Hunan-born artist Jiang Pengyi’s ongoing solo at ShanghART’s H-Space gallery turns a lens on light, darkness and everything between. The acclaimed photographer’s three most recent series see simple subjects ranging from ice to fireflies spectacularly transformed into towering prints that are loaded with possibilities.

Already one of Moganshan Lu’s more striking venues thanks to its pitched wooden ceiling, H-Space’s roomy interior has been remodeled especially for the show into a yin-yang set-up. It's a bright white gallery with massive color spectrum works on the one side. On the other, a dim, spotlighted space showcasing massive monochrome works. The arrangement’s contrast reinforces themes explored throughout the exhibition, and showcases the 11 works on display to dramatic effect.




Intimacy, the first series on display, comprises three of Jiang’s more colorful portrayals of light. Cast your mind back to classroom science lessons, specifically the old "dispersion of light through a prism" experiment, and that’s what you’ve got here. Vivid and bright, they span turquoise to pink to green to white, never skipping a hue. They're beautiful but arguably less engaging than what’s on show next door.

All dark and shadowy save for studio-type lighting shining directly on the eight photographs on display, the space sets an altogether different tone from what came before. Adding to that obscurity are the works themselves—specifically, trying to figure out what exactly it is you’re looking at. Some could be tangled strings of fairy lights; the suspended tentacles of jellyfish; or even the nighttime glow of a city’s nucleus and sprawl viewed from above.



In fact, Jiang’s spectacular Dark Addiction series is simpler still; they’re photographs of fireflies. He traps the insects in a black box and shoots them at a slow shutter speed for a long exposure. The resulting images are made all the more dramatic through their sheer size and a moody, dimly lit setting. Aesthetic opposites of those rainbow-hued canvases hanging in the first space, these works nonetheless share similar themes of light, sight, the visible and the unseen. Clever stuff.

The third series on display, The Suspended Moment, takes yet a different approach. Atmospheric, black and white shots of ice, complete with swirling mists of frozen water vapor, they look like otherworldly landscapes. The first of the two works on display from this particular series is especially striking: a block of ice captured mid-shatter. Full of movement and force, that violent explosion somehow belies the ordinariness of the subject matter at hand to dramatic effect.



What’s compelling about Jiang is his fusing of technology and tradition to transform something really, really simple—light, that is—into images that are surprising, complex and beautiful. Be it a contemporary take on the classic pinhole camera, straightforward color spectrums, or simply the frosty transparency of ice, Jiang’s experiments with light are well worth seeking out this summer. The show continues through July 31, and for details click here.