artists

BJ & Richeille Formento

Gai Series, Peikwen Cheng


About the Show

Peikwen Cheng, BJ Formento and Richeille Formento
Counterpoint 2011: Journey to the East - Photographs

Counterpoint is an annual photography exhibition that surveys current production by West Coast Bay artists. It is the outcome of gallery director Julina Togonon's resolution to promote local talent in the face of an increasingly globalized art market, with its main poles outside San Francisco. The last three years Counterpoint has shown work organized around different themes responding to the contemporary situation in art and society at large.

This year's subject, "Journey to the East," takes its lead from the rich and varied history of Asian immigration to the Bay Area and proposes a rethinking of Asia no longer cast in the light of nostalgia, but as a place of the future. Counterpoint 2011's artists went to Asia and they report back, unpacking some of the complexities of the region's position in the contemporary moment in relation to its past.

Peikwen Cheng is an award-winning Chinese American photographer who was raised and educated in the US. During the last five years he lives in Beijing and documents the changing face of the city in this period of intensive modernization. The photographs from the series "Gai," which means to build (盖) or transform (改) in Chinese, juxtapose rapidly disappearing physical structures and social formations with large-scale new commercial developments and iconic new buildings. Cranes, scaffolding, round-the-clock work in construction sites set the tone. Subtle formal explorations in composition and atmosphere, and the careful and sensitive introduction of the human scale provide layers of complexity and depth in this work.

BJ and Richeille Formento, are an award-winning artistic duo that are successfully crisscrossing the terrain between commercial and fine art photography. Their work has been exhibited and commissioned in Europe and the U.S. Earlier in his career, Formento has assisted well-known photographers Mary Ellen Mark and Annie Liebowitz. For the Counterpoint 2011 project, the Formentos returned to the Philippines to capture the essence of the people in their changing contemporary lives. Their portraits convey the complexities and incongruities of the Philippine culture, the impact of its colonial pasts and the unique influences of its geography.

Gallery director Julina Togonon and art historian, Stathis Gerostathopoulos, curate Counterpoint 2011.
Click here to view slide show of "Selected Photographs from the Exhibition" for both Formento & Cheng photos.