Works
Photography as a way to engage with reality, build relationships, and give shape to experience.
Wei Jinchun’s work usually begins with specific people, places, spaces, or relationships. Understanding develops through repeated visits, observation, conversation, photographing, and editing. The relationship between the artist and his subjects also shapes the distance from which he looks: at times he remains an observer; at others, his own body and actions enter the work. Each project develops its own approach to photographing and presentation, rather than sharing a fixed visual style.
Working Methods
Engaging with the Site
Understanding a project grows out of direct contact. Repeated visits, photographing across cities, traveling along particular routes, and direct involvement within the family are ways in which different works engage with reality.
Position and Perspective
The relationship with the subject determines the distance from which the artist looks. In Tangshan and Unfinished Lands, he largely remains an observer, bringing people, buildings, and their surroundings into the frame. In If I Am Guilty, his own body, actions, and responsibility become part of the work.
Shaping the Work
After photographing, a project continues to take shape through editing and its final medium. The Tangshan photobook uses an extended sequence to organize a view of a city. If I Am Guilty uses needles, thread, and spatial installations to make the photographs themselves material objects that can be pierced, connected, and installed.
In 2023, Wei Jinchun first visited Tangshan with a roommate from the city. At Nanhu Park, his roommate’s accounts of mining and the earthquake changed his perception of the landscape before him. Over roughly the following year, he returned repeatedly, stayed in the city, and photographed it. His attention expanded from earthquake history to people, industry, urban construction, and everyday life. The resulting photobook brings these aspects of reality into an extended sequence, allowing historical memory and the city’s present to inform his view of Tangshan together.
Unfinished Lands examines unfinished, stalled, and nonfunctional development sites within China’s urbanization and real estate development. Photographing these places across different cities, the artist considers unfinished buildings alongside roads, vegetation, housing, mountains, and the surrounding city. The work looks at how interrupted development persists in the physical environment, and how it relates to promises of development driven by capital, expectations of housing, and their social costs.
If I Am Guilty grew out of actual violence within the family and the artist’s reflections on his own actions after intervening in the conflict. The project unfolds through performative photography, photographs made together with family members, handwritten texts by family members, image manipulation, needles and thread, and spatial installations. It brings an indictment of violence into the same work as an examination of the artist’s own position.
From May to June 2021, Wei Jinchun made repeated motorcycle trips to photograph along routes through the Luan River Basin, Chengde, and the Bashang region. The black-and-white images record the people, rivers, land, and roads encountered along the way, preserving observations of the region formed through this movement.