ChenXueling

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Riverside

Playground

2019-2020









The "Riverside Playground” photo series captures the feeling of wandering on the edge of the city. Shot with a low-end, overexposed CCD camera I bought for 50 yuan at a flea market, these photos have a unique, grainy texture that quickly caught my attention. With its unpredictable exposure time, the camera's inherent unpredictability only adds to the project's allure. I used it to capture my friends and I as we explored the mysteries of the night, using various non-luminous materials to create a glowing visual experience. This exploration of the romance, strangeness, and uncertainty of the night also documents the freedom, confusion, passion, and loss of China's Z-generation, as well as a kind of spirit of wild growth that defies definition.


During this period of anxiety and confusion, I grew tired of crowds and this feeling is reflected in my photos. In this project, I no longer focus on the emotions and characters of the people. Instead, I weaken the subject and explore the light that covers the subject, as well as the night and enlarged details.

Using a CCD camera as my medium allowed me to capture a casual and unguarded perspective, reducing the formality of my photos and making me an observer of the lives of young people. The presence of a flash hints at a certain visual preference, but it also lends a dramatic visual quality to these casual shooting actions. Obviously, I don't care about the finesse of the image; what I present is just the image itself. This rough and random visual language, characterized by low resolution, perfectly portrays the unconscious moments of young people at night, as well as a hazy, aimless, romantic, and melancholic state of mind.

The name "Riverside Playground” comes from a park I explored by the river with three giant slides during my first trip to Quanzhou at the end of 2019. There, I took many luminescent night photos, and it was my first true connection with the CCD camera in my hand. In 2020, I returned to Quanzhou and once again visited the giant park that I missed so much. Two days later, my CCD camera fell out of my hand and was irreparably damaged in a vegetable market on West Street. I commemorate it, and the last set of photos I took with it at the Riverside Park in Quanzhou.