Chin Kong Yee’s photographies display his continuous search to capture his own experience of a time and place. The linear structure of his images appears to mock all traditional rules of painting. His compositions testify to a high level of confidence, in which the artist frees himself from his everyday vision. They are photographic montages, he delivers parcels of reality. With a surrealistic spirit, he works with multiple perspectives and superimposes objects and layers (so that the borders1
Chin Kong Yee’s photographies display his continuous search to capture his own experience of a time and place. The linear structure of his images appears to mock all traditional rules of painting. His compositions testify to a high level of confidence, in which the artist frees himself from his everyday vision. They are photographic montages, he delivers parcels of reality. With a surrealistic spirit, he works with multiple perspectives and superimposes objects and layers (so that the borders between fantasy and reality are blurred). His particular concentration is on the city square and street as anonymous places of constant motion and meeting. His view is that of a distant observer, or he sets himself in the middle of the brightly lit city. In this way, he succeeds in dramatizing and intensifying his subject, aggressive – also in terms of color – and exciting at the same time, just as in the city itself.
Stuttgart with its art museum and Königsbau appears as a place without clear contours, stairs and facades are distorted, passers-by appear out of the blue, are comical figures, who – like on St. Peter’s Square – are interwoven in each other. Bicycles resemble bent lanterns, objects are not subject to gravitational laws. The light gives the pictures a warm climate, a specific aura that fuses the real and the fictional together. Through layering and reflection, a specific type of photography develops that reminds one of the film medium. The computer-assisted editing is not concealed, rather it is used in a virtuosic manner: the images capture everything within the artist’s field of vision, as if he could simultaneously see above, below, right, and left. Comparable to a fish-eye lens, the photos show a spherical perspective that presents everything as bizarre and almost soft, as if it could melt away. Occasionally, someone from the crowd looks directly at the camera, perhaps unnoticed and unintentional, and breaks the illusion of the photographer as the unobserved observer. BY:Ricarda Geib