Until 8 April, Caroline O'Breen in Amsterdam is presenting a duo exhibition with work by Sarah Mei Herman and Tara Fallaux. Both photographers completed a residency program that would have a defining impact on their practice: a residency at The Chinese European Art center in Xiamen, South-East China.
Thematically, their work also has an important similarity: both photographers investigate intimacy and love in young people. In doing so, they don't emphasise the differences between Dutch and Chinese culture, but rather, they look for a certain universality in the emotions of their subjects.
Sarah Mei Herman's work is about relationships and intimacy, about change and growth. She has a particular fascination for the relationship between siblings and the gray and somewhat elusive area between friendship and love. When she traveled to Xiamen in 2014, she mostly photographed women there, including queer couples. It resulted in the photography series "Touch". After returning to the Netherlands, Herman was approached by Emerson & Wajdowicz Studios in New York, an organisation that publishes books about queer communities all over the world. It was the starting point for the nuanced series "Solace", for which the photographer traveled back to Xiamen. Travel restrictions meant that Herman had to finish the book in the Netherlands, in collaboration with Dutch people from the LGBTQAI+ community who were born in China. Herman interviewed her subjects about their lives and concerns — because although homosexuality has been decriminalised in China since the turn of the millennium, their community is still discriminated against and stigmatised, especially by older generations who still consider the topic taboo. It has been a recurring theme in world history, but homophobia in Chinese culture has coincided with increasing contacts with the West. Non-heterosexual relationships were common in Chinese culture for centuries, until the influence of the West and Christianity in the 19th century.
Herman first studied philosophy for a year before obtaining a bachelor's and master's degree in Photography at the KABK in The Hague and the Royal College of Art in London. Her work has been shown at The National Portrait Gallery in London, Centre Wallonie – Bruxelles in Paris and as part of Jimei x Arles: East West Encounters at the Xiamen International festival in China. In 2018, Herman became part of the Futures Photography platform. Among other things, she won a Rabo Photographic Portrait Prize and is currently nominated for a Victoria & Albert Museum Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography 2023.
Tara Fallaux initially became known as a director of award-winning documentaries. In 2018 she traveled to Xiamen, after which her artistic career would take on a different shape. Since then, Fallaux has focused on long-term projects in which photography, poetic storytelling, film and books are central. In Xiamen, she came into contact with a young woman who wrote many love letters. Fallaux captured her for the video triptych "I write this letter in bed" (2022), in which she reads a letter that reveals her feelings and insecurities, about herself and her future. In her practice, Fallaux examines how young Chinese women reconcile age-old traditions with more contemporary notions of love and intimacy. In the series "Perfect Pearl", she also elaborates on universal feelings about love, loneliness, desire, perfection, identity and social expectations, often viewed from a female perspective. Her eponymous photography book was shortlisted for the Prix du Livre 2022 at Rencontres D'Arles.
Fallaux studied at the Dutch Film Academy, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. Her work has been shown at various film and photography festivals, including Rencontres D'Arles and the NYC Independent Film Festival, at L'espace Van Gogh in Arles and at the Technische Sammlungen Museum in Dresden.