After Summer

After is a large and quiet place, holding longing, solitude, struggle, scars, slow ascent, release. These photographs are the shape of time spent inside it. Made over three years on analog film.

After is a large and quiet place. These photographs are the shape of time spent inside it.

Chunhan Chen calls this space after. It has no clear boundaries and no single mood. It holds longing, confusion, solitude, struggle, scars, slow ascent, release. These weathers do not follow one another in order. They return, overlap, recede, surface again. The work moves through them without naming them.

Chen works with analog film and natural light, over three years. The human figure is absent from the work. What appears instead are the ordinary surfaces of a world seen from inside after, surfaces that hold, briefly, from an angle, what cannot be said directly.

The order comes from return. Certain qualities and tones keep coming back across the three years, and the sequence lets them meet one another. Meaning sits between the photographs, in pairings, in rhythm, in silence.

After is a condition most people recognize. It is less an emotion than a territory, one that holds many emotions at once, and lets them come and go. After Summer is a slow mapping of that territory from inside.