Digital Drawings at FNAC

The FNAC on Nanking E. Rd. under the Asiaworld Department Store has maintained a small gallery of revolving exhibitions ever since it first opened. The interesting thing about the gallery is that does not seem like one. It's almost part of the commercial space, and customers are free to browse the artworks just as they browse the books and CDs. The gallery's distinct lack of monumentality is probably its greatest virtue, and also what makes it a great venue for showing small, yet interesting ideas.

Currently on display is a show of digital photographs by Charlelie Couture, a French popular musician who has recorded more than 20 albums, the earliest one dating back to the 1970s. Even before Couture became a singer, however, she was a photographer. The current show, Trans Focus, consists of a short series of visually astute digital photos, works that in their sketching together of ideas have the feeling of well crafted drawings. All find their basis in photos of a women's bodies, images which are often collaged with other moody scenes and overwritten with philosophical scribbles or song lyrics. For example: "les prospecteurs parlent plus que ceux qui ont trouve leur mine" (prospectors talk more than the one who's found his mine). Two works, in a spirit of tough femininity, also refer to men as "serpents."