Activities per year
Abstract
Mother River is a four-year project (2010-2014) for which the British-Chinese photographer Yan Wang Preston (*1976) photographed the entire 6,211km Yangtze River at precise 100km intervals with a large-format film camera.
As China’s ‘Mother River’, the Yangtze is usually celebrated by idealistic images of iconic places. With Mother River, Yan Wang Preston conceptually undermines the deep-seated preference towards certain river places and their landscape representations. The equally spaced photographic locations produce no picturesque views or sublime concrete structures but a set of accidental and vernacular landscapes that have never or rarely been photographed before. The book tells an epic story of the entire width of China from its western highland to its eastern coast and demonstrates that in an era of abundant satellite mapping and saturated imagery, fresh views can still be attained by conducting ambitious, physical and personal mapping.
As China’s ‘Mother River’, the Yangtze is usually celebrated by idealistic images of iconic places. With Mother River, Yan Wang Preston conceptually undermines the deep-seated preference towards certain river places and their landscape representations. The equally spaced photographic locations produce no picturesque views or sublime concrete structures but a set of accidental and vernacular landscapes that have never or rarely been photographed before. The book tells an epic story of the entire width of China from its western highland to its eastern coast and demonstrates that in an era of abundant satellite mapping and saturated imagery, fresh views can still be attained by conducting ambitious, physical and personal mapping.
Original language | English |
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Place of Publication | Berlin |
Publisher | Hatje Cantz |
Number of pages | 160 |
ISBN (Print) | 9783775743754, 9783775744478, 3775744479 |
Publication status | Published - 31 Oct 2018 |
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Profiles
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Yan Wang Preston
- Department of Art and Communication - Senior Lecturer
- School of Art, Design and Architecture
- Centre for Cultural Ecologies in Art, Design and Architecture - Member
Person: Academic
Activities
- 1 Invited talk
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Rivers, Trees, Journeys
Yan Wang Preston (Keynote speaker)
25 Apr 2019Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk