A gallery of portraits scrolls before our eyes, like a cinematic film. The protagonists are hooded in colourful mackintoshes, forming a rainbow of colours. Hundreds of droplets glisten in the rainbow, making the materials sparkle, contrasting with the exhausted look of the models wearing them. They pedal or drive their electric bicycles or scooters with difficulty in the large Chinese city of Hangzhou, in the south-east of the country, known for its romantic western lake. The water is there, during a typhoon in September 2013, cascading over the city and its inhabitants, urging them to protect themselves, hurry home or take shelter. Concentrated on their route, tired of their journey, struggling with the wind and water, they are equal to the elements and belong mainly to the country’s middle class.
Wiktoria Wojciechowska’s first memories of China were those of the artist Wiktoria Wojciechowska, who came for a university exchange. She has frozen this experience and visual emotion through photography. She settled under a small umbrella for several hours and days using a simple camera with flash to preserve these everyday and banal but often captivating and dreamlike scenes for the brand new western eye.
With Short Flashes the artist inaugurated the beginning of a series developed over several years, “Chinese Chapters”, telling her vision of a country, the different fragments that make it up, from the suburbs to the daily life of her friend Cong Yan, including stories of lotuses, ghosts and the river (We use to keep dead lotus leaves to hear the rain).
All his images balance between distance and tenderness, the artist collects the small moments of life of each one, highlighting their courage and making these individuals the heroes of a moment.