Mongolian Village, 2010 by Shawn Records
Like the recently featured contender Noah Addis, who we discovered years ago from his previous and winning submission to HHS!, Shawn Records first came into our purview when he was selected as a Hot Shot in the fall of 2005. You may also be familiar with his work from from We Love You So, the website of Spike Jonze and his film Where the Wild Things Are, where Shawn's son Max played the lead character and he documented the set during the filming of the movie.
Shawn's latest HHS! submission is comprised of personal photos that he took while on a two-week trip to China, and at first glimpse it appears as a pretty rosy view of the country: his colors are bright and cheerful, his images crisp and meticulously composed, and the scenes depicted are static and serene, ever-pleasant and—at times—rather romantic.
The rainbow—an immediately identifiable symbol of hope, prosperity and innocence—recurs three times as a motif in five submitted photographs, a move that seems intentionally uniting. Although what initially drew me to Records' photos is their apparent sunny disposition and their undeniable aesthetic appeal, closer inspection detects a hint of irony; I'm forced to acknowledge that these photos must be intended as a specific comment, and perhaps even criticism.
This leads us to the back-story to Records' project: the Chinese Government in fact sponsored his trip. Records, along with five other American photographers (who were at all times escorted by government officials), traveled to predetermined locations, which included wetlands, oil fields, a coal mine, and oil and coal museums. Their assignment was to take photographs that would be used to promote tourism in China. The photographs submitted to HHS! are ones he took in an attempt to document this (I imagine incredibly bizarre) experience. The question that most concerns me from seeing his work: how on earth does one tackle the challenge of presenting a coal mine as appealing to potential visitors to China?
Oil Museum, Daqing, 2010 by Shawn Records
Records provides a canny explanation of his submitted works in his artist's statement, and one that confirms my initial, (visual) suspicions regarding the complex, and certainly to some extent critical intentions of these photographs:
There's a Chinese saying, zuijing guantian, "like looking at the sky from the bottom of a well." These photographs were made from the bottom of that well. Ultimately, this work is wrapped up in the complexity of global economics and its web of politics, propaganda, environmental whitewashing, and good-old romanticism. But in the end, my limited knowledge and opportunity show just a sliver of this sky. I'm not sure what I can say, conclusively, other than people all over the world really, really want to be happy; and advertising, whether it's created by Western corporations or Eastern governments, uses that. We want to believe that everything's going to be alright. We want to believe that there's something special at the end of that rainbow.
Record's experience of China calls to my mind a book that I read more than a decade ago: Red China Blues, by Chinese-Canadian journalist Jan Wong. The book is a very honest, and often self-deprecating account of her experience moving to Beijing in 1972 (having grown up in Montreal, and not speaking the language) to study at Beijing University, and then going on to actively participate in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Although the political circumstances, and involvement of Records and Wong with the Chinese government are certainly vastly different, I draw a link between the experience of two outsiders attempting to navigate, and becoming intimately acquainted with ideas and goals of an unfamiliar and reputedly very complex administration.
Ultimately, Records' submission represents a thoroughly intriguing meditation on the nature of advertising, on cultural pride, on propaganda, and on how we choose to view and represent the world that surrounds us. More of his work (although not from this series) can be seen on his website.