For Torsten Schumann, the urban environment is an inexhaustible repository of enigmas and confusions. With subtle humour and an absurdist’s disposition, the artist captures the fragments of contemporary life in which people, actions and objects momentarily coalesce to form suggestive inner logics of paradox, oddity and interconnection. This is particularly apparent in his current series Vermilion Confusion, China 2020 – 2022, of decontextualised scenes from urban life - presented as formally and conceptually-linked diptychs - intertwine with and amplify both their adjacents and the images that precede and follow them, merging to become a complex, montaged whole in which narrative, plausibility and significance are playfully teased out and short-circuited. It is precisely by dissolving this boundary between appearance and reality that Schumann creates a photographic imagery that evokes a healthy skepticism towards the medium’s supposed evidentiary functions. Text: Wolfgang Zurborn

Am I dreaming? Or is it a reality? Or can I not always properly separate the two? That's how it feels to me, at least in part, after I traveled into the unknown in early 2020. Suddenly, from the other side of the "world", I now continue to think about what was familiar to me before, and at the same time, I let myself get involved with my environment in China, which is new, exciting and still foreign to me. Although I feel in different places as well as at different times in each case a different resonance of my environment, this is for me at the latest then no longer relevant at all when everything connects in my dreams. Torpor (lat. torpeur) is a dream-like, physically inactive state. By lowering their body temperature and metabolic rate, animals use torpor to conserve energy. It is possible that I, too, sometimes find myself in torpor, the floating, dream-like waking-sleeping state.