I took advantage of the long weekend to head into the city and see what was on at Toronto’s annual photography festival.
© Richard HuangThis year’s festival features 250 exhibitions, large and small, spread across the Greater Toronto Area. There was no way to see them all at once, and I had no idea where to begin. Then I spotted the name of a Chinese photographer and decided to start there.
Exhibition: Moving Images, Moving People
© Richard HuangThe artist, Tong Lam, is a history professor at the University of Toronto, as well as a visual artist and writer. His interests include infrastructure, Cold War ruins, the information society, postcolonial critique, and projects related to China.
© Richard HuangThe exhibition occupies two galleries. In the first, photographs are displayed on LED televisions while other moving images play in a continuous projection. The exhibition centres on outdoor film screenings in China, where at least 40,000 mobile projection teams are still active today.
© Richard HuangThe second gallery contains an actual film projector, aimed toward a television showing a video. In addition to spending years on the research, the artist paid several thousand dollars for the rights to screen this five-minute clip.
© Richard HuangSeveral supplementary historical photographs hang on the walls of the second gallery.
“Cinema is a mechanically reproduced art form that creates shared experiences, and the advent of digital technology has further standardized how media is distributed and screened around the world. In China, however, mobile cinema has once again become a popular means for the government, large corporations, and even nongovernmental organizations to cultivate new political subjects, consumers, and citizens. Outdoor screenings remain highly distinctive, improvised, and dynamic. Like consumer societies elsewhere, contemporary China has a visual economy capable of producing remarkably varied and fragmented audience experiences. Can mobile cinema still move people and organize society as it once did? If so, in what ways?”
“The images carefully document the phenomenon of outdoor cinema in contemporary China. Films are sometimes screened alongside public square dancing or even animals, while propaganda films must compete with images of conspicuous consumption. Beyond revealing the diversity of people and places in a rapidly changing country, Lam’s work invites viewers to consider an increasingly complex global media landscape encompassing commercial advertising, misinformation, and media spectacle.”
© Tong Lam
© Tong Lam
© Tong Lam
© Tong LamMy impression: Mobile projection teams may still exist in China today, but their form is changing amid the broader forces of digital and consumer society. Perhaps the outdoor televisions seen everywhere, along with mobile phones, tablets, and laptops, are becoming countless invisible open-air cinemas in their own right. Whatever the case, the desire and need to use moving images to influence the public remain. New circumstances, new problems, new methods, and new responses—all of them give rise to new questions…
Recommendation: Four stars out of five—worth seeing if you have some time to spare.