HSE Art and Design School Faculty at the Changzhou Photography Biennale
A. Meshcheryakov, V. Efimov, I. Mukhin, P. Samokhvalov, P. Stadnik, M. Kharshak
The International Biennial of Photography in Fujian (China) opened on 12 December 2025, marking its third edition. The Fujian Art Photography Museum is located in the large coastal city of Changzhou and opened its doors during the COVID 19 pandemic. Since then, the museum has maintained a busy exhibition schedule and actively expanded its collection. The museum will continue to develop as a research centre for photography of the Pacific and East Asia. A strategic partnership with the local design college further cements its status as an important educational and scientific hub.
International Photography Biennale in Fujian | Paulina Stadnik | 2025
Co-curators of the third biennial in Fujian are Irina Chmyreva, lecturer at the HSE School of Design and the Art Director of the PhotoVisa Festival, and Liu Xiaoxia, the Director of International Programmes at the Pingyao International Photography Festival. The theme of the biennale is ‘Capture and Integration.’ This issue is particularly relevant to the modern world, according to Irina Chmyreva: ‘We accumulate information and images while being immersed in continuous media processes». The curators have gathered an international group of participants, including teachers from leading art schools who combine educational work with active artistic practice and displaying their work.
«Within the theme of „Capture and Integration“, exhibition visitors will see both direct photography and conceptual projects derived from it, as well as works created with artificial intelligence. This section features artists from Russia, Australia and China. Their experiments demonstrate how modern neural networks are forming new languages of visual communication and how these digital practices are interconnected with cultural experiences, primarily those of the 20th and early 21st centuries.»
Irina Chmyreva
International Photography Biennale in Fujian | Igor Mukhin | 2025
One of the highlights of the international programme is a project developed with the support of the HSE Institute for Creative Industries Development as part of the global programme for career development in the creative industries. Through the initiative, an exhibition of the faculty of the HSE School of Design was organised. It included works by Arseny Meshcheryakov, Paulina Stadnik, Vladislav Efimov, Igor Mukhin, Pavel Samokhvalov, and Mitya Kharshak. The Russian section also featured multimedia artist and photographer Maria Gruzdeva and media artist Evgeny Shcheglov. Among the foreign exhibitors were authors already familiar to the Russian public: Tom Lisboa (Brazil), Mitar Terzić (Serbia/Spain), Katka Benadik-Pratzková and Robo Kočan (Slovakia), whose works had previously been exhibited at the PhotoVisa international festival in Krasnodar.
Mo Guangping | Posters featuring portraits of the Biennale participants and co-curators
This exhibition within the Biennale presents the first part of a large-scale project ‘Cultural Codes: China — Russia’. A subsequent exhibition will be presented at a Russian venue. Today, selecting works for international projects involving curators from different countries is becoming easier thanks to digital tools such as the photo.mediiia platform, which offers photographers new opportunities to be discovered.
WORKS PRESENTED AT THE BIENNALE
Vladislav Efimov Around the Forest
Vladislav Efimov. Around the Forest
The installation is dedicated to the practice of observing the green surface of the forest-its nature and structure. The forest’s surface speaks of its grandeur, while its details define the flow of its life. Moving through the forest provides the means to distinguish zones of permissible indistinctness from those places where close observation brings some clarity to understanding the secret life of bushes and trees. sy introducing additional movement into the method of a forest walk necessary tor a natu alist to shift positions in search of specific viewpoints-we are forced to contend with the sit uation of incomplete, discrete revelation of nature’s details. Many parts of the forest remain unnoticed and blurred; the memory of the forest adventure fades.
Vladislav Efimov. Around the Forest
The viewer’s linear movement along the forest’s boundaries leads to the indistinguishability of its details, leaving only the motion captured by the camera. It transforms into a simple green line, a direction, a vector of the wandering subject’s speed. The installation consists of photographs integrated into specially constructed objects, which impose varying paces and methods of viewing for the observer.
Igor Mukhin Patriki
Igor Mukhin. Patriki
Places of power in the metropolis are constantly shifting. Eras change, a new generation of young people or a small subculture constantly takes over new urban spaces.
Igor Mukhin. Patriki
For the past five years, a small, historic neighborhood near Patriarch’s Ponds, or «Patriki» for short, has become the unofficial center of Moscow’s public life. These mystical places are described in Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous Soviet novel «The Master and Margarita.» But it seems that even here, things have come to an end.
