from "Four Seasons, Everyday Life of Tibet Peasants" (1996-2004)
Lu Nan
吕楠
Production date
1996-2004
Media
gelatin silver print
Measurements
90 x 60 cm
Notes
In 1989, inspired by the work of photographers such as Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Mary-Ellen Mark, Lu Nan left a secure job as a technician in the darkroom of the Minzu Pictorial and began to travel all over China to photograph patients in hospitals, and those unfortunates who spent their lives tied up or imprisoned in rural villages, where no medical care of any kind was available. Ever since, Lu Nan has dedicated himself to photographing the marginalised, the excluded and the despised, revealing the dark underbelly of Chinese society. His exposure of China’s failure to provide care for the mentally ill was followed by On the Road: the Catholic Faith in China, documenting the underground nature of Christian religious faith at that time, and then in 2004 he completed Four Seasons: Everyday Life of Tibetan Peasants. These bodies of work comprise his epic trilogy, originally inspired by reading Proust’s early twentieth century novel ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (‘In Search of Lost Time’), and dealing with what Lu describes as ‘the internal worlds and spiritual states of people outside of urban life.’
Accession number
2018.054