Mo Yi: Me in My Landscape represents the first major comprehensive museum study of early works from Chinese artist, Mo Yi (莫毅). An outsider, and auto-didact photographer, Mo Yi’s images from the streets are iconic for their ability to capture the energy and melancholy of China’s evolving social fabric during the second half of the 20th century.

Throughout his prolific career, Mo Yi has challenged ideas of the photographic gaze by taking images often without looking through the viewfinder and instead placing the camera behind his neck, or fixed to a stick, allowing him to photograph at ground level while walking.

These roaming street experiments defied documentary tradition, rigid technical precision and ideas of composition- authorship, privileging instead alternative potentialities for the image-maker and his medium. As a long-overdue study of Mo Yi’s praxis, the exhibition will present black and white and color photographs from iconic series such as 1m – The Scenery Behind Me (1988), Tossing Bus (1989), Landscape Outside the Bus (1995), I am a Street Dog (1995), Dancing Streets (1998) and numerous self-portraits (1987-2003), affirming their prescient, formal and conceptual nature within the national and global history of photography and Chinese experimental art.

Select archival materials such as handmade photo-books, collage, and original contact sheets, exhibited for the first time, will complement the photographic installations and contribute to a more profound understanding of his artistic process.

Holly Roussell