The examination of female roles, activities and attributes is a recurring theme in the subject choices of the photographer Anna Fabricius. During her travels to Asia over the past two years, her attention turned towards the younger generations’s self-definition and new kind of search for an identity perceived through their changes of style, clothing, and consumer goods. The pieces of the Mandarin Woman exhibition were mostly taken in Shanghai, the fashion capital of China. The series focuses on clothes, accessories, attires and styles, yet this is not fashion photography. Her works are composed, but Fabricius still does not work with the toolkit of staged photography in the strict sense, as the quasi-staging always leaves considerable space for chance, the play of randomness.
This exhibition showcases the various ways in which a photograph can be displayed as an artwork. The photo wallpaper, which usually evokes nature, hills and valleys, or seashore palm trees when used in private spaces, now reveals the snapshot of an elegant party. The Mandarin woman wearing a costume and keeping herself busy with her mobile phone is in the center of the image, while we can see a Danish DJ exchanging in the background. As opposed to the captured moment, the framed photographs installed on wallpaper are all staged.
The girls posing in the staged scenes, who could be interpreted as illustrations of female archetypes, may be considered to be a continuation of Fabricius’s earlier series titled Tigress of Housekeeping. The video work titled The Chinese Market Conquers Europe, which puts her own self into the center as a point of reference, invokes her previous series as well. The tall, blond woman appears in the square as a new building not yet seen. The phenomenon “representing Europe” catches the attention of the locals. Without even trying to conceal the intention to imitate, they start examining the phenomenon, first keeping some distance, but then increasingly boldly and thoroughly, until they even surpass the original objective by reaching the given height.
The third most important element of the exhibition is the photozine, which evokes the lookbook format of the fashion industry. As opposed to the lookbook, which usually presents the collections of one designer or one fashion house, here we mostly see scenes from everyday life. Besides the young people testing their identity, wearing the most extravagant clothing and accessories, we see fashion models spending their leisure time, urban genre photographs and street shots, as well as tint drawings created in Taiwan.
Anna Fabricius’s reserved, yet rather personal images provide an insight into the quickly changing fashion world and trends of the Far East. The identity formations and undertaken roles presented via the various clothing, delineate an intricate network of relationships and connections.
Judit Gellér