China’s Underground Nightclub Life Through the Lens of Sergey Melnitchenko

Description

In 2015, 2017 Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award-winner Sergey Melnitchenko (b. 1991) worked in China as a nightclub dancer. During this time, he snapped a body of both documentary and conceptual art photography.

From Dusk Till Dawn, his first exhibition in Asia, features a selection of images taken between 2015 to 2017. Melnitchenko’s 77 black-and-white images portray Chinese society from the intimate perspective of an outsider. What captured the eye of the photographer were not the glamorous or materialistic side of a fast growing economic power, but the fleeting moments of the everyday life of its common people.

Conversely, his stint as a nightclub dancer allowed Melnitchenko to capture people as ‘one of them’: his candid, backstage images the invisible and often the harsh reality of working life inside the nightclub. As Melnitchenko puts it, ‘there’s no falsehood—it’s not a scene, it’s their everyday life, our life, or rather mine.’ The exhibition features eleven colour images from this award-winning series.