Escape by Fang Tong

It seems to be a bright and colorful solo travel; the disguise hides the traveler’s loneliness.

The same red dress re-appears in the vivid scenery, but the trip seems to be a series of surreal scenes. It may be just a dream or just a sense of relief and escape.

Instead of staging the scenes and stories, this time Fang Tong places herself, the traveler, in real landscapes, in real deserts, and on real highways. It was a real trip, but she intentionally made the scenes look surreal and staged. Overall, this series starts inside of a very realistic scene. Then, surreal imagery is overlaid within the works, creating a temporary escape from the reality of the everyday. Most people have flashes from the subconscious where they want to escape from their daily bonds and cares, not to run away, but to break free. We can call it dissociating by drifting away, creating an instantaneous sense of freedom, but then returning to realism with a better sense of harmony.

About Fang Tong

Fang Tong graduated from the Fine Arts Institute of Shanghai University and studied in France. She has had a successful career in painting, sculpture, design and other art fields. In recent years, she has focused on photography, and she has been awarded several major international photography awards. She has been published in VOGUE and other major domestic and foreign magazines. The photo ‘Swimming Pool’ won first prize in the Nikon International Photography Competition Category C in 2015. She was commissioned by Sony in 2013 as one of 20 photographers around the world to represent Sony’s camera phone. Fang Tong is a freelance photographer based in Vancouver, BC.

Fang Tong is a cinematic style photographer, as a spectator of life. Her works are embedded with an implied narrative, which is left to the viewer to resolve over time with their own imagination. Reflecting her background in classical art, the photography is carefully planned to control the frame and the expression of details, giving her work an ethos of a painter. As a bystander, Fang Tong captures the potential that photography can embody pieces with an eternal quality, thereby creating a slightly fictional world that resembles reality but transcends consciousness. Fang Tong’s passion is for her work to border on the surreal, yet hold back enough to keep it firmly in the real world. Her photos provoke audiences to create a narrative out of cinematic pictures. There may be no clearly defined story behind the scene, but there is a strong mood and atmosphere throughout the whole image. The imaginary world is strangely familiar while the narrative arc takes audiences on a hyper-visual ride through people’s subconsciousness. She nurtures the balance between the real and the surreal that pulls her audiences into the world she created, but she also allows the audience to discover their own answers. [Official Website]