ZHOU YANG                

ZHOU Yang is an artist using the medium of photography. She believes in photography’s ability to reveal the unseen and the invisible. Her research and practice explore themes of memory, cultural heritage and myths, and has been exhibited in major photo festivals in China in the past decade, such as Lianzhoufoto, Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, and Image of Silk Road Photography Biennale of Tianshui. 
 

ARTIST STATEMENT: FAËRIE

The project "Faërie"  seeks to explore the traditional Chinese literati gardens with photography. As renowned scholars James Cahill, Liu Shanshan and Huang Xiao wrote in Garden Painting in Old China, spending a day in the Garden while a thousand years could have passed outside, and therefore the Garden is a Faërie within the real world. The intellectuals who built them were creators of a Secondary World, in the same way, as English philologist and writer J. R. R. Tolkien argued, that fairy-story authors create the Faërie realm. In such realms our ultimate desire could be fulfilled: Escape from Death. 
Photography as a medium is associated with the act of revealing as well as creating. In the gardens, I try to transform the noisy tourist attractions that the gardens have become today into images of mysterious realm, each on one single negative. The photographic images help us to look beyond the material world and find this hidden Faërie, beautiful but illusive, forever an object of human desire. The truth claim still associated with analog photography transforms my creation into belief of such Faërie’s existence. When the setting sun shines upon the lotus flower in the middle of the lake or when the goldfish disappears into the twilight depth, viewers could look beyond the material world and find the hidden Faërie.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS & EXPERIENCE: 

6th June-5th July, 2024: Project Faërie was included in ‘Birmingham Creates: the Open’ outdoor group exhibition at Victoria Square, city centre of Birmingham

2nd-30th June, 2024: Project Faërie was included in group exhibition ‘Unlocked Landscape’ at Gallery @ 12, Antwerp, Belgium, as part of the Antwerp Design Week

28th Oct-13th Nov, 2022: Project Sites of Myths was exhibited in Shanghai International Photography Exhibition

28th Dec 2021-16th Jan 2022: Project Faërie was selected in the 4th National Youth Photography Festival and exhibited in the Capital Museum in Beijing

26th Sep-1st Oct, 2021: Project Faërie was selected in group exhibition ‘Chinese Landscape’ (Season V), exhibiting at The 9th Dali International Photography Exhibition

Nov 23rd, 2018-Jan 3rd, 2019: Project Faërie was included in group exhibition FLUCTUATION and exhibited at Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, and was nominated for the Madame Figaro Female Photographer Award

WORKS [ Selection ]

All the works can be purchased here