Studio Mobile

Maleonn (1972)

Memory, aspiration, and performed identity in contemporary China, examined through participant-directed staged portraits in a mobile studio.

Description

Studio Mobile (Chinese: 移动照相馆) by Maleonn brought a traveling portrait studio to 35 Chinese cities during a ten-month journey in 2012, creating free, staged portraits with 1,600 participants. The project grew from the threatened demolition of the artist's Shanghai studio and expanded his stationary My Photo Studio. Drawing on his collection of historical Chinese studio portraits, Maleonn sought to restore the ceremony of sitting for a photograph while moving art beyond gallery walls and into everyday social exchange.

This older studio ritual became a framework for examining memory, aspiration, and performed identity at a time when digital photography was making image production increasingly routine. Participants could propose roles, stories, or memories they wanted their portraits to represent. Maleonn and his team developed these ideas into staged scenes, sometimes constructing props and scenery specifically for them. Artists, workers, students, civil servants, families, and children could imagine alternate selves or reconstruct local and personal memories. Through a dedicated account on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, Maleonn connected with prospective participants across the country and arranged portrait sessions.

The portraits place individuals and groups before red curtains, painted backdrops, and fabricated scenery. Retro or exaggerated costumes, comic hats, theatrical poses, and roles ranging from pilots and soldiers to magicians and superheroes create a colorful, theatrical vocabulary. The mood combines play, nostalgia, and the formality of a studio sitting.

A second-hand truck and van carried roughly 2.5 tonnes of lights, costumes, props, printers, and a generator, allowing the studio to operate in varied interiors and places without mains power. Maleonn reported avoiding Photoshop and produced effects through physical construction, lighting, and performance. Prints were made, trimmed, mounted, stamped, signed, and given to participants on site, making material exchange central to the work.

A preliminary participatory exhibition at 18 Gallery, Shanghai, in 2011–2012 introduced the project before its national journey. The resulting photographs were subsequently exhibited at Magda Danysz Gallery in Shanghai in 2013 and Paris in 2014. For a 2013 exhibition in Swansea, Wales, Maleonn created new staged portraits of local participants in their homes, using costumes and props. The Chinese photobook, published in 2013, assembled 243 photographs with travel records and participant letters. Recognitions included the 2013 New Vision Annual Art Project Award and a 2017 A' Design Silver Award in Photography. In 2024, the project formed the concluding dedicated section of Shanghai: City of Photography, 1910s-2020s, placing it within a broader account of urban memory and social representation.

Behind the work

When demolition threatened Maleonn's Shanghai studio, he decided to take it on the road rather than store its sets and props. He initially envisioned a container truck, but the cost of operating it exceeded his budget, so he opted for a second-hand four-ton truck. He fitted it with metal shelving and lined the floor with felt and rubber to protect the lights from vibration during long drives. Rivets and screws secured the equipment, including a large generator. Maleonn described the truck as resembling a stage when opened.

At each stop, the crew unloaded roughly 2.5 tonnes of material, built the set, met the sitters, photographed them, printed their pictures, repacked the truck, and moved on. Props and sets repeatedly broke under this daily loading cycle, so repairs became part of the journey.

The original plan was to hang a backdrop from the truck and work outdoors, but winter cold and summer heat made that unworkable. The team instead relied on local contacts to find interiors, ideally with electricity, ceilings above 3.5 metres, and more than 100 square metres of space. The smallest documented venue was a 15-square-metre independent bookshop in Xining, where Maleonn used an ultra-wide-angle lens. Other temporary studios included an unfinished building in Hohhot and a museum in Guangzhou.

Portraits were finished and handed over on the spot: while Maleonn photographed, a printer ran at a nearby table, another team member trimmed the print, and it could then be mounted, enclosed in an envelope, stamped, signed, and given to its sitter.

Quotes by the photographer

"There is a bewildered and sad relationship between photography and life… only a desire to make things just a little better than real life."

"Different people come to me; I photograph them, tell them a role, a story, and let them perform it."

"I want my work to be useful—to bring joy and a sense of happiness to the world and to people."

"Let ordinary people become stars."

"In my earlier works, I was the leader: I presented my ideas, and everyone else was my actor; I was the absolute director. But this time, the protagonists have become the friends I photograph, and I am merely someone standing behind the scenes, recording images for them."

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