Chily, Golden Bridge Hotel, Guangzhou
Zhang Hai'er
张海儿
Production date
2005
Object Detail
Media
digital C-type print
Measurements
100 x 67 cm
Notes
One of the first photographers to embrace new approaches to documentary photography in China in the post-Mao period, Zhang Hai’er is best known for images of an urban demi-monde that is rarely depicted in Chinese contemporary art or popular culture. Chinese photography in the 1990s was often performative (in many cases symbiotic with performance art in experimental artists’ enclaves in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou) and often centred on the body, in a reaction against the puritanism of the Mao years. Photographers such as Zhang Hai’er sought subjects that revealed private and intimate milieus removed from the control and surveillance of the state. In the late 1980s and 1990s his series of moodily-lit, closely-cropped photographs of Guangzhou sex workers and cross-dressers reveal a painter’s understanding of light and form. We sense that both photographer and subject are involved in a performance, a theatrical pact between equals. These images of half-dressed women in domestic settings do something more interesting and more complicated than merely objectify Zhang’s subjects. They meet our gaze in a way that challenges its implied voyeurism; they are at once vulnerable and confident of their sexual power and selfhood. In 2004 Zhang changed from mostly black and white to colour photography, and from mostly film to digital processes, and he began to photograph men in Guangzhou and Dongguan who dressed as women. Posed – sometimes provocatively, sometimes awkwardly – in tawdry hotel rooms, or in tiny spaces against draped backdrops of sheets or bedspreads, they gaze directly at the camera, or just beyond it.
Accession number
2014.122