Vermilion Street

In “Vermilion Street”, Torsten Schumann condenses his fragmentary views of urban life in China into diptychs, using the found paradoxes and absurdities of our contemporary life to also question the evidential value of photographs.

Vermilion Street   朱雀的困惑

For Torsten Schumann, the urban environment is an inexhaustible repository of enigmas, confusions, harmonies and incongruities.
With subtle humour and an absurdist’s disposition, the artist captures the fragments of contemporary life in which people, actions, objects, and environments momentarily coalesce to form suggestive inner logics of paradox, oddity and interconnection.
This is particularly apparent in his current series Vermilion Street, created in China between 2020 and 2025. This series of decontextualised scenes from urban life - presented as formally and conceptually-linked diptychs - intertwine with and amplify both their adjacents and the images that precede and follow them, merging to become a complex, montaged whole in which narrative, plausibility and significance are playfully teased out and short-circuited.
It is precisely by dissolving this boundary between appearance and reality that Schumann creates a photographic imagery that evokes a healthy skepticism towards the medium’s supposed evidentiary functions, while enacting an empathetic curiosity for the particular and amusing in the unspectacular and everyday. In turn, this approach characterizes the artist’s stance toward all political, cultural and ideological boundaries encountered in his global practice and lifestyle.