Visual Arts Review: Go Worlds Away at SoWa Boston
By Kathleen Stone (’80)
These two photography shows in the South End transport you far from the gritty hipsterism of SoWa Boston. The Ars Libri Gallery takes you to China and Iran, while the Griffin Museum deposits you in rural Massachusetts, closer in miles but still worlds away from Harrison Avenue. Both galleries have successfully paired photographers who work in parallel idioms and who, through simple visual details, deliver a vivid sense of place tinged with memory and nostalgia.
Wei Bi’s photos, at Ars Libri, draw on his childhood in rural China. Each picture shows a single ordinary object from his village in Hunan Province, often from his father’s house. A drying rake, a withered sweet potato, a pile of roof tiles, a double happiness jar, a pair of felt skippers: quotidian items in China’s rural life. He uses a similar compositional arrangement throughout — a single object in matte black is placed against a mottled gray background. The austerity gives off a totemic quality. The artist adds hand-lettered calligraphy to the images; the delicate tracing of black ink provides a counterbalance to the blackness of the object while the writing also personalizes the picture. Even if you are unable to read the Chinese characters, you sense he is writing about people close to him who once wore the slippers, or dug the potato from the ground, or acquired the jar on their wedding day. The nostalgia is palpable, even from the other side of the globe.