Happiness Survival -- Chen Haiwen's Image Memories from the Journey

Author: Chen Haiwen (Compiler)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-08-01
Features: The theme of "happiness and survival" achieves a unified integration of the individual, the crowd, the nation, and the region. This tracking and care for the state of human survival can be seen as a kind of religious devotion. The compassion conveyed in the images evokes people to reflect and re-examine the concepts of "happiness" and "survival." Chen Haiwen's peak of creativity occurred in the 1980s, when personal time was relatively abundant. He picked up his camera, retreated to Huangshan Mountain, wandered through streets and alleys, and spent a full decade defining his own path. He created almost entirely based on his keen artistic intuition, free from the influence of popular photographic concepts and deliberately mimicking others' techniques. This allowed him to more authentically portray the original state of social survival at the time. However, as time passed, this creative approach has gradually been diluted. Today, as the pace of life becomes faster and faster, the space available for photographers to create freely is shrinking. The unprecedented explosion of technology, equipment, financial resources, and information has made many photographers restless. In an era that emphasizes practicality, photography is increasingly dependent on commerce, and the trend of blindly chasing novelty in the photographic world only highlights the steady mindset in Chen Haiwen's seemingly ordinary works. Although Haiwen has also immersed himself in business, using his camera to the frontier of wealth, from his initial almost instinctual and intuitive focus on the survival of ordinary people to entering the vast ocean of market survival, he has found new habitats and growth points for life and art, bridging the gap between artistic creation and market demand. When many photographers lost their direction and meaning due to the impact of society and the times, he instead broke out again, with his creative passion stretching freely like a road.