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HONG KONG SAR, CHINA
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CLIENTS
Swire Pacific, Alain Mikli, Coach, Hermes, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Cathay Pacific Airways, Adidas, HSBC, Peninsula Hotels, Mandarin Oriental, Frame, Mark, Giorgio Armani, Vogue, Vogue Living Australia, Forbes, Das Magazin, Taschen, Qvest, Wallpaper.
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AWARDS
2010 - 2011 CREATIVITY AWARDS INTERNATIONAL (Editorial Design, Single Spread, GOLD AWARD)
2010 SOPA AWARDS (Excellence in Feature Photography - WINNER)
2009 HASSELBLAD MASTERS AWARDS (ARCHITECTURE - FINALIST)
2009 ASSOCIATION OF PHOTOGRAPHERS AWARDS (UK) (LOCATION PORTRAITURE - FINALIST)
2008 TAYLOR WESSING PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PRIZE exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery, London.
BIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHY
Virgile Simon Bertrand is a French photographer who has been based in Asia since the late 1990s. Virgile studied Applied Arts at Ecole Boulle (1988 - 1991, Paris), Graphic Design at Ecole Duperre (Paris) and Photography at the Ecole Nationale de la Photographie (1993, Arles). Virgile began his career assisting Magnum photographer Abbas and working as a photographer for the Opera National de Paris. Bertrand's interest in the relationship between the individual, space and scale permeates both his fine art photography and his commercial work and began with his first major projects for the Opera and for Donald Byrd/The Group in New York. After completing his National Service at the Service Photographique des Armees, Virgile moved to Asia, establishing a successful commercial practice. His work has been commissioned by architects such as Zaha Hadid Architects, Heatherwick Studio, Cesar Pelli, Aedas, RMJM and published in magazines such as Qvest, Interni, ID, Vogue, Forbes, Wallpaper, Intramuros and Mark.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
30LX
2P CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY
G/F, 6-20 Po Tuck Street
Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong
From 14 January 2011 until 27 February 2011
30 lx or ˜30 lux™ is the minimum light intensity required by the Buildings Department'™s Code of Practice for the Provision of Means of Escape. Constructed using low cost materials, devoid of any ornamentation, these compulsory means of escape are perhaps the purest examples of entropic architecture. Virgile Simon Bertrand'™s photographic studies draw attention to an inadvertent phenomenon, how despite the common genesis of these architectural features, each offers subtle but surprising structural variations that give rise to an elegantly minimal formal vocabulary.
SIDEWARD NARRATION
1A SPACE
Unit 14, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road,
To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, Hong Kong
From 6 Mar 2010 until 20 April 2010
Participating Artists: Annie Wan, Enoch Cheung, Jaffa Lam, Lam Wai Kit, Thomas Choi, Virgile Simon Bertrand
Sideward Narration is a story-telling process of 6 artists through photography, sculpture, installation, painting and video. This is to echo with the Art Publication exhibition in the venue. In œArt Publication exhibition, we are trying to study the collaboration and interrelation between art and publication with our displayed books, a forum, a talk and a reading club. While in Sideward Narration, artists are exploring a form of narration other then text and publication. Publication may be seen as a form of art. On the other hand, we may discover the delicate relations of the works by these artists and the characteristics of art publication.
PROXEMICS: Photographs by Virgile Simon Bertrand
Music by James Devane and Christopher Knight
ARTISTREE, 1/F Cornwall House, Taikoo Place
Hong Kong, China
From 21 October until 18 November 2009
Virgile Simon Bertrand'™s photographs of people and places consider how we perceive the space around us. The term proxemics was first created by anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his work The Hidden Dimension™ and describes how space communicates the unspoken rules of human relationships. Hall relates in detail how the distances people impose between themselves and others fall within precise measurable limits and indicate whether those relationships are intimate, personal, social or public. The portraits and architectural photographs in the exhibition show how differently people behave within these invisible zones, depending on their relationship to the person next to them or to the space around them.
If Hall's work Proxemics examines the perception of space using research data and documentation, Gaston Bachelard'™s Poetics of Space describes how emotion and imagination shape our perceptions of space:
It is a strange situation. The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty: into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory.
The spaces described by Bachelard change constantly with the imagination, weightless places, untouched by the rules of geometry or logic. These two different interpretations of space from Hall and Bachelard can also be applied to the photography of Virgile Simon Bertrand. Whilst each photograph is a document of something that is physical and real, his images move with ease between the rational and the poetic, refusing to be limited, and possessing the same ability to transport the viewer between time, dream and memory.
An enclosed space takes the shape of what physically surrounds it. Within the vast exhibition space itself, the physical structures built for the photographs are intended to suggest these unspoken rules of human relationships, replicating and allowing the visitor to experience as far as possible, the intimate, personal, social and public distances between themselves and the photographs. The installation also considers how sound can alter our perception of space and can fill and define a space using the audio textures created by American artists James Devane and Christopher Knight.
Davina Lee, Curator
TAYLOR WESSING PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PRIZE EXHIBITION
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
London, United Kingdom
6 November 2008 until 15 February 2009
Virgile Simon Bertrand's photographic portrait of Chinese contemporary artist Yin Xiu Zhen has been selected for exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London for the 2008 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize Exhibition and will tour two other venues in the United Kingdom.
DISTANCE DECAY: photographs by Anthony Lam, Dinu Li, Virgile Simon Bertrand
DIORAMA
Arles, France
8 - 19 July 2009
˜Distance decay™ is a geographical term used to describe how distance affects cultural and spatial interaction. In essence, the further way things are, the less we are supposed to interact with them. The photographs in the exhibition recount the human consequences of distance decay, encompassing the extremes, complexities and contradictions surrounding the term, from the closely observed monochrome depictions of contemporary East London where Anthony Lam has lived since childhood, Dinu Li's colour photographs of places known through the memories and experiences of his mother, to Virgile Simon Bertrand'™s portraits of a generation of young men and women from Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated areas of the world.
ESPACE LIMINAL
LE MONITEUR
Paris Odeon et Paris Cite de l'™Architecture
Paris, France
From 4 September 2008 until 29 October 2008
Virgile Simon Bertrand's large format photographs draw the viewer into the paradoxical realm of the liminal space. These physical locations can be visited, touched, pinpointed on a map or even be destroyed, but they are also places of ambiguity and transition, places which exist at the edge of perception. Taken over a period of three years, Bertrand’s photographs render the familiar unfamiliar, reducing structures to their fundamental forms and reinterpreting those structures. Using a narrow palette of monochrome tones and colours so subtle as to be barely perceptible, Bertrand'™s ˜Liminal Spaces reveal the tenuous relationship between clarity and abstraction, encouraging what he describes as ˜a floating level of perception™ within the viewer.