Rêve d’Orient
“The exhibition Rêve d’Orient brings together three series made in the Far East between 2005 and 2008 : Transsiberian, Lost in China and Japanese Whispers. I built these three series like so many cinematographic shots, seeking to convey through my framing and my colorist approach a timeless and poetic vision of Asia.
In the summer of 2005, I took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Beijing, crossing Mongolia. I then travelled through continental China. In the streets of Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai, I had the extreme sensation that there was a kind of permanence of a Chinese aesthetic that had crossed the ages and marked this country in full mutation.
In the spring of 2008, I went to Japan where my father, a naval officer, had lived. The furtive figures I saw in the bars of Shinjuku in Tokyo, the frail silhouettes gliding through the alleys of Gion in Kyoto, looked strangely like the prints of my childhood. The places and the landscapes were imbued with a disturbing ghostly atmosphere.
Rêve d’Orient merges these three series which are an invitation to a chromatic, poetic and dreamlike journey. ”
François Fontaine
DETAILS
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Hôtel Paul Delaroche
58 rue Saint Lazare, 75009 Paris
+33 1 53 01 85 85
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