Chu Chu(b.1975)
i) It's not it • Tool 04 ii) It's not it • Tool 05
inkjet print on fine art paper;
set of two
edition 3/4
executed in 2006-2007
each: 100 × 86 cm
(39 3/8 x 33 7/8 in)
EXHIBITED
The Alchemy of images - Third Lianzhou International Photo Festival, Lianzhou, Guangdong, 8 to 22 December 2007
It's not it - Chu Chu Photography Exhibition, Ofoto Gallery, Shanghai, 18 May to 13 June 2008
Group Exhibition of 18 photographer, 208 Gallery, Paris, 16 February to 20 March 2012
NOTE
1. Chu Chu won the Annual Wu Ji cutting-edge photographer awards with It's Not It series in 2010
2. Accompanied with certificate signed by artist

“When we first encounter a work of conceptual photography, we expect to understand its background and motivation in order to derive the work's deep scholarly meaning. However, this may be predetermined or influenced by the accompanying critical analysis of the work. It may be the case, as in many visual works, that the most indescribable elements are transmitted precisely by our intuition about shapes and forms. Through the original rules that guide the interpretation of intuitively-created visual artworks, these works disperse their own energy beyond the boundary of rationality.

In the past, Chuchu experimented the projection of slightly off-centred images of scenery onto a background screen, and also tried to create a ‘remote scene’ by generating numerous printed images. However, whilst skillfully integrating the tangible vessels in the foreground with this unified imaginary background space, the final image was generated by a single shot of a traditional large-format camera and a traditional gelatin-silver print developed by hand. In the final processing, Chuchu deliberately added the fun elements created by the silver particles and emphasized the unbroken overcast tone which is unique to the silver pigment image. Chu successfully minimized the audience's doubts on this non-existing space, where no challenge has been received so far. The purpose of Chuchu's concealment of this fictitious construction roughly coincides with her philosophy regarding the ’material object’ (’It’) provided in the series ‘It's Not It’, resembling the visible and invisible qualities of the matters in the real world.”
- Excerpt from The Intuitive Nature of the Imagined Regarding the works of Chuchu; Vessels within the series It's Not It by Jiao Jian, Professor of the Department of New Media, The China Institute of Fine Art.