Sian 21-13A
Signed Print

This signed photographic print by British artist David Hockney was issued in 1981. Like the prints Wuxi 40-12, Wuxi 45-7 and Sian 15-23, Sian 21-13A was created during a long visit the artist took to China in the same year. During his trip, Hockney was accompanied by the likes of English writer and poet, Stephen Spender, and friend, onetime partner and curator, Gregory Evans. China saw Hockney mark a decided return to one of his favourite technologies – the camera – the virtues of which he had often praised. Despite his love for the medium, Hockney had often derided the camera – and the photograph – as being too unifocal, too simplistic, and a simply ‘lazy’ medium. Turning the medium on its head, during the 1970s Hockney sought to repurpose the camera, producing composite images he named ‘joiners’. Many of these works appear in the artist’s Photo Collages series. In this image we can perceive a sense of Hockney’s interest in the natural world, a fascination that permeates many other of his works, from the more recent iPad drawings of The Yosemite Suite all the way back to other series such as The Weather Series and Some More New Prints.