At the Xishuangbanna Photo Festival, the festival invited the jury panel to vote on the exhibited works. Serving in my capacity as a curator on the panel, some artists received various awards, while the artists I voted for will be discussed through a written piece. I would like to share this writing to help promote these artists and offer a look into the works of our neighboring countries, rather than focusing solely on our own.

The featured photo series come from two countries: China and Myanmar. Although their approaches differ, their common ground lies in an unconventional storytelling process. Both works diverge from the festival's primary trend of intense and straightforward documentary photography. Instead, these two projects significantly push photographic art to overlap with other mediums, whether by combining technology with traditional techniques or through elaborate staging and unusual storytelling, which are methods frequently used by contemporary photo artists.

Black River
Creating fictionalized narratives in photographic art is an interesting method. It might look cinematic, but the stillness of photography creates a shared space among artwork—viewer— reality. In that empty space, it can be a straightforward truth based on visible evidence, or a new truth that goes far beyond the artist's work and even beyond the absolute truth itself.

Kinguv Shi (施金宇), a PhD student at the School of Film and Media, Beijing Film Academy, created a project titled “Black River” about the journey of his ancestors, the Yi people, to settle in the Liangshan mountains. But instead of doing traditional documentary photography to explore what remains and connect it to the present, he chose to create a parallel story of truth and fiction, using scripts and storyboards just like making a movie.

The project uses actors and set designs, which makes me think of the mix of photography and performance art in works like “Pink Man” or “This Bloodless War” by the renowned Thai contemporary photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom, or Kamonlak Sukchai's “Red Lotus”, which tells a newly rewritten myth using a similar process.

Black River by Kinguv Shi is certainly not strict documentary photography. Rather, it is about passing down history and stories through an open perspective. The artist blurs the boundaries of photography, extending it deep into other artistic fields. Even inviting local Yi villagers to act in the project dissolves the boundary between the artist and the audience, pulling them into the same space. This creates a new vision of past events based on the fragmented historical information we have left today.


Noises Are Quite Loud Here
Valuing nature does not require us to travel into deep forests or encounter rare animals just to prove that the environment worth preserving must come from these extraordinary things. Instead, we can simply consider the things close to us, as they affect our lives and stay with us from morning until we go to sleep.

“Noises Are Quite Loud Here” by Burmese artist Shwe Wutt Hmon proves this idea by using a mixed-media approach rather than just traditional photography to communicate what is currently happening to nature, such as the noise pollution and toxic dust in her city that broadly affect many people.

Shwe uses various processes, such as combining recorded sounds with video and displaying them alongside photographs in an exhibition titled Noises Are Too Close Here, which shares the same concept as the exhibition in Xishuangbanna presented at the Thailand Biennale Chiang Rai 2023 (though unfortunately I could not see the version in Xishuangbanna due to venue constraints).

Flowers, leaves, or dead insects gathered from a garden in Kuala Lumpur are photographed using analog methods and layered with scanned documents related to environmental degradation, bringing high visual diversity to the work and successfully conveying the unsettling chaos of overlapping objects and data.

Therefore, Noises Are Quite Loud Here is not just about striking visuals and creative processes. Shwe is replicating the slow disasters that are gradually happening around all of us, no different from the PM 2.5 dust that flows into our noses while we live peacefully, leaving us unaware of the deadly diseases quietly forming and consuming our bodies from the inside.