Trademarked registered (Li Li Chung)
Founder: Li Li Chung
Founder’s Statement
Exactly Foundation is about thinking. Thinking about what? Life and Living.
The challenge is that things are not so straightforward or obvious; sometimes “we just couldn’t cope”.1 We all say that it is best to think before we speak but we often act without thinking. Our thinking can be circular: we judge based on what we know such that we just bounce off from where we were. Through photographer-artists’ practices, could they (photographers) “… signal the future, their photographs informed by some deeper, darker narratives guided by their outsiders’ eyes. From where we are now standing – and looking – these are the decisive moments … ”2 ? How then to not miss those moments?
Can we, as people living in a community, change? Exactly Foundation presents opportunities where one man’s iron sharpens another, where a photographer-artist could perhaps suggest a new way of looking. A winning photograph could represent a “turning point” and engage others beyond photographers though it may not seem so initially. It can be just “a daily life moment” and not a stimulus “to go see the exotic.” 3
Exactly Foundation’s ideal outcome is when an Exactly guest-viewer says years later: “I remember our chat. I love that photograph. I now have a print of it and every time I look at it, I remember our discussion with the photographer over dinner. I think I see better. I listen better. I speak better. My soul is happy, I’m thinking.”
Residency
Click here to find out more about our Residency.
1 Private conversation with Pakistani art historian Salima Hashmi on the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition. 31st January 2015, Delhi
2 Sean O’Hagan, “Cartier-Bresson’s classic is back – but his Decisive Moment has passed” The Guardian, 23rd December 2014
3 James Estrin, “A Subtle Moment
Becomes the World
Press Photo of the Year”,
The New York Times, 12th February 2015. http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/a-subtle-moment-becomes-the-world-press-photo-of-the-year/?_r=0