Régis Bodinier

“The ambivalence of the Middle Kingdom challenges the traveller and fascinates the artist. Vestiges of a glorious past, omnipresent and enduring ancestral traditions, development, modernisation of a civilisation in full mutation. Everything mixes together, blending in a vertiginous way at an increasing speed. A disturbing and subjugating contrast.

In the manner of a pictorial ethnographer, Régis Bodinier describes a changing Chinese society in which he has lived for several years. Here, we are invited into the tangible daily life of the Chinese, we share a certain intimacy. A testimony from which emerges a lot of respect, sensitivity and emotion.

Emmanuelle Huguenin, 2015

“From his stopovers in China, Régis Bodinier, creator of images and traveller of time, reveals to us his new realities as a solitary walker. In the course of his contemplations, the need to express images has become a challenge. To show other perspectives on China and the relationship with time. Those of a Frenchman. Those of black and white in the polychrome world of the colourist. Those of the everyday through the past.

China, vast territory, great history. The moment, a tiny space of infinite density. These two territories united in a series of photographs as a natural fusion of heritage and traces of time. The everyday is a testimony of the rhythm of time, of the evolution of the transformations of a world whose rotation is both perpetual and unique. The traces of time are those of the past and the present, those of the day, of a day. Sensations of the present that take on a taste of eternity.

In a more prosaic way, Régis Bodinier expresses through his images the happiness of contemplation and the energy it brings. In this universe, he is on the edge of the encounter between Eastern art and Western aesthetics. These boundaries capture the panorama and express the voices of silence, the eye of the present, often absent from the representations of historical and modern China in manuals and other guides. His humanism expresses a thought disconnected from existing reference points. Here is its own timeless space.

A few shots further away, on the trail of the imprints of time, he gleans and shares these moments of China seen step by step. Régis Bodinier’s journey in China is a vision of the traces left by time, a meeting between the stigma of history and reality. It continues… “

Anne Battestini, 2012