My works has been adjusting the distances between me and the world, to make the faraway existences almost reachable. For the existences that are too close to see to focus,  are made seen through a further distance created.

Maybe it’s a sort of tradition to express feelings through landscapes in China, where bodies and the aura of bodies have been described as landscapes as well. All the emotions and feelings are deeply hidden and coded with all sort of landscapes. 

Ji Kang, who is a talented artist from mid-third Century was described by his fellow writers like this:

“He’s proud and independent like an alone pine tree; but when drunk, he’s like a tall jade mountain that is about to fall.” “He is like the sound of wind rustling among the pine trees, high and soothing.”

I try to capture things that are not able to be captured. To capture a sense of fluidity, and flowing. When we talk about the body, the body is not just the body, it’s also a body of other things.  

“Je est un autre.”

Mountains may depart. Tides, yes, breathing…

Text by Liu Shuwei

Liu Shuwei currently lives in Shanghai. Trained in engineering, when he graduated from Guangdong University of Technology in 2009, he decided to do what he really loves: photography and writing.

Liu Shuwei’s photographs are like mental landscapes. He is strongly inspired by literature and cinema (notably Jean Genet and Derek Jarman). His characters, where they appear, are enigmatic whether as friends or solitary, and traverse lunar landscapes or the interiors of houses haunted by good spirits, much like in the images of Wim Wenders. Like the German filmmaker he admires, Liu Shuwei starts out with bright colors which he animates with a poetry that is very much his, and close to people he seems to love deeply.

His works got exhibited internationally including at the Power Station of Art, Artefiera Bologna, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Vu Photo.Liu is a finalist of LensCulture Portrait Awards 2016, and “Ones to Watch” by British Journal of Photography 2019. His work got featured in The New York Times, i-D, Artforum, Der Greif magazine etc. 

He is also regularly published in fashion magazines (Vogue, Modern Weekly, T magazine…) and he has collaborated with international brands (Prada, Bottega Veneta) and local designers (Momo Wang, Chaotic, Pure Idealism).

Every year in November, PhotoSaintGermain brings together a selection of museums, cultural centers, galleries and bookstores to present a rich and eclectic range of photographic works – a program proposed both by the associated galleries and institutions and by the festival team, through new exhibitions. All these events address the major trends in contemporary photography and question the ways in which it is promoted and distributed.

The festival is rooted in a particular geography, rich in history and culture, that of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district in the ^6th arrondissement of Paris, and seeks to bring together and associate all the players who make up this geography.

Created in 2010, the festival has been directed since 2015 by Aurélia Marcadier, an art historian who worked for six years in a gallery-publishing house and founded TEMPLE in 2013, a structure dedicated to emerging photography and publishing. She has been assisted for several years by Justine Lacombe and Laura Martin. The board of directors is made up of image professionals, including Marie Robert, chief curator of the Musée d’Orsay, Photography and Cinema, and Victoria Jonathan, co-founder and co-director of the Doors agency. In addition to the Liu Shuwei exhibition, Victoria Jonathan regularly curates exhibitions of the festival, such as Feng Li in 2021.