Photography of Jonas Yip

Paris: Dialogues + Meditations

A joint exhibition featuring the photography of Jonas Yip and the poetry of Wai-lim Yip

Emerging with layered voices and meaning – unveiling a forgotten history among trembling light and shadows, fine art photographer, Jonas Yip, and renowned poet and scholar Wai-lim Yip bring together a dialogue about Paris; pairing expressive, atmospheric photographs with evocative poems and expressions – noted as "shadowy landscapes, dreamscapes [that] seduce us and arouse strange sensations."

"In the Paris: Dialogue series," as noted by Jonas Yip, "the world is rendered in dreamlike atmospheres, with sparse landscapes and empty cities visited only occasionally by ghosts and shadowy figures. More interested in capturing feeling than in capturing detail, I strive to find the beauty in the mundane, the extraordinary in the ordinary; that radiance revealed not in how things look, but rather in how you look at things."

According to the San Diego Museum of Art, the exhibit is the rapport between text and image, classical and modern, East and West, and father and son. In his photographs of rain-washed streets and empty parks peopled by indistinct, ghostly figures, Jonas Yip has embraced the spontaneous and accidental. Unforeseen effects of homemade lenses, misaligned planes of focus, and light leaks have become part of the photographer’s palette — his language of expression.

Inspired by these photographs, Wai-lim Yip, an influential poet, critic, and member of the Taiwanese avant-garde, composed minimalist poems that link the aesthetics of Classical Chinese poetry with mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American Imagism. With only a few words the verses conjure a mood of melancholy nostalgia. Shown side by side, these evocative pictures and the poems presented in both Chinese and English suggest a cross-cultural, multi-generational dialogue whereby image and text are mutually enriched.

Web: jonasyip.com

Life and Truth: French Landscapes from Corot to Monet

By John Marciari, Ph.D., curator of European Art and Ariel Plotek, Ph.D., assistant curator

[ Now through July 10, 2011 ]

From Jules Jacques Veyrassat and Claude Monet, to selections by Gustave Courbet, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Leon Richet, Theodore Rousseau and Charles-Francois Daubingy – among others from Barbizon, "Life and Truth" is an intimate exhibit displaying more than a dozen works birthed from observation and free technique; the collective focus simply appreciates the rhythm and lyrical ambiance of nature.

Escaping the studio, it was common practice in the late 18th century for artists to work outdoors – capturing its lure and charm; popular sites often included the expanse of the countryside, a coastline panorama, sunset vistas, hillside slopes and ponds. The efforts of this group of artisans, pioneered what would later become known as Impressionism – a movement of art in the 19th century characterized by open compositions, accurate depictions of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject manner, as well as the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience.

The exhibit brings together works from the Museum’s permanent collection and a group of loans from local collectors; the occasion thus provides context for the Museum’s own ‘Haystacks at Chailly’ by Claude Monet, an important early work itself painted during a visit to Fontainebleau.

According to John Marciari, Ph.D, curator of European Art and head of Provenance Research at The San Diego Museum of Art, "One of our goals is to complement the European permanent collection installation on the Museum’s second floor with small, focused exhibitions that shed light on key works. In this case, for example, we put our important early painting by Monet – a work that doesn’t fit with most people’s idea of the typical, more impressionistic Monet – in context. Moreover, we like to bring in loans from local collections to complement the Museum’s permanent collection, and this exhibition includes many paintings that are privately owned (in San Diego and Rancho Santa Fe), and which are not otherwise available to the public. [The exhibit itself] is of interest as it shows Impressionism’s roots; but the earlier paintings are also interesting on their own, in their ability to capture the light and air of nature."

The San Diego Museum of Art

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