Rossi & Rossi will stage an exhibition Twirling the Lotus: Photographs from Tibet and China by Lois Conner at their new gallery at 16 Clifford Street, Mayfair, London W1, from Thursday 1 to Friday 30 November 2007. This will be Conner's third exhibition in London, following the success of previous shows at the Photographer's Gallery in 1988 and in 2004 at the British Library as part of The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith. This exhibition will include some 40 sublime platinum and pigment ink prints offered for sale in limited editions for prices ranging from £1,500 to around £10,000.
Rossi & Rossi's showing of the extraordinary panoramic photographs by one of the most important and influential photographers of late 20th century Asia will be a major contribution to the 10th anniversary celebrations of Asian Art in London, which takes place from 1 to 10 November. This highly successful enterprise draws collectors and scholars from around the world to the many exhibitions and other events held by dealers, auction houses, museums and important institutions in London.
Lois Conner is an outstanding landscape photographer who has spent much of the last quarter of a century working in Asia, particularly China and Vietnam. She was born in 1951 in New York and received an MFA in photography from Yale University in 1981. In 1982 she began to work in an elongated format, using a panoramic or 'banquet' camera (first used at the turn of the 19th/20th century for group portraits), inspired in part by Ming dynasty paintings she had studied while in graduate school. In 1984, with a Guggenheim Fellowship, she spent nine months in China and since then has returned to work there annually, most often for months at a time. Since the 1990s, Conner has drawn her inspiration from the gradual yet profound changes in the physicality of the cities and countryside which have occurred since the adoption of a market economy.
The panoramic form allows her to extend the sweep of narrative in her images and to embrace more than one moment concurrently. She uses photography to reinvent a sense of the world through landscape, of landscape as culture. Conner began taking photographs in Tibet in 1986, while her Lotus project was started in 1995. Both are ongoing. Together they conjure up a world that is fragile and fluid, dynamic and profound; a world that has seen irrevocable change yet remains infused with tradition. The title of the present exhibition Twirling the Lotus comes from a well-known Buddhist sutra indicating a moment of enlightenment or understanding of the meaning of life.
The photographs on show include a number of her tranquil studies of the lotus plant in a wide variety of forms, taken at different seasons and times of the day. They are evocative visual meditations. Alongside these subtle images of the lotus will be studies of landscape, street scenes and portraits, temples, monasteries and sculptures from China and Tibet, a remarkable testament to the sensitive eye and unique vision of this distinctive photographer.