Igor Mukhin. Patriki
Mitya Kharshak Scaffolded city
Mitya Kharshak. Scaffolded city
The photographic project is a study of the transformations in the urban environment of St. Petersburg, begun in 2002. During restoration work on the city’s architectural monuments, the urban environment is being transformed—in the familiar classical and baroque St. Petersburg, the voice of a young and commendably audacious constructivism begins to resonate distinctly. All the most significant examples of St. Petersburg’s historical architecture have gone through a period of having their facades masked by archaic wooden scaffolding. The scaffolding structures possess the genuine beauty of a functional object. Things are seen more clearly from a distance, and if one were to mentally rise to a bird’s-eye view of the city, the scaffolding would appear as a large-scale artistic and architectural intervention. Temporarily, they concealed the beauties of the 18th and 19th centuries beneath them, shooting forth a manifesto of a new architecture. Many of these shots have already become historical testimonies of the urban environment’s transformations in the early 21st century.
International Photography Biennale in Fujian | Mitya Kharshak | 2025
Alexander Borovsky (Head of the Department of Contemporary Trends at the Russian Museum): «Since 2002, Kharshak has been photographing the city in scaffolding. Scaffolding is a sign of a normal desire to somehow reformat the urban text towards order or, as is more often the case with us, embellishment. Meanwhile, all this scaffolding and structures, combined with the initial stable cultural messages delivered by the grand architecture, is also a text, and a most interesting one. For Christo, this text is a sign of self-assertion; Kharshak is more of an ecological-type artist: he listens, observes, and strives to preserve something vanishing, something that represents what is being lost in the heat of major recodings. The niche is so rare that, I am sure, people will be hunting for Kharshak’s works just as he now hunts for the rarities of a disappearing visual environment.»
The project, which began in 2002 on the eve of St. Petersburg’s tercentenary, now comprises about a hundred scenes. The project continues, just as the restoration work in the city’s historic center continues.
Mitya Kharshak. Scaffolded city
Paulina Stadnik Sine Loco (Lat. «No location specified»)
Paulina Stadnik. Sine Loco (Lat. «No location specified»)
The photographs for «Sine Loco» were taken in the territories of former Anatolia (the Aegean coast of modern Turkey, insular Greece). While working on this series, I soaked the exposed film in seawater, allowing its salts to penetrate the photographic image and affect it at their own discretion. After that, I dried the negatives and developed them. The intricate patterns that appeared on the photographs after such manipulations always remained completely unpredictable. And seawater became for me a metaphor for the Ocean of Time, in which architecture and landscape lose their connection to the past or the present.
Paulina Stadnik. Sine Loco (Lat. «No location specified»)
The photographic images of the «Sine Loco» series could have been taken at any time, beyond the boundaries of time or space. This series of photographs refers to the archetype of the ancient amphitheater, where natural landscapes and architectural structures, the forerunners of European culture, become the scenery for the appearance on stage of the Hero—a detached observer, which is the viewer themselves.
I address the theme of Time, the cultural memory of human consciousness, and invite the Viewer to independently undertake a journey through the centuries and find their own locus communis (Lat. «Common Place»), starting from the photograph.
Paulina Stadnik. Sine Loco (Lat. «No location specified»)
Arseny Meshcheryakov, Agey Tomesh Floral horoscope
Arseny Meshcheryakov, Agey Tomesh. Floral horoscope
‘Floral horoscope is an archaic system of symbolic classification discovered in cultural layers of the presumed pre-continental period. Unlike astrological systems based on the observation of stellar motion, this model correlates human individuality with phenological cycles — the blooming time of plants, seasonal weather changes, and fauna migration,» the curatorial text reads.
Arseny Meshcheryakov, Agey Tomesh. Floral horoscope
Each day of the modern calendar year is assigned a particular ancient plant (usually a flower), which is believed to have its own ‘character’ or behavioural metaphor. It is assumed that a person born on a certain day inherits the qualities attributed to «their» plant, as well as its supposed role in the natural and social structure,» the project’s authors assert with feigned seriousness. Yet they clearly ‘wink’ behind the scenes, not quite disguising the fact that the ‘Flower Horoscope’ is an AI hoax.
