About the Exhibition
Every human body is beautiful. Our bodies and flesh are part of nature, but we seldom see them that way. Instead, we label our naked bodies as indecent, lewd and obscene. We cannot look at them. We cannot talk about them. We deny all the possibilities of them.
The 84 images in the Incarnation exhibition present naked bodies as a unique and precious landscape. As alluring as Mother Nature herself, these bodies have returned to their raw and primitive aesthetic forms. Like the sunset and the moon, the exhibition’s tableaux transcend our usual ways of seeing and help us to look at the body as it really is.
More than 20 nude models, including transgender and baby, joined this photography project by Simon C over the past five years and became part of nature as mountain, desert and deserted island. Moved out of the studio to a city in ruins, these images of nude models repeatedly invite celebration of the human body. The videos by Ten Days Ten give five of the models an opportunity to tell their personal stories of putting “body autonomy” into practice in their daily lives and work.
In addition, four writers (Atom Cheung, Coco Shen, EntsSong and Lawrence K L Pun) are invited to create writings in 4 different languages (Cantonese, English, Mandarin & Taiwanese Hokkien) based on the photographs in the exhibition. These original poems, essays, and fictions will be presented in both written form and recitation in their respective dialects. It is intended to give viewers an experience that leads them beyond the two-dimensional images to new conceptions of the human body.
Four talks in the accompanying lecture series “From Body Photography to Private Photography Culture” will also be held during the exhibition’s run. The invited speakers include scholar, artists, private photography models, sexuality educator, and gender equity advocator, who will engage in an open conversation about the history of body photography, talk about the relationship between photography and the body, and share various areas in private photography. The talks will touch on such topics as selfies, selling self-images, and slut-shaming, and debunk popular myths and misconceptions about body autonomy. Please see Annex 1 for details.
Body Fest, is part of the 2021 HKIPF Hong Kong International Photography Festival Satellite Exhibition, extends our belief that “Everybody Is Awesome”. To enter Body Fest is to let "Our Models" be our guide to “see the unseen”.
