shashasha

Wei Zihan’s “The Taste of Emotion” features photographs of animals together with short pieces of text describing the associations and emotions that she felt when looking at the animal. Published to accompany Zihan’s exhibition at Canon Open Gallery 1 in Tokyo after being selected for the 2nd Canon Ginza SHINES contest, “The Taste of Emotion” explores the artist’s acute relationship with animals in unusually framed photographs and inventive sentences – the photo of a giraffe is accompanied by the line “A folded tatami mat taken from a wardrobe”; the beautiful fur of a panther reminded her of “repeatedly touching silk with a special shine” – and highlights the complex sensations that the act of looking can entail.

“Whenever I look at an animal,
I sense all kinds of things from what I see,
and start digging in my memory for similar things,
replacing images of fluffy sheep with those of my first marshmallow.”
― from Wei Zihan’s afterword (all texts included in Chinese, Japanese and English)