elegant narcolepsy

I think this is the one I love the most. This is like a fairy tale. Sorry about the heavy border.
















It's quite fitting, I was thinking of writing something about these pictures today anyway, but as it happens I've been unable to because I've been in bed, exhausted, wiped out all day long. Talk about tapping into the Zeitgeist! This picture and the ones below are from a series by the Chinese photographer Wang Ningde, called Some Days. Each one is called Some Days with a number. (Many thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for reproducing this one and alerting me to the existence of this artist! It's a new love affair but I've seen a lot of pictures. Go to the Goedhuis Gallery for more.)















I don't want to get into that thing where you start saying what I think the pictures mean, or what they're "about." I find them very haunting and evocative and I'm sure people have written much about them. For now, let's just look and think. (...funny that you have to be awake to do that, yet in order to be with the pictures you have to be very receptive to a dreamlike state! Eh!)














They seem to be specifically Chinese on one level and also universal. The EDW angle is here: first of all, the clothes are clearly extremely important here, and the artist is using them in a way that is not about fashion. He is recognising the real power clothes have over us. Secondly, these pictures are intensely elegant in their composition, in their painstaking execution and the amazing stillness at the core of each one. Thirdly, the artist has not seen a need to go for colour, which would have ruined them, I feel.

I love them as much as I love Jeff Wall. And that's saying something. Very exciting.