UP Gallery is pleased to present Parallel Gazes: East, West, and In Between, featuring works by Arthur Ou and Ronghui Chen—two artists of Asian heritage connected through the photographic lineage of Yale University’s MFA program. Their practices explore cultural dissonance and the complexities of cross-cultural experience. The works on view are exhibited in Paris for the first time, traversing the intersections of identity, memory, and place, and bridging Eastern and Western visual languages through conceptually nuanced and visually compelling approaches.

In Modern Shanghai, Ronghui Chen investigates the sociocultural dynamics of migration in China’s most modern metropolis. Using Shanghai’s “Hukou” household registration system as a conceptual anchor, Chen turns his lens toward the city’s outer subway rings, where migrants—like himself—live between belonging and displacement. These peripheral communities embody what Chen calls “the land of in-between”: spaces suspended between urban aspiration and rural return, documenting a new social landscape of modern China.

Chen’s Yosemite series reinterprets a site deeply ingrained in the Western photographic canon. Drawing inspiration from Zhang Daqian’s ink-splash landscapes, Chen merges Eastern aesthetics with a symbol of American photographic tradition. By 3D-printing Yosemite’s terrain and splashing ink across the models, he reconstructs the landscape in vibrant colour, offering an East Asian vision of a place immortalised by Ansel Adams.

Arthur Ou’s To Preserve, To Elevate, To Cancel draws from the German philosophical term “Aufheben,” with its threefold meaning: to preserve, to elevate, and to cancel. Reflecting on his family’s twenty-year immigrant history in the United States, Ou examines how photography functions as both preservation and transformation—how the act of recording memory elevates certain moments while simultaneously erasing others. Through layered photographic interventions, Ou meditates on history, identity, and the paradox of what endures.

Together, Chen and Ou’s works form a dialogue on belonging, transformation, and the evolving visual narratives that emerge between East and West.