Weekend Portfolio: Zhidong Zhang
Image and Text by Zhidong Zhang
I see my practice as manifestations of vulnerability, defiance, and joy. My work explores intersections of gender, identity construction, and visual representations. I’m fascinated by the potentiality that queerness can be manifested, subverted, or even recontextualized via visual semiotics and representations. Through staged portraits of close friends, family members, and still life made with objects I collected from thrift stores, I found myself interested less in the subjects themselves than the referential tableaux and the representational system that frame them. As a queer person raised in a traditional Chinese family, the expression of true identity becomes a luxury, or even a taboo. Therefore in a lot of ways, this body of work invites me to confront and negotiate with my own upbringing, through an active act of recognition and reconfiguration against a suppressed societal and familial backdrop. It encourages me to see beyond what the dominant culture chooses to make visible and accessible, and challenges the rigid and stereotypical codes of identity construction, gender roles, and traditional cultural values in my culture. As a mere attempt as an image maker and a romantic, these photographs envision a queer futurity beyond my imagination, and mimics a proximity to an alternative reality that could not otherwise exists in the present.
Biography:
Zhidong Zhang (b. Hunan, China) is a Chinese photographer currently based in Boston. He received an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Informed by his upbringing from a conservative Chinese family as a queer person, Zhidong’s work explores the intersection of representation, identity construction, and the role of imagery in contemporary culture. Zhidong’s work has been exhibited internationally including SPACE Gallery, Centre régional de la photographie, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and has appeared in i-D Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Photoworks, Der Greif, BOOOOOOOM, among others. Most recently, he’s a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and a finalist for the Robert Giard Grant. He was an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA, and will be attending the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture this summer.
To view more of Zhidong Zhang’s work, visit his website or instagram.
