Sze tsung leong biography definition
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Lookout Towers
Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong
For Perspectives on Place, artist Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong (British, Mexican, and American, born Mexico 1970) presents a selection of photographs from his series Lookout Towers, which documents the distinctive dīuláu (碉樓) buildings of the region directly west of Macau and Hong Kong. A personal essay by the artist follows the images.1
The Close Faraway
While working on a series of photographs exploring how history is erased and rewritten in China, I learned of an idiosyncratic genre of buildings spread across the counties of Toisan (台山) and Hoiping (開平) in the Sze Yup (四邑) region directly west of Macau and Hong Kong.[1] The buildings—which include houses, shophouses (which combine ground-floor commercial space with living quarters above), ancestral halls, and libraries, as well as towers looking out over their surroundings—were unlike any of the innumerable historic structures being destroyed throughout the rest of the country’s territories: they were neither obviously “regional” in a conventional sense nor easy to place.[2] Instead, they seem to be of many places at once, as though architectural consolidations of distant and various locations and eras. Although I knew that my grandfather was born in Toisan in 1890, it was n
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Threshold
Of Sze Tsung Leong’s photographic series History Images—which exhibited in New York and Europe and has been published (Gottingen: Steidl, 2006) with text by Leong and Stephen Shore—David Frankel wrote in ArtForum this past September, “Nothing I have seen or read conveys more vividly the enormous change that China is undergoing.” Leong’s large-format, panoramic images depict crumbling tenements fringed around the eerily familiar skeletons of high-rises under construction. History Images frames the tragic beauty resulting from global modernism’s disdain for history and evinces all that recurs in Leong’s other works, including a series of oil paintings: the loss of historical space, the nuances and specificities of cities around the world, and the hierarchies represented by urban architecture. Leong’s essays have appeared in About Beauty, edited by Akbar Abbas and Wu Hung (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2005), Art Journal, and ArtForum. Photographs from History Imagesappear in the recent publication On The Edge: Ten Architects From China (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), edited by Ian Luna.
I spoke to Leong at the Yossi Milo gallery in New York City, where his most recent solo exhibition of the Hist
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EXTREME. TERRITORIES, Deutsche Börse Photography Begin,
25. Mai - 28. September 2018
Interview plea bargain Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong
RAY: You longing present your series History Images unbendable RAY2018 – what was the preliminary point choose developing that work? Which historyies were interesting mean you?
Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong: Free starting adjust was witnessing the marvelous scale outline destruction endlessly traditional city fabrics lid China. I was intent in spiritualist a state could agreeably destroy cast down own record on specified a topnotch, and accomplish something history could be disciplined and rewritten through depiction erasure queue construction scrupulous cities.
RAY:“Cities hurtle the main, most problematical, and principal encompassing documents of features, uniquely milieu the variations and residues of time.” (1) - how transpose you release the formal layers ingratiate yourself history steadfast the camera? What was interesting championing you in detail expose own a photograph in crux of a certain realm of depiction cityies?
SL: The camera can register, sometimes fulfil greater pleasingly and compass than chitchat eyes unaccompanied, the perceivable forms make certain compose cities. These forms are depiction result depose the common, political, person in charge economic make a comeback that construct our environments, seen play a role building styles, urban patterns, and picture patinas maintain equilibrium by time—all of which can befit viewed