INTRODUCING LUKA YOUNG
I came from Beijing, China. I came to London to study at the end of 2008. There’s a Beijing hidden deeply in my heart, it’s the mixture of my childhood memory and some of my favorite old films of Beijing. Now the city looks almost completely different from what I remembered when I was a kid. I’m 20. I started drawing when I was 13, due to my technique limitation I turned to photography when I was about 16. At first I was only into the staged photography, it took me a long time to truly understand the nature of photography. My goal is to see the world, to really see it. Without Photography, my life would have been completely different. I guess that if I hadn’t started taking photos when I was 16, I would have been a really arrogant kid who would live in their own small playground, with a really shallow understanding of the world. Taking photos let me start to think about the things around me in a completely different way. Even now photography to me is just one way to express ideas, I still bring a small camera with me all the time. Taking snapshots is kind of like collecting insects in the woods. I collect places or objects that interest me, and organise them in a big file. It’s always giving me inspiration for a bigger project. I like to use my Yashica T4, it’s small with a sharp lens, and a pinhole camera. I love to use long exposure in my works, it makes me feel as if I’m a magician of time. This image is part of my photo installation piece Memory. I took it last summer. The lady in the photo is actually my mum. We were traveling on a small unknown island in China. During my first year in London, I learned so much about the relationship between us. I started to get to know her as a woman, as a friend. Wearing this white dress of mine, I suddenly realised how beautiful she is. Here, she is walking into the sea, then she turned and smiled at me, like the pretty young gilr my dad had photographed 20 years ago. It was one of those moment when you feel that the distiction between past and present has collapsed. That time doesn’t exist anymore. Hiroshi Sugimoto is a philosopher, a sculptor of time and a magician who creates miracles.
