In the series of “Incapacitation”, I took shots of the subjects in their New York City daily living spaces with altered elements.
With the mise-en-scène loosely resembling the iconic mythological sceneries in art history, such as The Birth of Venus, Goya’s The Colossus, and Michelangelo’s Pietà, the series represents the fragments of reality, yet remains a poetic distance from the essence reportage quality of photography. This “socially distanced” disconnection is also adopted in the concealment of subjects’ faces, in which the depersonalized characters are more empathized with while the feeling of uncanny permeates.
I’ve always been interested in making works focused on the eeriness in everydayness. After experiencing COVID-19 in April, the isolation, anosmia and the gestaltzerfall caused by repeated routines developed into this series, a modern tableaux reflecting the mental status of the people living in one of the most severely damaged cities in this pandemic.
