolis in another register, The photographs take on a dream-like quality as some zones of the picture remain in crisp focus while others dissolve into an abstract blur, as layers of experiences accrue in planes of view generally inaccessible to the human eye. in "Dancing Streets, Mo Yi captures the pure experience of city streets in motion, a jumble of clarity and distortion, anxiety, beauty, and darkness.

“I am a Street Dog "and "Dancing Streets" convey more openly Mo Yi's heightened emphasis on engaging in actions and conceptual processes. Here, he further privileges the primacy of the human spirit rather than attempting to document the bare facts of people or places. In his journals from the time, Mo Yi reiterates that the photograph itself is only part of the creation; instead, he foregrounds the tools that allow him to partake in the exploration of unseen worlds and emotions. Shot a few years apart, at different times of day, and with different objectives, these two series exemplify the role experimentation plays in Mo Yi's distinctive, changing attitude towards life in the city.

“Art is the exchange between the self and the world, an experience of the self, an experience of life."

- Mo Yi

A Hint of Red in the Scene

Around the turn of the millennium, Mo Yi began to find black-and-white images increasingly unsatisfactory, romanticizing, and abstract. Seeking to highlight certain subjects in photographs and draw them out from their background, he swapped out the white flash with a red effect, placing a red gelatin film in front of the flashbulb. This technique was used in two series, "Scenery with Me - A Hint of Red" (1997), "Red Streets” (2003), as well as a multi-year photographic catalog of telephone poles and mannequins.

In the first of these experiments "Scenery with Me - A Hint of Red" (1997), the artist poses for the camera in the middle of a city street, using the red flash to visually alienate himself from other city-dwellers in the image.

A few years later, he continued his actions in the streets, reverting, as before, to the point of view of a dog but now with the red flash. in “Red Streets" (2003), Mo Yi would interact with city-dwellers by photographing them; a red light confusing and surprising his fellow denizens of Tianjin as they go about their daily hustles. The reddened streets are vibrant, lively, in motion, and behind each red flash is a moment of surprise, a departure from the quotidian as Mo Yi creates a subtle disturbance. Formally, the red flash creates a mesmerizing effect that heightens the vibrancy of the photographs. Conceptually, it isa reminder that the artist remains present in every image: even if his gaze does not define the composition, he is present in the process.

Surreal and poetic, the resulting photographs seem to embody most purely the conceptual spirit of his practice. Mo Yi claims his role in urban history, asserting his presence and his authorial view in a flash of red.

Artist Books

This room reunites more than a dozen of Mo Yi's handmade photography books. Starting in the early 1990s, the artist began producing handmade artist's books. The artist's initial impetus to create self-published books resulted from lack of interest among Chinese publishing houses for his work; however, Mo Yi continued the practice in later years, attentive to sequencing, typography and the relation of images to white space and to one another-binding, and many other details. Collage, hand-binding with red yarn (as seen here), and printing on novel supports would become integral to Mo Yi's praxis from the 1990s into the mid2000s. His photographic books, exceptional within his peer community at the time, form another layer in his experimentation with the potential of image presentation in highlighting an archival and “grouping" effect.

"In place of a single photograph, I use a continuum, with clusters of images to produce and express themes and moods felt in a tangential and consistent mood. I strive for sameness in approach, idea, and the work itself."

- Mo Yi