Hugo Tillman: Impressions of Being

Impressions of Being, which opened at Milan’s CorsoVeneziaOtto last week, is English photographer Hugo Tillman's first solo exhibition in Italy. The show, offering a broad introduction to the artist, brackets two separate bodies of work: Film Stills of the Mind, a series of photographs shot in China, and Daydreams of Mine, a body of work based in Cuba.

The starting point for Film Stills of the Mind are the "inner hopes, fears and dreams" of 76 contemporary Chinese artists, nine of which are displayed here. Each photograph is what Tillman calls an 'inverted portrait' as the images are, in intention at least, less a physical portrait and instead more descriptive of the ‘psyche’ of each artist. In Daydreams of Mine Tillman offers us an equally constructed representation of contemporary Cuba, in an attempt to record the contrast between 'progress and exoticism'. Though each body of work is effective in its own right, together they form an awkward sort of antagonism.

The justified explorations of the internal and the surreal in Film Stills of the Mind make the same forays in Daydreams of Mine descend into ridiculousness; the comment on Western conceptions of the 'other' in the latter in turn make the viewer realise there is something uncomfortably encyclopaedic about Tillman’s examination of the ‘Chinese psyche’. Both series may be levelled by the criticism that the portrait is not of either China or Cuba, but instead of Tillman himself. This is not original, but then neither is Tillman’s—very Western—approach to photography.