摄影家是那个在世界中安置边框的人。不一样的边框是一扇扇门通往不一样的境界。萧潇为我们裁切的世界,寂静简洁,透着冥想的神秘。他有从司空见惯的场景中提炼出最单纯结构与图像的天才。精神上的洁癖与技术的精湛完美地统一在这些图片之中。他的这些作品中没有一个人和一切杂物,但你能感觉到那个冥想与忧思的人的在场。
如果说《窗系列》是艺术家在刹那间看见了精神性的自己,那么,在《云系列》中,艺术家看见了后现代文明精确的虚妄。
任芷田

现代祭坛上的终末会面  / 王基宇
中国观念摄影的主流有三:一是社会学与空间政治摄影,以庄辉、邵译农、蔡东东、曹斐、翁奋等为代表;二是情境诗学摄影,以邱志杰、蒋志、陈晓云等为代表;三是图像制作摄影,以王庆松、缪晓春、赵半狄、李小镜为代表。而如果陷入目前的当代摄影观看习惯中,青年艺术家潇潇的作品《合理的现实》则比较难以进入;在这种差异中,包含了新一代艺术家尚未完全展开的新方向,若要通览幽微要旨,则需要在新的感性中做出有力的观看断句...... (全文/More

Influenced heavily by what he describes as the ‘rational reality’ of the city as a machine for living, Beijing-based photographer Xiao Xiao explores the relationship between reality and the photographic image in this ongoing project of urban morphology from Beijing’s Central Business District (CBD). Xiao Xiao’s images stand somewhere between architectural photography, minimalist sculpture (the artist credits Anthony Gormley as one significant inspiration), geometric abstraction, and a form of still life. Stripped of colour and devoid of all sound, motion, human activity, or, for that matter, anything organic, redemption comes in the form of an exquisite play of light. Far from the chaotic or frenetic images of Chinese cities we are normally accustomed to seeing, an almost surreal calmness and order characterises Xiao Xiao’s vision. His interior spaces, whether living rooms, empty offices, or hallways, function somewhat like modern art galleries, whereby the city outside is reduced, depending on the viewer’s point of view, either to a kind of elegant wallpaper or to seeming artworks – light boxes, diptychs, triptychs, or multi-panel studies hung for the delectation of the invisible inhabitants.
深受其所描述的“合理的现实”的影响,居于北京的摄影师萧潇以北京的中心商业区(CBD)为出发点,通过发掘现实和摄影图像之间的关系,进行了一项仍在继续的的城市形态学研究。萧潇的作品似乎立足于建筑摄影、极简主义,几何抽象和静物形式之间。剥离颜色和声音、动作和人物活动——或者说,剥离了任何的生命迹象——他画面的救赎就来自于光线优雅的嘻闹。远离我们习以为常的混乱喧嚣的中国城市风光,那几近荒诞的沉着和秩序即是萧潇的眼中景观。他作品中的内部空间——不管是在客厅、空荡的办公室,或是走廊——都似乎扮演着现代画廊的功能。因此,这空间之外的城市的意义便被减弱,并依附在观众的眼光之上。城市变成了精致的墙纸,或是被观看的艺术作品——是发光的盒子,是双联画,是三联画,或是被挂起的多屏镶嵌画,只为取悦空间中看不见的居民。
Holly Roussell

...Xiao Xiao presents its counterpart with the modernist apartment as an urban machine. ‘Rational Reality’ exposes the hygienic minimalism underlying the urban ambition of inhabitation. Its windows loom not so much into the city that surrounds them, but inside the psychological reflection that projects the urban desire of personal space in the apartment as a machine for living. The image is then processed and constructed in a way as to become almost as abstract as the machinistic blueprints in the first chapter of the story. With the frightening potential of the lead panels hung on the walls. The city, the metropolis as a concrete concentration of wealth in the form of skyscrapers offers the apartment as the only available cells inside the modernist organism. For those who claimed that modernism failed, it takes seconds to realize that abstraction and repetition are tools used by the capitalist machine not only for weaving the fabric of the modernist city, but for drawing the bucolic scenarios of the suburban landscapes of contemporary urban sprawl that serves as the city’s supposed antithesis. If the Muscle car is the suburban machine par excellence, the epitome of the urban condition is the apartment cell as machine... 

...Xiao Xiao’s photographs depict segments of Skyscrapers reflecting clouded skies in their mirrored glass facades. Apparent allegories of the stealth properties that global capitalism infuses in the built environment since the invention of modern architecture, these images seem to reveal the dichotomy of a system based on a universal vocabulary of abstraction and speculation, and its impossible aesthetic mission to melt into air. Taken in Shanghai and Beijing, these photographs display buildings carrying the universal gene of ubiquitous modernism,the type of visual content used by banks and corporations, by the concrete spaces used for the transaction of flowing capital that evaporates, moves, and dissipates like the clouds aim to reflect... 
Garcia Frankowski 

The detached photographic gaze of Xiao Xiao presents us with a singular framing of the quotidian as the symbolic speculation of a dejected, remote interiority. Windows frame our forlorn gaze, glaring out at the munificent spectacle which looms beyond our vacant interiors, as spires of callous concrete fill the grid upon which we project our facile desires. As with so many vapid, thoughtless manifestations of the urban environment, we remain enthralled by these captivating visions, though always cautiously remote. This distance forms an opening into our errant interiority, as while outside there is progress, inside we lament. We lament how it frames us; how it forces us under it, scrapping pathos for power, and texture for the harshness of its form.
James D. Poborsa 



Using Format