Hans-Christian Schink - ASIA
Opening on Saturday, September 6 at 9 PM.
The artist will be present.
Prof. Dr. Kai Uwe Schierz from Kunstmuseen Erfurt will speak.
At 7:30 PM, Hans-Christian Schink will give a talk at Kunsthalle Erfurt about his work.
ASIA
The word Asia comes from Assyrian and means "sunrise." Asia is the largest continent on Earth, covering about one-third of the total land area, and with over four billion people, it is also the most populous.
Here, the first great empires emerged with the Neo-Assyrian and Achaemenid empires.
Throughout his career as a photographer, Hans-Christian Schink has traveled to numerous Asian countries, including Pakistan, Indonesia, and Turkey.
In the summer of 1989, he traveled to North Korea; at that time, he was still a student at HGB Leipzig. His liberal professors sent him to the "World Festival of Youth," believing there would be opportunities for unique photographs. Indeed, such opportunities arose. Schink captured images of the aging Kim Il Sung and sobering scenes from kindergartens and department stores. However, a series on the metro stations of Pyongyang proved to be of lasting significance for his oeuvre.
One and a half decades later, he returned to Asia under entirely different circumstances. By then, he had developed his own visual language and had created an entire era with his "Traffic Projects."
His primary interest now lay in the interaction between humans and nature, a type of photography that functions "like a cut through time" (Thomas Weski).
The first series was created in 2005 in Vietnam. He preferred to photograph in rural areas, where the coexistence and opposition of humans and nature exist in a tense relationship. A view over the rooftops of Hanoi, almost in a low flight, is the urban exception. The counterpart to this breathless moment is a series of jungle images captured backlit, a timelessly sublime display of beauty, strength, and grace.
Two years later, in 2007, he took photographs of the Bayon Temple in Angkor, Cambodia. The motif has been photographed millions of times, and one might think it has been completely exhausted photographically — but just like in 2004 at Machu Picchu, Schink managed to find his own perspective.
The artist built perhaps the closest connection to Japan, where he found not only subjects but also an informed audience. In 2009, he received an invitation to the project "European Eyes on Japan / Japan Today Vol. 11" and created a series that appears surprisingly familiar: "In Niigata, Japan, the Thüringer Wald served as a memory backdrop — small settlements in valley locations, surrounded by dark coniferous forests — and as a trigger to find the familiar in the foreign." (Kai Uwe Schierz). In 2012, he became an artist in residence at Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto. A year after the tsunami, he photographed in the Tōhoku region, creating disturbing impressions of the violence of the elements.
In the past two years, Hans-Christian Schink has made several trips to Burma. He is fascinated by the contradictions of a country that, after fifty years of military dictatorship, is rapidly transforming into a state with typical developments of Asian forms of capitalism. This is despite its conflict-ridden and bloody history, its numerous ongoing ethnic, religious, and political disputes, and the visible consequences of the generals' mismanagement, which serves as a projection surface for Western longings for the charm of original and peaceful existence.
"As he says, it is less about appropriating the world, but rather about engaging with what he finds. Travel, therefore, is not a means to do something with the other, the new, the unknown, but to experience, see, and show what this does to him, the photographer, and his photography." (T.O. Immisch)