Exception Holiday - Xueling Chen

‘There was plenty of time, though nobody knew quite how much.’

In Exception Holiday, Xueling Chen follows a group of friends on the verge of graduation, close to the end of one way of living and unsure what comes next. Developed during a period of moving between cities, the series finds them suspended between the familiarity of student life and the expectation of becoming somebody. For a while, the question can wait.

Photographed with a compact CCD camera, the work records the friendships and emotional fluctuations of this unsettled time. Direct flash and saturated colour give the images an immediacy that holds freedom and vulnerability close together. Chen photographs from within this shared experience, attentive to the ways people make a place for themselves in one another’s lives, even as their surroundings change.

The Chinese title, 例外假期, carries an echo of 例假, bringing the body’s rhythms into the idea of a holiday. This is a pause that makes room for rest, sensitivity and uncertainty. Across the series, being together becomes a temporary kind of shelter. There will be decisions to make, places to leave and other versions of themselves to become. For now, they are here.