This new body of work is a meditation on the area in Beijing where the artists lived before it was demolished and replaced by expensive apartment buildings in 2002. Before Rong Rong and inri began working together in 2000, they had both achieved considerable success as creative photographers, Rong Rong for his remarkable photographic studies of the short-lived artist’s community known as the East Village and the Wedding Gown series and inri for the ferocious intensity of her portraits of models she had encountered in Tokyo, the city of her birth.

Once they started living and working together, the focus of their work changed as they began traveling to distant locations in the North of China, Austria and Finland. As described by Christophe W. Mao,

Rong Rong and inri became archetypal figures in scenarios of their own devising. Shedding their individual identities as husband and wife and residents of Beijing, they became primal figures at the birth of time, notable for their frailty and diminutive scale before the majesty of nature.

In their most recent work they have returned to Beijing, but it is already a Beijing that no longer exists. In three overlapping groups of photographs, the artists document their short life together in the modest house that they shared for a short but crucial time in their lives. Photographs of details from their daily life complement evocative photographs of social gatherings and art world visitors posing in front of the front door of their house. Finally, dressed in dark clothes and offering bouquets of lilies, they record the process of demolition until all that is left is a pile of rubble.

Performers in their own work and photographers, Rong Rong and inri are uniquely gifted in their ability to create urban tableaux of haunting beauty while finding the hidden poetry in subjects as mundane as unwashed dishes on a dinner table.

Curated by Zhang Li