Public Exhibition: I Didn’t Walk Away — Absurdity & Resistance / Renata Duan

18 - 22 JUNE / OPENING Monday 18 June, 5 - 7pm / DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART GALLERY, RIEGO ST, (off Albany Street)   / HOURS Monday to Friday 10am – 4pm / Saturday 10am – 3pm

Renata Duan - Artist's statement

A lomographer who doesn’t paint cannot be a good translator.

My exhibition is a series of acrylic paintings, using my own LOMO photos as reference and looking at the world through the lens of what’s going on in China.

For the last 9 years, my previous job as a translator and other life choices took me to many places around the world. Everywhere I went, I carried my LOMO camera (a type of vintage analogue camera) to record the journey of my experiences. The pictures I took eventually became my personal database, from which I chose the ones that allow me to express more than what a photo can tell – I “translated” them by painting them on canvas.

Having grown up in China, I witnessed the earth-shaking changes that it went through since the economic reforms. Despite achieving unprecedented economic growth, it also brought about countless issues. Air pollution, with vast areas covered in thick smog (the main reason I left China); land degradation and overexploitation; ubiquitous surveillance of both the physical and virtual worlds; all of which create an oppressive environment.

However, the more I read and the more I travelled, I realised that these seemingly Chinese issues happen in fact throughout the entire world. I want my paintings to be a “soft punch” – a way to make people become aware of the issues I am addressing, or to be a reminder – making people rethink the familiar and ask the question “Does my country have the same problem?”

With scenes of stillness and unidentified locations or architectures, I try to depict the sense of absurdity and futility coming up with the observation of what is happening around the world. I am expressing my social and political commentaries and my questioning attitude towards the relationship between human activities and the environment, as well as my emotional responses to them all.

Even though I might not change anything, I see the act of pointing out these problems as a way of resistance against said absurdity, like Sisyphus eternally pushing his boulder uphill. As Camus said, “The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart”.