In issue 5 we congratulate ourselves on our one year anniversary.
We hope you have enjoyed the journey with us and have been inspired by the artists we have shown.
Driven by a passion for contemporary photography and a desire to offer a platform for photographers from around the globe and to inspire them to be part of a global exchange we started see-zeen.
We began with a vision and followed our road map enthusiastically and we continue to believe there is an untapped well of inspired photographers out there. As a small team we plan to expand and collaborate with other like-minded creatives in the year ahead. Get in touch if you share our vision.
We want to thank all the artists who submitted work, especially in the earliest issues, who trusted our vision and we congratulate all the photographers who we have published in our first four issues, many of whom have won awards, published books, been exhibited, and been further acknowledged in the photography world.
As we embrace artists of the world we ask: where society is headed? There’s been a massive cultural shift, accelerated by the events of the last few years, which affects us globally. We are yet to see where this will lead us but we believe that art, or in our case more precisely photography, can help us to understand the very different perception we have depending on where we’re from and how we identify ourselves. For every issue we are happy to receive submissions from around the world.
This time our selected artists come from Belgium, Chile, China, Denmark, France, Greece, Nigeria, Spain, Taiwan, UK and Ukraine.
Before introducing the photographers of this issue we want to mention that our section A Visual Dialogue has taken an unexpected turn and as a result this time we are publishing two “visual monologues”. After much deliberation we decided to go ahead and publish the work of two of the four artists, one from each pair, who accepted our challenge to participate in A Visual Dialogue for issue #5. We want to remain transparent. Perhaps it is a sign of our unsettled times but both Elena and Marie’s dialogue partners did not adequately complete their part. This is life, things happen. Read more about that HERE.
In see-zeen #5 Ukrainian Elena Subach, troubled by the war in her country, focuses on the meaning of Home in her “visual monologue”. OC George talks about the struggles and lack of opportunities in his homeland Nigeria in Handicapped Dreams and Chinese Hui Choi’s Under Cloud deals with his relationship with the opposite sex and questions the traditional values surrounding marriage in China. Marylise Vigneau dedicates her diptychs And the Clouds Followed Them to the people of Myanmar, once again under a military dictatorship, a situation that has been overshadowed by other news. In protected and surveilled wealthy suburbs of Athens, Greek Vassilis Vaseliou questions his own living environment and the paradox of being simultaneously protected and restricted in his series The Voice of the Cicada. In Covid Generation Brit Aaron Yeandle’s portraits of students in Guernsey, UK, focus on the insecure futures of these teenagers resulting from the chaos of the last 2 1/2 years.
As the world changes at an ever-faster pace, emphasising our inability to deal with the problems we are creating, in particular the effects on our environment and its destruction, more artists find inspiration in nature. Our featured artist Chinese Ji Zhou’s floral images in Symbiosis are like a breath of fresh air, yet they act as a metaphor for our current situation: a flower whose leaves endure the winter, another that doesn’t need soil to survive. Nature serves as the background in the performative work of Spanish artist Curro Rodriguez and Chilean Paula Carmona Araya. In Saeta Rodriguez is inspired by pagan customs and rituals and in her series Gesture and Landscape Carmona Araya places herself in landscapes to develop her symbolic actions, that can also be seen as rituals with a political meaning. In Belgian Stefanie Schaut’s photography nature plays a central role and in Under These Waves she looks to transcend man and seeks to understand the immensity of the universe.
For the unresolved A Visual Dialogue Danish artist Marie Wengler presents us with three interpretations of Anxiety in her “visual monologue”. Lan Chung-Hsuan from Taiwan questions how death is perceived in contemporary art in Dielusion in which he invites his subjects to share their idea of the perfect death and in I am where I am our other Taiwanese artist Liu Entung performs her daily rituals and reflects on the influence of new technology.
We hope you enjoy see-zeen issue #5! To us and year 2!
