Capturing the Elusive Present

Closed shutters. An empty glass. A watermelon broken open. The 25 photographs assembled in this exhibition are images of the everyday, but not quite. In his work, Fabien Seguin, a French photographer now living in China, foregrounds the ordinary to draw attention to the unnoticed, allowing the moment itself to speak of a beauty both fleeting and eternal.

Seguin's photographs are at once aesthetically delightful and deeply contemplative. They arrest the viewer in a moment of connection with, or rather disconnection from, the present, portraying, as the introduction to the exhibition would have it, "the traces of a communication between the individual and the pure present." Despite the post-structuralist prattle that the exhibit both preaches and inspires, there is indeed something meaningful behind these simple photographs. By manipulating subtleties of focus and lighting, Seguin turns an empty glass tumbler sitting on a table into a solitary being thoughtfully contemplating its loneliness and ours, a study in light and line becomes a story of love and longing.

If you want to take your time with the photographs in the tunneled entrance to this underground bar-cum-artspace (emphasis and A / C, regrettably, only on the bar side) you'll have to dodge the eager cruisers who walk right by this unimposing exhibit, but this continual interruption highlights the easily-missed beauty of the moment that these photographs hope to capture. Through these works, Seguin suggests a mode of viewing the ordinary, urging you to slow down and appreciate the simple power of the present. And though you feel, somehow, that you are breaking in on a moment, it is instead these confidences that are inviting you in, awakening you to the "wide open" and ever-present potential for beauty in the everyday.

Robert Niles

DETAILS

When: Through Wednesday, Sept. 17
Add: No. 4, Lane 1950 Huaihai Zhong Lu 淮海中路1950弄4号
Tel: 6283-1043