text by Fandra Chang
Since the early 90's, my work has been involved with the mechanics of reproduction, questions of perception and deception, singularity and duplicity, origination and dissimulation. Until recently, my work often begins with a material which conventionally serves as a background or ground on which images are made, such as a woodblock, a silkscreen, or a canvas. The appearance of each surface material is accentuated, then mechanically reproduced to yield its positive and negative images - all of which are to be reconstructed and juxtaposed with their original source. This is a process by which the surface is amplified so that its point of origin is preserved and camouflaged, effaced and recollected.
The current work, which uses "stock photography," is a departure as well as an extension of the previous work. (Stock photography is often used in marketing and advertising to mass-produce visual materials associated with popular consumer culture.) Produced by nameless authors, with nameless faces, locations and times, this vast collection of digital, picture-perfect readymades are made for an unknown and unlimited number of users and viewers. The use of stock photography is thus the ultimate form of mutual manipulation, exploitation and consumption - an endless use and abuse of the familiar. From categories such as "Main Street America," "Everyday People," "The Things We Do," to notions of nature, beauty, science, technology, business, romance, family, leisure, health, etc., we are surrounded by "mirrors" of our contemporary society. I think of my use of stock photography as a way of working out this unshakable anxiety toward the paradox of things that can be both blatantly real and false at once, the oscillation between over-production and anti-production, the fascination and fear of technology, as well as the contempt and seduction for consumption and being consumed. As Jean Baudrillard once wrote, "Everything is destined to reappear as simulation... Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn't just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world."
By Fandra Chang
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