Half Cadence

Having brought together six photographic series by six photographers, half cadence examined photography’s potential to hold space for absence, suspension, and the complexities of transformation. The works reflected on the tension between individual agency and inherited cultural frameworks, attending to how personal identity, belonging, and the memory of the commonplace are negotiated in the interstices between articulation and silence. 

The title drew from a musical term: a half cadence concludes on the dominant, leaving the phrase unresolved. In this exhibition, half cadence became a photographic metaphor; the transition was emphasised over resolution. As Susan Sontag wrote, ‘Between photographer and subject, there has to be distance.’ In half cadence, this distance was both temporal and spatial. It was not a lack or rupture, but a condition of vision itself. It was through simultaneous separation and proximity that the image took form, enabling us to enter it as subjects. Some series unfolded through fragments and loose narratives, while others constructed gestures of quiet rebellion and stage a saturated realism. Each withheld overt expression, akin to a pause within a passage. Operating both as a collection and as a singular photographic work, they postponed definitive meaning, questioning the instability of perception and the continual flux of daily life.

Artists: 
Zhou Zhang @_zhouzzzz 
Xinyuan Yan @yxy_uan 
Xuan Feng @frederickfengo 
Yizhou Li @yizhou1017 
Gigi Yuxuan Zhang @gigi_zyx 
Yan Yang @saintjoeyoung 
 
Curated by Catherine Li @cath_erine_li and Xuan Feng @frederickfengo