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) depicts one of Zhang Hai’er’s favourite models. She reclines rather stiffly across a sofa covered with a bedsheet, dressed in white knee-high boots and a tiny transparent shirt over white underwear, an image that somehow exudes pathos rather than sexiness. A close-up portrait of Lune Violette shot on the same day shows her gazing wistfully at the camera from heavily-kohled eyes, lost in her own thoughts. 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
2014.117