The Chinese

Liu Zheng
The Chinese

Photographs: Liu Zheng

Publisher: Dragon Work Chinese Photo

30 pages

Pictures: 30

Year: 2000

Price: 150 €

Comments: Portfolio of 30 b&w photographs in illustrated cardboard case, 28,4 x 28,4 cm. First edition. In very good condition, other than a folding mark on the case's flap. Rare portfolio published before the Steidl monograph.

"The importance of Liu Zheng's works is that his photos "retain the remote and past body impulse, the change of consciousness and the sentimental desire becoming as the body image". Therefore, these works have become the image fossils that conserve various strange phenomena above one's head in China's historic cultures and current reality. When these unshapely images and phenomena present before his camera, I believe, he converts them from the images into the image fossils, in order not only for saving his fear of the long history and culture to some degree, but also for reshaping the history by means of taking photos. More importantly he is to make his photos become his image-carried response to the reality and the future with all his heart and soul. And "The Chinese" is rightly the gift that he endows to the present and the future."

- Gu Zheng

In the photographic series The Chinese, Liu Zheng was prompted by his distrust of the highly tendentious official version of history to create his own history, in the form of images. Liu’s development as an artist coincided with the ‘New Documentary’ generation and its trends: an approach distinguished by a more conceptual, more experimental mode of expression. The photographer’s interest shifted away from formal reporting and toward a more personal and unsparing view of China’s population and their living conditions. The fragile, decaying, unforgettably displayed, defiant bodies in his photographs are witnesses to shifting power structures. They are like human memorials to China’s recent history—and to China’s declining ancient traditions, which Liu Zheng’s photos protect from being forgotten amid all this rapid change.