Existential Frames:
A Journey Through Images

In the relentless surge of the digital age, capturing and experiencing genuine human emotions has become increasingly elusive, a phenomenon that has become more pronounced since the advent of generative artificial intelligence, ChatGPT. However, photography remains a window into the complexities of human nature and the authenticity of life.

During this Asian Heritage Month, the exhibition Existential Frames: A Journey Through Images brings together seven emerging Chinese-Canadian photographers and lens-based artists. Using their unique perspectives, they document vivid, dramatic, and rich authentic moments.

Just as Marcel Proust explores the passage of time and the reconstruction of personal memories through delicate sensory recollection in In Search of Lost Time, these artists capture fleeting moments through their lenses. They examine various aspects of the real world, capturing the most sincere and intense human emotions from ordinary daily life, connecting individual experiences with universal human emotions, thereby touching the essence of existence.

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This is the quintessential human experience that machines and artificial intelligence cannot simulate — the warmth of life. Those true, unembellished human emotions are reflected in what Marcel wrote in his book: We vainly return to the places we once loved; we can never see them again, not because they are located in space, but because they reside in time.

Those overlooked moments of life, are preserved eternally in the form of photographs.