QIanjin Men

Qianjin Men

Project Description

Soft Thorn is a collection of photographs that captures everyday scenes often overloked in life, as well as visual representations of inner thoughts. The series is the result f the artist's observation of her own actions and emotions, and her silent struggle ith negative feelings through photography.

BIO

Qianjin Men was born in 1996 in Tianjin, China. She received a B.A. in journalism from Bin Hai School of Foreign Affairs of Tianjin Foreign Studies University in 2014. In 2019, she applied to the Art Photography M.F.A. program at Syracuse University. Then she went to the United States to begin her MFA studies in photography in Syracuse, where she began to formally learn how to think and photograph from an artist’s perspective.

Her photo projects mostly relate to herself: self-reflection and self-reconciliation, the collection and reproduction of memories, and the exploration of intimate relationships. She also used photography as a form of meditation to capture landscapes, objects, and portraits.

As the work progressed, Men developed the idea of adding other artistic elements to creating images, because she found that her art was evolving in more ways than developing technical skill in digitally capturing images: she also desired to bring physical traces of the real world into her art after exploring and experiencing that world. Men began to venture into uncharted artistic territory beyond still image processing: video, installation, collage, performance art.

In 2022, her work was included in the 2022 MFA Photography Survey group exhibition at Light Work.