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«After dabbling on and off in photography since the late 90’s, things overtly intensified when I came into possession of a medium format camera sometime around 2009. My renewed interest in film coincided with me taking up a position as an English teacher for a government run aerospace school…for kids, on the periphery of Beijing city.
Half my time is spent teaching in the resplendent, decaying 1960’s residential compound of the Chinese aeronautic fraternity while the other half loitering around my residence about 1km down stream. In boozy contrast to the ordered, semi euphoric surrounds of the high space sanctuary are the cacophonous street organs of my local neighborhood. Yet consumed by the harmonizing rhetoric of the capital, this place (named jiu gong) is bound to its own internal logic – a full frontal ectoplasm of society in a bewildering state of stratification.
My experiences of the rest of Beijing and of China in general can be best articulated in my daily traverse to and from work - between the brutal flux of economic upheaval and the calmly monolithic ‘permanence’ of the Chinese Communist Party. Stemming from this dichotomy my photography attempts to put a sword into the order of things and wrestle out all the internal paradoxes and antagonisms while gesturing at how I might (or mostly not) fit into these narratives.
Where the excess of kitsch explodes into the frenzied real, fantasy foams at the brink of a disassociated exercise machine; a gap inscribes itself in the other - I’ll be around.»
© All copyright remains with photographer Jeremy O’Sullivan