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6/4/2007

Robert O'Connor

Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai

Future Projects

Robert O’Connor was born in Cork, Ireland in 1976 and completed his MFA at the University of Ulster, Belfast in 2001. Future Projects continues his exploration of post-industrial landscapes using photography.

This new body of work is based around a series of images taken in Shanghai and Hangzhou during the spring of 2006. It documents the two cities’ monumental urban transformation, with its total disregard for the past in its absolute pursuit of the industrial dream. The subject matter focuses on the billboard advertising of a government led real estate campaign.

The need for contemplation, reflection and self criticism is ever more necessary in these uncertain times in which the ‘Global Village’ evidences itself through increased technological innovation and cultural hegemony. O’Connor brilliantly captures the spirit of “development fever” in this postmodern landscape by picking everyday street scenes but asking us to look at them in a different way. His continuing experimentation with light, specifically at dusk, imbues his work with a uniquely surreal quality which is as much disturbing as it is beautiful.

But it is the artist’s play on space which takes this new work to another level. A visual game develops in the play on ambiguity between what is real and not real. Glossy cityscapes depicted on the billboards and the actual landscapes they inhabit, where does one end and the other start? Am I looking at an image or the real thing? This creates a tension within the photographs which forces the viewer’s absolute engagement and does not fail to disappoint.

Eastlink Gallery
Moganshan Lu, 50 Shangai
Open: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. Monday to Sunday.
Admission free

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