The faces of celebrities are everywhere in China – in subways, lifts or even on water bottles. This time, you can see nine familiar faces inside an art museum.
Unlike the photos that you flip through in glossy magazines or see in advertisements on billboards, the ones at Shanghai Center of Photography’s latest exhibition Good Vibrations shows another side of the stars – the private life of these very public personas, through the eyes of their childhood friends, family members and colleagues.
The exhibition has more layers. The nine Chinese celebrities turned their lenses on the most important people in their lives too. One of China’s most famous actresses, Zhou Xun (you may know her from her role as a humanoid in Cloud Atlas) went back to her hometown of Quzhou in Zhejiang Province and photographed her friends from kindergarten. Director and actor of The Sun Also Rises and Let the Bullets Fly, Jiang Wen captured his wife Zhou Yun in a dark blue linen dress basked in sunlight. Burgeoning director Bi Gan, known for his fantastic debut Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, sat his mother on a chair and snapped her portrait with a 4x5 large-format view camera.
The founder of SCoP, Pulitzer Prize winner Liu Heung Shing accompanied the celebrities through the yearlong project, and the exhibition also offers his impressions of the stars. The young musician Leah Dou, daughter of immensely successful singer Faye Wong, looks just like any other young woman who is earnest, passionate and curious. Twenty-one-year-old musician and actress Ouyang Nana from Taiwan, as captured by Liu, is simply a daughter spending time with her mother.
Photograph: Zhang Ziyan (Behind the Scenes in Quzhou as Zhou Xun is photographed by Liu Heung Shing as she sings for her school friends) A glimpse of these megastars’ private moments may be the main attraction, but the gorgeously rendered photographs in a museum setting certainly elevates it. Paparazzi this is not.
