Fang Tong (童方)
Fang Tong is an artist based in Vancouver Canada. She graduated from the Fine Arts Institute of Shanghai University and studied in France. She has had a successful career in painting, sculpture, design and other art fields. In recent years, she has been focusing on photography and has won major international photography awards. She has been published in VOGUE and other major domestic and foreign magazines. The photo ‘Swimming Pool’ won first prize in the Nikon International Photography Competition Category C in 2015. She was commissioned by Sony in 2013 as one of 20 photographers around the world to represent Sony’s camera phone.
Fang Tong is a cinematic style photographer, as a spectator of life. Her works are embedded with an implied narrative, which is left to the viewer to resolve over time with their own imagination. Reflecting her background in classical art, the photography is carefully planned to control the frame and the expression of details, giving her work an ethos of a painter. As a bystander, Fang Tong captures the potential that photography can embody pieces with an eternal quality, thereby creating a slightly fictional world that resembles reality but transcends consciousness. Fang Tong’s passion is for her work to border on the surreal, yet hold back enough to keep it firmly in the real world. Her photos provoke audiences to create a narrative out of cinematic pictures. There may be no clearly defined story behind the scene, but there is a strong mood and atmosphere throughout the whole image. The imaginary world is strangely familiar while the narrative arc takes audiences on a hyper-visual ride through people’s subconsciousness. She nurtures the balance between the real and the surreal that pulls her audiences into the world she created, but she also allows the audience to discover their own answers.
童方毕业于上海大学美术学院，曾在法国留学深造，长期活跃在绘画，雕塑，设计等艺术领域。近年来从事摄影创作，作品多次获得国际重要摄影奖项并发表于VOGUE,Yishu（典藏国际版）等国内外各大杂志。她曾是尼康国际摄影大赛的一等奖获得者。近年来作品不断在巴黎，上海，纽约，伦敦，意大利，布达佩斯，温哥华等各地展出。2019年，加拿大国家电视台CBC Arts对童方进行了跟拍专访。2020年，童方导演了一部力邦艺术港出品的微电影，并入围了多项国际电影节最佳短片奖项。
童方作为一位职业艺术家、摄影师，同时也是一个生活的旁观者。她擅长于拍摄情景人物电影式风格的作品，她喜欢在真实和超现实之间寻找平衡点，把她的观众带入她所营造的世界的同时，也让观众们寻找出他们自己的答案。童方擅长用现实主义的视觉语言来表达一种略带抽象和魔幻疏离的情感。她那充满电影代入感的拍摄方法，使观众游离于现实与非现实的边缘。
