Zhuo Jie Bound by Qiao Mei, Guangzhou, 2005
Zhang Hai'er
张海儿
Production date
2005
Object Detail
Media
digital C-type print
Measurements
100 x 67 cm
Notes
Zhang Hai’er spent years documenting moments in the lives of men who dress as women in Guangzhou, Dongguan and Beijing. His subjects occupy a shadowy half-world in a subculture that is still despised and feared by mainstream Chinese society. His theme in these photographs is desire – sexual desire, the desire to be other than what the world sees, and the desire to be loved and accepted. Here, two of his muses, Zhuo Jie and Qiao Mei, engage in Kinbaku, a Japanese bondage practice in which a person is tied with thin ropes of jute or hemp and suspended aesthetically (the term often applied to this practice, Shibari, is thought to be a western misuse of the Japanese verb meaning ‘to tie decoratively’ – although these terms are often used interchangeably). The two protagonists in this photograph are tightly framed in what appears to be a tiny bathroom, complete with plastic shower curtain and hanging dressing gowns: the mise en scène is distinctly unglamorous. Zhuo Jie is tightly bound and suspended by a system of ropes and pulleys, hanging over a sheet of cheap imitation parquet vinyl flooring. Qiao Mei enters the frame from the right, wearing crumpled satin pyjamas and shod in Burberry ballet flats. Zhang Hai’er’s photograph deliberately represents the sexual fetish within the absolute ordinariness of the everyday, suggesting there is in fact no distinction.
Accession number
2014.114