Long Xi Vlessing

• Published by Healing Time/Hard Liver
• 188 pages
  
• 27 x 20 cm
• Hard cover, cloth
  
• Debossed cover with printed sticker
• Off set printing
• Edition of 250
• Printed in Shenzhen, China

The fruit of Vlessing’s return to his family village in Fujian, traces grief, intimacy and love through photographs of the people and landscapes around him. Amidst the grave illness and passing of a patriarch, Vlessing introduces an emerging cast of soap characters occupying the space of contemporary Minnan life: Blue Mother, Blue Neighbour, The Blower, The Bodybuilder. Shifting between mountain country and urban seaside, these images hold life and death in close proximity, acting as a conduit for Love’s jumbled excess.

The artist’s first published monograph, Half of love is still Love, opens with a foreword by Toronto-born writer and curator Temple Marucci-Campbell.

Long Xi Vlessing (b. 2000) is an East Vancouver-born visual artist working across photography and film. As a kid of the aughts, his playful, circadian process welcomes digital, medium-format and phone cameras into the documentary tradition. He realises mixed-media documents and installations akin to diaries, implicating himself as narrator and marker of time.

Care, communion and criticality inform Vlessing’s practice as much as his curiosity. He is a self-taught photographer and a graduate of Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, where he studied communication studies, film production, critical theory and the moving image, finding influence in narrative cinema, the Frankfurt School, West Coast Photoconcept and domestic objects. In Montréal, Vlessing is a frequent documentarian of queer nightlife and occupant of the dancefloor. Like ‘slow dance’ and ‘slow cinema’, he embraces a relational, protracted and progressive process of image building in conscious opposition to the growing scope of automatized imagery.