Lune Violette, Guangzhou, 2006
Zhang Hai'er
张海儿
Production date
2006
Object Detail
Media
digital C-type print
Measurements
100 x 67 cm
Notes
Lune Violette, Guangzhou 2006 (2006) shows Lune Violette gazing wistfully at the camera from heavily-kohled eyes, lost in her own thoughts. Zhang’s lighting technique creates a moody chiaroscuro which highlights his subject’s glossy red lips, her shiny satin bra revealed through a transparent shirt, and the flower in her hair. Zhang Hai’er is interested in Susan Sontag’s notion, explained in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, that all photographs are to some extent a memento mori: ‘To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.’ Zhang’s closely observed and sympathetic photographs possess an unmistakeable melancholia. With their thick make-up, curled wigs and padded bras, his subjects assert their presence as individuals with their own desires and ambitions, seeking beauty and looking for love. Yet, in the end, they live in a liminal, shadowy world of fantasy and role-play: the unseen presence in all these photographs, just as in Manet’s painting of the Parisian courtesan, Olympia, is the absent male lover.
Accession number
2014.116