Mo Yi, Selected Photographs 1988-2003

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Thames & Hudson (here). Hardcover, 11.3 x 8.9 inches, 192 pages, with 163 images in monochrome and color. Edited by Holly Roussell, with essays by Philip Tinari, Holly Roussell, Christoph Wiesner, and the artist. Design by Agnès Dahan Studio. (Cover and spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: Don’t look now but Mo Yi, who has spent much of his career as an outsider banging on the walls of the art world, may be about to gain entrance to its inner sanctum. What’s that? You’ve never heard of him? Join the crowd. Although relatively well known in his native China, the 66 year old photographer has flown under the radar in the west. But a recent monograph may change that. 

Adorned with a cover and interior accents of imperial yellow, Mo Yi: Selected Photographs 1988-2003 announces its subject as an exalted figure, or at least that’s the hope. The book is published in conjunction with two major exhibitions, at Les Rencontres d’Arles (which closed on September 29th) and the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (running September 28th – December 29th, 2024). The book and shows were curated by UCCA’s Holly Roussell. Her 15 year mini-retrospective is well organized, with multiple essays, ephemera, and photographs packaged in a horizontal hardcover. The highlighted projects represent a particularly tumultuous and transitional period for both Mo and his country.  

For those looking to get quickly up to speed on the artist, the appendix has a helpful timeline of major life events. Mo was born in 1958 in Tibet to Han Chinese parents, and raised on a university campus in northwest China. His formative years occurred under the strictures of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which weighed on the nation’s creative class from 1966 until 1976. Perhaps the future seeds of alienation and its flâneur-based cousin Jiepai (street photography) were planted then? If so, there was scant time to explore the question, because Mo was signed to the Tibet SAR soccer team in 1973, where he played professionally for the next ten years.

Retiring from soccer in 1982, he resettled in Tianjin, near Beijing in northern China, to rejoin his parents and plot his next steps. It was there that he felt the early tug of his eventual calling. In order “to feel closer to photography” he took a job in a local hospital as a medical photo technician. Teaching himself from books and magazines, he acquired a camera and gradually honed his skills. 

Mo shuffled between Tibet and China over the next few decades, but Tianjin would remain his primary base. With a few minor exceptions, all of the photographs in the book were made there. Tianjin was a quickly growing city with tightly knit hutongs, bustling foot traffic, and passing anonymity, the perfect tool kit for a young street photographer. He prowled Tianjin omnivorously between 1988 and 2003. A quick browse through his photos of the period reveals an affinity for fluid situations, chance encounters, and intrusive compositions. He shot with relaxed curiosity. Each exposure probed an uncertain path.

To these chaotic ingredients Mo added another: a willful blindness. He rarely looked through the viewfinder before shooting. The book’s first series 1m – The Scenery Behind Me offers an extreme example. Mo shot the photographs walking through Tianjin in 1988 and 1989, with a camera and 17 mm lens mounted to his back. Moving forward, he focused at roughly one meter. He guessed at composition and timing, but of course precise frames were impossible to plan. 

The twenty-two photographs in the book feel a bit like urban core samples. Each one sweeps up a wide angle of people, shadows, buildings, and activity in one swath. They are interesting as historical artifacts of 1980s China. In fact Roussell classifies Yi as “an urban ethnographer.” But more importantly, these early images show a young explorer determined to hijack his own vision. By dislocating his eyes from his lens, Mo transposed the routine for the unexpected. His photos looked backward, but they would presage future events in China. 

A group exhibition in 1987 had received poor reviews. When the Tiananmen Square protests failed in 1989 (well documented here), Mo plunged further into a period of despondency. His aimlessness soon found a new non-target in a series he named Tossing Bus. Riding public transportation around Tianjin in the autumn of 1989, he held the camera at his chest to capture bus interiors. Monochrome snatches of passengers, seats, and railings trace a tale of humdrum malaise. Some frames in the book are blurred or out of focus. Commuters look glum enough on their own, and Mo’s wide angle confers an added degree of impersonal disaffection. They have the perfunctory mood of surveillance footage or a video feed. Mo’s mood was not much brighter. He soon decamped to Tibet where he remained until 1993. 

