Emily and Shi Guobin, Guangzhou, 2009
Zhang Hai'er
张海儿
Production date
2009
Object Detail
Media
digital C-type print
Measurements
100 x 67 cm
Notes
Emily and Shi Guobin, Guangzhou 2009 (2009), a photograph with the alternative title Deux Garçons sur le Canapé (Two Boys on the Couch), depicts ‘Emily’ cuddling with her friend. One boy is dressed in a flowered qipao, the other in a raincoat over underwear and stockings. Their long legs and stiletto-shod feet stretch into the foreground – the image is both awkward and tender. 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
2014.119