The true self is hidden in the unconscious by Tales Yuan

Tales Yuan is a photographer living in Chongqing (China), a city built on mountains. His major in college was chemistry, a subject that seemed to have nothing to do with photography. However, during his master’s degree, he bought his first SLR camera and fell in love with photography ever since.

Like many young photography enthusiasts, portraits became one of his first themes but he focused on Nijigen. It is a subculture related to Anime, Comic and Games. The word Nijigen is a Japanese word meaning ‘2-dimensional space”- referring to the 2D worlds of manga, anime, comics movies, and games. But it also found its incarnation in real-life like cosplay with people dressed as characters from those 2D worlds. “As a kind of subculture, Nijigen culture is becoming more and more popular among young people in China”. He photographed many of these subcultural portraits, such as role-playing, Lolita costumes, Hanfu, JK uniforms, and so on.

With the deepening exploration of this photography genre, Yuan began to notice that there is a problem of mutual understanding between the subcultural and mainstream groups. “I hope to combine Nijigen portrait photography with conceptual photography and begin to try some forms of contemporary photography.” The images “Travel”, “Goddess..” and “Symmetric” are a part of this subculture.

Another Self is a part of his ongoing project about Nijigen teenagers in China. After a series of costumes, the young people came to their understanding of another possibility in their self-awareness. This state will be different results at different times and places, or by different observers. “Subconsciously, we have another self-individual. How do we look at it and describe ourselves? The true self is hidden in the unconscious, so which one is the real self?” The desires and emotions of the ego ultimately make us connect with them.

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