Letian Qu was born in northeast of China in1991. He graduated from CAFA in 2015 where his previous practice related to print and painting. He moved on to MA print RCA in 2019 where he has developed photo and moving image.
He is about to graduate from RCA and live and work in London.
I am interested in the everyday and the things that are overlooked. For example, the moving landscape from a vehicle's window, people walking on the street.
Our life is occupied by plenty of mundane time spent walking, people traveling from home to their workplace or on the way to the supermarket everyday, when they think about something else rather than the act of walking itself.
This routine of walking is often ignored, where as I observe myself and others during the process and consider what is important to record, otherwise these daily walks are just a blurred memory when I look back. For example, whilst I walk from home to shop, approximately every two days, my thoughts are skimming across food, family, future and many other things and I am not focused on the views on each side of street. I cannot specifically remember what I was thinking on each occasion. I think everyday life and highlight moments should be treated equally. In order to describe these sorts of experience I take photos and moving images as solid evidence for what actually happened in the past.
Everyday activities are something that potentially influence us, just like marks on a handle or creases on our face, we go though life without being aware of them. I try to use simple and objective recording to make people aware of the considerable part of our lives consumed by walking, the traces of which are like a moving sketch of life on the planet.
I continue to accumulate recordings of walking on film. Although walking is our daily behaviour, it has potential implications. What I want to capture is not a decisive moment, but a process. The figure and lens are the two ends of changeable distances, which also imply the psychological distance of people’s relationships. We pass someone just like we pass somewhere everyday. This evidence of simple and inadvertent walking shows the natural beauty of our lives. The blurred images even provide these moments with dreamlike effects.
I also use the working process to explore the connections between still and moving images, I tried to capture the process of walking by way of a series of stills. The chemical blurred image produced by liquid light film creates an imaginary space through accidental effects, hence applying emotional elements through technical steps.
The interaction between layers of printmaking is also a relationship between disassembly and combination. I applied this concept by showing a series of walking image arrangements taken over a period of time as an installation with the concept of adding time through layers of both still and moving images.
Time lapsed images of walking, employing single and multiple exposures determine different times and positions to express the concept of movement and time.
This book shows some plain and vivid sides of daily life through the superimposition of time and memories. Discovering the interest in overlapping landscape images and arrangements of images of walking taken over a period of time. The relationship between the images shifting as you turn the pages.
