Heji Shin and Wang Bing

Wang Bing
Wang Bing is one of the important documentary filmmakers of today and a stunning “portraitist.” He is known for his epic films dedicated to the world of labor and everyday life, its constraints, dreads, and opportunities. Produced in China, his films are screened at festivals in Venice and Locarno; in galleries like Chantal Crousel, Paris; museums including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and international exhibitions as, for instance, documenta 14 in Kassel.

At Kunsthalle Zürich, Bing will be presenting two films: Mrs. Fang, (Fang Xiu Ying, 102 min. 2018) and Man with No Name (Wu Ming Zhe, 99 min., 2010). Both films focus on a single individual and that person’s fragile physicality. Bing follows Mrs. Fang and the man with no name with great immediacy and tenacious respect, combining intimacy with unsentimental realism.

“I am interested in the everyday life of these normal people and I don’t want to just repeat what the media has already shown. Usually these people aren’t given the right to express themselves—they are mute somehow; they have no voice. With my camera I give them the opportunity to finally speak out.” (Wang Bing)
 

Heji Shin
Heji Shin is a New York–based German-Korean photographer. She works commercially on projects such as fashion shoots as well as in the art world. Shin became known, amongst others, for her images commissioned by the American fashion label Eckhaus Latta and for Make Love, a much-discussed sex education book for teenagers, as well as for the image series “#lonelygirl” and “Babies.”

Heji Shin’s photography raises—from a variety of perspectives and with great audacity—the question of intimacy. At its center sits trust, something that is today called into question on all sorts of levels. Yet intimacy is the fulcrum between our body and the public sphere, capable, at turns, to protect or expose us. Currently undergoing a reevaluation in the context of social media, it is a momentous subject of crucial importance. Intimacy has become a battleground and a site of profound upheavals and confusion. Once again, we face the challenge of the “difficult business of intimacy” (Virginia Woolf) and the need to fundamentally readdress it. Shin’s photography is a demand to face this task.

At Kunsthalle Zürich, Shin presents a newly produced series of portraits of American musician and producer Kanye West along with a series of X-ray self-portraits of the artist with a dog.