This Face

Xu Yong
This Face

Photographs: Xu Yong

Publisher: Culture of China Publication

549 pages

Year: 2011

ISBN: 978-988-19625-7-7

Price: 480 €

Comments: Hardcover under illustrated dust jacket, 19,5 x 15 cm, color photographs. First edition. Very rare. In very good condition, other than some light scratches on the cover (see pictures). and a small trace at the end of the book which doesn't affect the photographs. RARE!

"Five hundred-plus portrait photographs showing a female face, sometimes wearing make-up, sometimes not; at first glance they seem unrelated, but they are all of a young woman called Zi U, a chinese sex worker".

The photographer, Xu Yong, has made a close-up record of Zi U's face at different times on one day, beginning the moment she gets up right through until her day is over. A sex worker's face is both important as a front that draws in clients and a mask for hiding her true identity. The photographs that Xu Yong has taken of this face through a single day are combined with Zi U's own diary describing her life that day; the pair have collaborated in a work that adroitly combines text and image.

This work of course makes us think of a previous collaborative piece by Xu Yong and a sex worker called Yu Na, Solution Scheme; this too combined images with a self-description by the subject. The difference between the two works is that the earlier piece is a posed work by someone who is displaying her body in photographs as a way of getting out of sex work; while this new piece is the photographic record of the face of a woman who intends to use sex work to make money. Setting aside for now any moral judgements of these two works by Xu Yong, they both allow us a glimpse of the reality lived by sex workers in China. Sex work is a global industry.

It is to be found everywhere in both developing and developed nations, and in some places it has become a special feature of the tourist trade. After the Chinese Communist Party established the People's Republic in 1949 there was a period when sex work was strictly outlawed; today, it has grown to become an enormous industry in China. Be it in major metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, or in distant Shigatse in Tibet or right down in the countryside, there are sex workers in the hotels, boarding houses, bars, karaoke parlours, hairdressers, bathhouses and massage parlours. Out on the streets or hidden away in private clubs and fancy apartments, there too we find fashionably-dressed sex workers plying their trade. There have even been complaints lodged with the authorities concerning sex workers touting for business in ordinary residential neighbourhoods and outside primary schools. Although the prevailing social moral climate strongly condemns sex work, we are compelled to accept the reality that it is widespread. If we ignore this reality there will be no chance of appropriate social management of sex workers, so driving them underground into the arms of organised crime, and depriving them of their legitimate rights.

Today in China we have on the one hand the government implementing regular crackdowns on prostitution followed by periods of relative tolerance; and on the other, the continued ubiquity of sex work. This bizarre social situation has led to sex work being a grey industry that everyone in China is aware of, yet left sex workers as an at-risk group unable to work openly. That Xu Yong has been able to persuade sex workers to take part in publicly exhibited art works, works that stand as rare testimony of the social reality of our times and provide a direct glimpse of human nature, is itself a work of courage and extraordinary significance.

When, through Xu Yong's art, we get a glimpse of Zi U's hidden life of sex work, we are also able to see how an actual Chinese woman looks at and copes with the world we live in. Zi U's face is both a mirror reflecting her hidden world and a true record of the desire in contemporary Chinese life. Whether you like it or not, this is one true face of the society we live in. Xu Yong exposes hidden aspects of our society, expressing his social observations through the medium of art, without adding any commentary or critique, then presenting them to us, leaving each of us to seek out solutions to this social problem for ourselves.

-Shu Yang, 2011