BOUNDARIES OF PHOTOGRAPHY:CLASPS SKY ABOVE, TANGLES EARTH BELOW

Romantic Memories Exhibited at the Lishui International Photography Festival

6 November – 15 December 2025

2nd Floor, Lishui Photography & Culture Center (Kuocang Road, Lishui)

Artists: Dana Cojbuc (France); Marie Cloquet (Belgium); Yang Bin; Han Yang; Curator: Zheng Xiaoxu

“Art can only survive when it connects upward with gods and angels, and downward with animals and the earth.”
— Joseph Beuys

Do you believe that the place where something begins may also be where it ends? That the past can move toward the future? What, then, is a boundary, and where do the boundaries of photography truly lie?

The works of these four artists invite reflection not merely on differing interpretive standards of photography, but more importantly on the search for a relativity that adapts both form and meaning. This implies sustaining doubt and introspection toward photography itself, while acknowledging the evolving relationship between images, time, and space.

Within the representational modes we have long explored, the “frame” emerges as the first manifestation of boundary. Since Aristotle’s documentation of the camera obscura, an early source of inspiration for the invention of the camera; the reproduction of light and shadow in the visible world has always been accompanied by the notion of delimitation. As photosensitive materials and viewfinders developed, the camera’s visual logic absorbed the frame as a defining boundary. In the pursuit of efficiency and standardization, we came to accept the rectangle as the camera’s sole window. From its very inception, the frame has evoked a desire for “release” precisely through its act of constraint.

With the modernity of post-production technologies, the “framed world” established by the camera is no longer central. Photography gradually departs from teleological logic, and blurred boundaries generate an atmosphere of openness. Here, artists treat the frame as a radical yet invisible criterion of recognition, prompting a renewed way of seeing entrenched boundaries and pointing toward a loosening at the level of photographic form as a medium.

Boundaries are not merely descriptive or rhetorical devices within artistic language. Traced through the materiality of images, they generate space, constructing imaginative, evocative, mnemonic, and lyrical contexts. When we feel (rather than see) that an image is yellow or pink, it is the photographer awakening the subject through sensation.

In this exhibition, the concealment of the frame operates on two levels: it foregrounds the material translation of the artist’s conceptual intent, while situating the work and time-space in a relationship of interaction and parallelism. Images thus extend into the realm of spatial experience. Through the presence of the physical artwork, the space of what is photographed reconnects with the space in which the viewer encounters the work. Time, in turn, is reconstructed and circulates anew within the act of viewing.

The boundary that images can reach is far more complex than simply abandoning the frame as a form. It requires a multidimensional articulation of visual language alongside an unfolding of internal visual narratives. In the works of these four artists, formal experimentation intertwines with humanistic reflection. “Boundary” becomes not only an exploration of photographic form, but also a poetic pursuit in which individual experience confronts human civilization. Ultimately, we return to the photograph itself, searching beyond the ordered logic of photographic imagery for a metaphysical boundary, one that can be felt as a connection upward and downward, where the presence of the divine meets the embrace of the earth.

Romantic Memories

by Han Yang

Han Yang’s Romantic Memories foregrounds female experience. She is particularly drawn to the density and texture of life as revealed through sensibility, using the body and plants as narrative mediators. The work moves beyond photography’s conventional fixation on the frozen instant, allowing time to participate in reshaping the logic of the image. Through this process, the series explores how personal memory, carried by emotion, can inhabit images and generate a form of temporal memory, one that permits movement, return, and circulation across time.