THE ARTIST
Milan F4 is established by Han Yang, Hou Keshan, Jiang Li and Wang Haotian, an art group that has never debuted nor been publicly recognized. It has been selected as a finalist in an art institution’s young curator competition twice and an art magazine’s publication project, and has received both positive and negative comments.
Han Yang graduated from the Printmaking Department of the China Academy of Art in 2015 and received his MFA from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in 2020, and currently lives and works in Wuhan. Hou Keshan is a photographer living and working in Chengdu, who graduated from Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera with a bachelor’s degree in 2017 and a master’s degree in 2019. Jiang Li mainly publishes non-mainstream video works in the corner of a mainstream video website and is also working as a designer; Wang Haotian is a photographer living and working in Shanghai and also runs his personal Haotian project.
THE WORK
Image Shop is a project about the diversity of “images,” initiated by artists Jiang Li, Wang Haotian, Hou Kosun and Han Yang in 2019. From the perspective of viewing, it discusses the extension of contemporary images under the retina, and the meaning beyond the retina (virtual level), as well as the transformation, reproduction and generation of images.
Image Shop and any other stores are of the same nature, i.e. “exchange.” In this sense, the image as the eye of the other, is placed in the “shop” as a commodity for the viewers to “consume.” The “exchange” is completed when viewing happens, and in this process the “viewer” is a “consumer,” who is no longer a passive receiver and spectator of image information, but becomes a participant in the “editing” of the image, completing the process of “exchange” with the image.
The act of “exchange” in Image Store seems to be more important than the images per se. Some of the images will leave, while others remain in memories, being “packaged,” taken away, forgotten, recombined, dislocated or transformed.