Returning later to Tianjin and feeling energized, he resumed the Tossing Bus series in 1995, along with a sister project Landscape Outside The Bus. In the latter series (shot partially in Shanghai), the reader can sense his curiosity and concern reviving. Framed through side windows and front windshield, his pictures show the outer world jumping to attention. The nondescript masses of Tossing Bus have been supplanted with clearly delineated exteriors. The series feels expressive, maybe even hopeful. “I found this shooting method natural,” he says. “It allowed me to deal with the constant changes of the city view around me with the help of the bus windows.” 

For his 1995 series I Am A Street Dog, Mo adjusted his methodology, this time walking around Tianjin with his camera at the end of a long stick. Using a remote shutter button, he shot pedestrians from a vantage near street level. The dog’s eye view is jarring and novel, although in a few frames it veers uncomfortably close to upskirting. In 1998’s Dancing Streets, Mo extended his street-level technique into a vertical series, adding a surrealist edge with slow-synch fill flash. 

The camera on a stick was a new tool, but it still clung to the old comforts of visual displacement. “Holding a camera is just like holding a gun,” he once mused. The detached misfires in the book reveal an artist struggling to get outside of his head, to escape his own internal hard wiring.

That impulse came to later fruition in two series of self portraits. Me In My Landscape captured the artist in moments of reverie, backed by Tianjin streetscapes in 1997. A few years later Scenery With Me – A Hint Of Red took Mo’s selfies into the realm of color-gel experiments. In this series Mo flashed himself with a red filter into various corners of the frame. Peering in from the edge, he swam against deep blue backgrounds. In broad strokes these pictures aren’t far from the hand painted selfies of Masahisa Fukase’s Private Scenes (reviewed here). Whether there was direct influence is an open question. In any case Mo’s expected no outside validation. “I knew even before I took the photographs that Chinese critics in 1995 would simply see them as ‘meaningless’ pictures,” he writes. “I made these self-portraits to express myself, and I have continued to take them because I feel like a specimen in my own habitat.” 

If one wants to convey an ostracized impression, applying a red filter to self-portraits will certainly do the trick. Meanwhile he was using straight flash for his street level views. It was only a matter of time before the techniques combined. The 2003 series Red Streets concludes the book with quick bursts of pedestrian legs captured in Tianjin. Red flash and slow-synch shutter cast a salacious, knowing gaze on calves, stairs, skirts, and bike wheels.

Mo’s personal red-light district is a fitting partner for the quickly developing city in the background. His photos show that the narrow warrens of old Tianjin have been superseded by broad plazas and apartment towers. Bold advertisements and patent leather shoes signal newfound wealth. Indeed, during the span of the book, 1988-2003, China’s economy quadrupled, and Tianjin blossomed into a megacity (current population roughly 13 million). The country was morphing rapidly. So was Mo. It’s just as well that the book ends here, before his 2010 move to Beijing, or his later 2023 retreat to a small town in Zhejiang.

Mo Yi: Selected Photographs 1988-2003 offers a brief window into Mo Yi’s life, and a transitional period for China. During the book’s 15 year span, both underwent radical transformation. While the photos are dynamic and entrancing, it’s worth remembering that this is just one selected slice of Mo’s long career. At various other times he has explored collage, multiple exposure, image grids, mixed media, cropped faces, and common household objects.

None are represented here, and the decision to focus on a single period may feel arbitrary. But it’s in fact quite deliberate. Mo’s feelings of disillusion, under appreciation, and boot strap self determination help to unify the work. In fact, they might also describe his country’s mood. In Jiepai he’s found the ideal photo vehicle for alienation, and Mo’s relentless tinkering adds fuel to the genre.

All of this is well laid out by Roussell in her informative introduction. She offers a brief historical overview of 20th century Chinese photography, and some ideas about how Mo might—albeit sometimes begrudgingly—slot into it. She calls him, accurately in my view, “one of China’s most iconic flaneur-provocateurs.” In gratitude, Mo thanks Roussell “for continuing her research into someone so stubborn and difficult.” That underdog self-identity probably isn’t going to change any time soon, even as he gains increasing international recognition.

Collector’s POV: Mo Yi is represented by Blindspot Gallery in Hong Kong (here). His work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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