Arseny Meshcheryakov, Agey Tomesh. Floral horoscope
Pavel Samokhvalov North-west swell
Pavel Samokhvalov. North-west swell
The Northern Swell project was initially conceived as a series of neurophotographic typologies of liminal hotel functional spaces, captured during a journey through an imaginary coun try, possibly existing in a parallel reality to our own.
Pavel Samokhvalov. North-west swell
The project gradually expanded in scale to encompass larger territories, with new locations and types of functional spaces coming into focus: factories, plants, water towers, power plants, and transport infrastructure. The exhibition presents only a small part of the Northern Swell world.
Pavel Samokhvalov. North-west swell
The curator’s word. Irina Chmyreva on the works of the biennale participants
«Presence» can be understood in two ways: as «presence here and now (that is, existence)» and as «present time.» «Methods,» in this case, are the methods of presence and the methods we know in the present, the ones we as artists use to capture and reflect on reality.
And I believe this is a very important philosophical concept, especially in the context of discussing creativity and photography in general. It’s also about how we relate to the present and how we interact with it: what methods of «captivation» [capturing, accurately recording] and preserving this time we choose, and what are our methods of presentation and dialogue when we present this image of time to the public. And another question: how does the transition, the transaction of knowledge, take place between the present and the future, which will turn out to be the present, but with different methods of understanding the world. In my view, modern methods of interacting with the present time combine completely different approaches to different ways of understanding the world. When discussing photographic methods and their historical realities, we often describe opposing strategies that coexisted simultaneously. But we always emphasize that one of these phenomena emerged from the past, while the other was a harbinger of the future, an innovation emerging in that era.
The present in which we find ourselves now combines many methods that already existed in the past, but contemporary methods are precisely different forms of blending what came before, in different proportions, in different parts, with varying degrees of objectification, and from the perspective of different authorial interpretations of the past. And in this complex mixture of methods, like a time machine, we travel ever further into the future.
This can be a combination of academic drawing and an academic knowledge of art history with 3D modeling, and, thanks to this tool, a transition to pure abstraction, as with the Russian artist Evgeny Shcheglov. And alongside this, there’s Pavel Samokhvalov’s method, which could only have developed in an encyclopedically educated cinephile immersed in the subtle fabric of world cinema (meaning cinema as a fantasy substituting for reality). And from these threads of allusion, the artist weaves his art with the help of the spider of artificial intelligence. This could be a work with the theme of speed, which artists have explored throughout the twentieth century. But today, the theme of speed (of life, of cognition) is developing alongside the theme of nature and a reality existing independently of humans, such as forests, as in the works of Vladislav Efimov.
In the exhibition by photography professors at the School of Design at the Higher School of Economics, we see a diversity of simultaneously developing methods. In this case, methods are tools of thought that senior artists teach younger artists to master. They also teach them to use different methods depending on the task at hand.
Thus, within the simultaneously coexisting methods of communication between the artist and reality (the present), documentary photography can coexist (without losing its integrity and retaining its need for the present tense, as time demands documentary captivation). And alongside it, there are experimental methods of working with artificial intelligence, with which we travel in a time machine back in time—not literally to the Gothic or Renaissance era, but to a parallel reality of the past, which we are now constructing with the help of modern tools (as in the works of Arseny Meshcheryakov and the Agey Tomesh studio). And alongside these are works that explore the metaphor of photography as concealment (the works of Mitya Kharshak), and photography as a poetic allusion to our personal and cultural experience, as in the works of Paulina Stadnik. This diversity of methods coexists in contemporary photography, and we no longer construct a hierarchy of methods based on the principle of old and new (where the old is the foundation, and the new is elevated above it and placed higher in the pyramid of hierarchy, on the shoulders of the old). The coexistence of various methods, with their equal relevance, distinguishes our contemporary artists from those of the past. If we previously spoke of the actualization and de-actualization of certain media and movements, now we speak of entering an era of new syncretism.
We stand on the threshold of a synthetic fusion of our memory and artificial intelligence, but at this moment, «a second before» the onset of the era of fusion, we find ourselves in an era of syncretism (the coexistence and diversity of various methods). And at this special moment, different, but extremely important in their authorial interpretation, photographic methods are present separately.
