Katabasis was presented as a solo exhibition within the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival. The project borrows the Greek term for a descent into the underworld, but turns that descent into an operation on images: human figures withdraw from historical narrative, technical images rewind, and geological time begins to replace the heroic event.
Across video, CGI, AI-generated image and essay-film fragments, the exhibition asks how fiction becomes believable. Classical motifs, dinosaur reconstructions, mining landscapes and media remains are treated as operational images rather than illustrations. What is left is not a single story, but a set of image systems in which scientific hypothesis, visual authority and collective hallucination continuously reinforce one another.
Process notes
Katabasis is a descent into the underworld, and here the descent is carried out on images: the human figure withdraws from the historical narrative, the technical image rewinds on its own, and geological time slowly takes the place of the heroic event. Across 3D modeling, CGI, AI-generated images and essay film, the work builds another kind of realism, one with no intention of copying the world.
In the Before or After pieces I take historical and classical images — Saint George and the dragon, the crossing of the Red Sea — and run them through rewind, pause and fast-forward until the protagonist drains out of the frame and only the landscape is left, slowed and uncertain. Beneath them runs sound recorded six hundred metres down an antimony mine, so that geological deep time keeps pressing against the time of contemporary media.
Exhibitions
- 2023, Katabasis, Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, Xiamen, China (CN)
Links / references
- Three Shadows - Katabasis Official Jimei x Arles exhibition page for Katabasis, curated by Chen Min.
- Three Shadows - Liu Guangli, Special Jury Mention Official Jimei x Arles recipient page documenting the Discovery Award Special Jury Mention.
- TANC - 退入地下世界，集美阿尔勒发现奖 Chinese article on the Discovery Award context and the Katabasis exhibition.
- 1854 Photography - What does a French-Chinese photography festival mean to Jimei? International programme context for the 2023 Jimei x Arles festival.