RA’A

The Alchemy of Seeing

( Chongqing Art Residency )

RA’A — from the Hebrew root meaning “to see” — invited viewers to slow down and reconnect with the world they encounter every day. In this exhibition, I explored photography as both process and perception, returning to the tactile, alchemical magic of image-making in a digital age.

Each print in RA’A transformed a fleeting moment into a dialogue between time, material, and human touch. The marks and textures on the surface revealed the presence of the hand, connecting the photograph to multiple timelines beyond its capture.

The series drew inspiration from Chongqing, with a palette of greys and greens symbolising the city’s dense fog, concrete, and resilient nature. The works were arranged in the form of a Bagua — the feng shui symbol of balance — to mirror the relationships between process, intention, environment, and viewer.

Ultimately, RA’A asked each visitor not just to look, but to truly see — to step into the work, engage with it, and reanimate it through their presence.

RA' A series of work -Ronnie Goldfarb Photography, dominated by the commercial media, seems to many as an old-fashioned way to create avantguard art pieces. However, Ronnie Goldfarb, a young british artist, help us to rediscover the power of communication hidden in this type of Old stuff. At the age of Social Media and Virtual Reality, our visual sights are over-loaded with commercial images and stimulus. Traditional art works are losing its appeal to the mass crowd as the graphic revolution plays out. Artists all over the world are struggling to escape from this doom by exploring ground-breaking new channels of expression. Ronnie's approach is right against the general trend. Her works comprises not only the end result - photo images, but also intermediate phases along their production, including ink chemical make-up, application of traditional chinese mounting techniques, particular treatment of sheet textures for special effects etc. She tends to expose all these details right in front of spetators in order to bring their attention beyond the images themselves and help them to enter into her world full of pleasures of creation, a new type of Alchemy as she put it. Thus, her message can easily get across to spetators, that is: Life is not simply about the goal, usually the process of achieving this goal is an integral part of this journey, sometimes much encouraging. Due to her solid mastery of the art of photography, her works can emulate with the most trendy genres of modern art approaches such as behavorial or cross-media, instrumental etc. In her works, we can also identify various concepts of tension and agony, effects of "ying" and "yang", youth and aging, the mood of upbeat etc. One of her focal plots needs to be mentioned here is that her efforts to reach out to the Eastern Culture during her short China journey has left some traces on her recent works. Curves , rounded shapes, Ying-Yang contrast, the integral nature of the exhibit as a whole and even the taoist-pattern arrangement for her works within the show rooms, all suggests that Chinese aethetic factors have found their ways into her artisitic stock. Seems that Ronnie has come to understand the crucial value for Chinese fine arts, the wholeness of the art work, rather than its parts, can help acheive the transcendence aestheically as well as spiritually. With this new ingredients in mind, we believe she will experience a new height in her career as a professional modern artist.

By 刘羽-John Liu
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