One Sunday in Beijing

Limited edition of 700 copies. 350 copies with a yellow cloth binding and 350 copies with a red cloth binding. Please email [email protected] with your preference when you place your order.

The 3D lenticular cover has one black-and-white and one colour photograph (the first colour Kenna photo ever published in a book). Each copy includes a c print 18cmx19 cm include at the end of the book in a Cristal pochette

A lavish setting is needed to promote intense concentration among visual artists. Following in the footsteps of Pieter Hugo, Guy Tillim and Claudia Jaguaribe, a new international artist has been enjoying the hospitality of the Chinese people. Residing at the luxury Rosewood Hotel in Beijing throughout his photography project, Michael Kenna has been able to give his utmost attention to a city which is as hectic and multifaceted as it is pure and archetypal in form.

Tinged with a spirituality that is at the same time gentle and powerful, his images paint a picture of a sacred land where the signs of the human condition are a set of structures that offer mysterious, yet soothing, views. Speaking beings may seem absent from the space of contemplation, but let us make no mistake, [there is] every sound of invisible presences and of words unspoken.

The abstract scenes which the British photographer loves to create are invitations to meditate on the dual nature of our appearance in the general order of animal species, between grace and ponderousness, the pictorial beauty of the scenes represented seeming to redeem every evil intention, fulfilled or not, past or future.

In his aesthetic imperative there is a way of reordering the visible according to a paradigm of elevation, like an objective alliance between the Doric columns of our time, the architectonics of grandiose constructions, and the intimacy of prayer, like an ever-possible ecstasy, of the standing stone, the plant or the praying figure.

Michael Kenna envisages eternity as an arrangement of lines brought together by the power of inspiration demonstrating a very high level of civilisation, the vernacular joining the contemporary in a vast symphony of forms seized by a profound feeling of unity. So the artist turns politics into a panorama of events dilutable in the sublime of an untouchable nature despite the violence of that which wounds it.

The yuan rockets, or the euro, or the dollar. Cycles of disappearance accelerate in the Anthropocene era. What is left is a delight in the present, in full awareness, for whoever feels the moment as a desirable and breath-taking point in time.

Limited Edition of 700 copies, 350 with a yellow cover, 350 with a red cover, each with a lenticular cover and a 18cm x 19cm colour c-print enclosed in the book (not signed).

Publisher: Editions Bessard 2018

Size: 290 X 310 mm

72 pages, 68 images