PHOTO LONDON 2026
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PHOTO LONDON - 2026
Baptiste Rabichon, Yang Yongliang, Jiang Zhi
MAY 13th - MAY 17th, 2026
National Hall, Olympia, LONDON, ENGLAND
Booth B02
In the Love Letters series, Jiang Zhi photographs orchids bathed in soft light with shades of blue and green. The images are based on precise composition, where delicate layers of color overlap in a controlled balance. Each photograph isolates the flower, placing it at the center of a calm, almost suspended space.
Each flower is captured at the moment it is slowly burning. The flame surrounds the petals with restraint, without immediately altering them, revealing a tension between vitality and disappearance. The fire does not destroy instantly; it accompanies the form, revealing it as much as it consumes it.
In China, it is traditional to burn objects as offerings to the deceased in the afterlife. Here, burning these flowers becomes a symbolic gesture. Jiang Zhi lost his wife, and orchids were her favorite flowers. Through this series, he extends this act of offering in a form that is both intimate and silent, where the image preserves what is in the process of disappearing.
Jiang Zhi was born in 1971 in Yuanjiang, Hunan Province, China. After graduating from the China Academy of Art in 1995, he developed an artistic practice that blends photography, painting, video, and installation. His work, drawing on fiction and poetry, explores contemporary social and cultural realities, at the intersection of personal experience and observations of everyday life.
Yang Yongliang is known for his contemporary reinterpretation of shanshui — traditional Chinese landscape painting — which he reimagines using digital tools. From a distance, his works resemble misty mountains, serene forests, or winding rivers. Yet upon closer inspection, these landscapes are revealed to be composed of urban elements: skyscrapers, power lines, construction sites, and traffic jams. This shift from one world to another reflects a deep concern about rapid urbanization, the erosion of tradition, and the dramatic transformation of the environment. Without being didactic, his work offers a subtle critique of the environmental, economic, and social upheavals of our time, while also suggesting the possibility of a dialogue between cultural heritage and technological modernity.
Born in Shanghai in 1980, Yang Yongliang studied traditional Chinese painting with the calligraphy master Yang Yang for ten years. Photographer, painter, videographer and visual artist, he graduated from the Shanghai Institute of Design and the China Academy of Arts in the fields of visual communication and design. He is now a professor at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art.
Baptiste Rabichon composes his photographs like a painter. An RC photographic paper is his blank canvas, a territory of exploration for his composition process, mixing analog photography, digital images and the projection of diverse objects from his daily life. Within the darkness of the darkroom he gathers his memories while shaking up our relation to photography. Flowers picked a few days before are placed on the enlarger and mixed with pictures collected from the Internet or in magazines. But the almost scientific approach of his aesthetic, which might evoke the herbaria of 21st century botanists, is disturbed by the sensuality of a mysterious female silhouette gently lying on the paper image.
Baptiste Rabichon’s works from the Ranelagh series subtly explore the interplay of perception between negative and positive space. Through a delicate layering of floral motifs, the artist creates images in which the planes blend together and gradually reveal themselves. Within this visual interweaving, a face seems to emerge with a touch of delicacy. This apparition on the edge of the visible invites a careful reading of the image.
Born in Montpellier in 1987, Baptiste Rabichon lives and works in Paris. After viticulture and oenology studies, he went to ENSA Dijon in 2009, to ENSBA Lyon in 2011 and finally to ENSBA Paris in 2012. In 2015 he joined the National Studio for Contemporary Arts (Le Fresnoy) from which he graduated in 2017 with honors from the jury. He was the recipient of the 2017 BMW residency and participated in the 63th edition of the Salon de Montrouge.