The photography art exhibition ‘The Ingenue and the Vegetable’, curated by NOMAD NO MAD, opened at Garden Books on May 1st.
French photographer Laurence Chellali, who has resided in China for nearly a decade, brings poetic and witty imagery to us through her perspective. She uses food as a universally relatable medium in human society to explore the law of balance in the collision of ideas by different cultures.
On that day, Laurence Chellali presented her original ideas and how she realized them, and she showcased her artist‘s book.
蔬果无邪 ｜The ingenue and the vegetable – Laurence Chellali
Date : 2024.05.01-05.31
Venue : 上海市徐汇区长乐路325号，韬奋西文书局325
Changle Rd by Shaanxi Rd (S), Xuhui, Shanghai
Artist’s Statement
I no longer know how to speak, I no longer know how to read, I no longer know how to write. One heck of a downfall! Imagine that: I, so naturally talkative and avid of reading, from one day to the next I find myself mute and illiterate. And worse, there is little hope that this can be fixed.
What is left for me to express about my encounter with China? How to explain that here so many things seem strange to me, unknown and mysterious?
So, I had to look at the heart of what links humanity and finally I found it! Food. Along with language, it’s one of the vital elements common to all humans, but it’s also a cultural marker, of what differentiates one from the other. Food is at once connection and distance. Paradoxical, isn’t it?
So, cooking will be my pretext for the expression of a certain cultural gap, or rather the raw ingredients I come across on market stalls and which are enigmatic to me. And which will remain so, as long as I am unable to read their names. Ask my fellow shoppers or open the dictionary.
Bewilderment can be a good thing in that it stimulates the imagination as well as memory. As if by enchantment, texts I had learned in my youth have at times resurfaced in my mind and brought the necessary poetry to these harmless vegetables and fruits that had been transformed into wicked things by my ignorance. The rest is pure invention.
Inevitably, the result is amazing and often unexpected, a strange mix of known and unknown, sprinkled with humor and self-derision, in order to laugh, to smile. Because, yes, laughter also belongs to all of humanity, which, these days, it would be unfortunate to do without!
Images from the opening
