My work in the past 7 years was wandering on street and took pictures of peoples passing by. I witnessed their bodies and tired expression on different faces, wondered where else they were going to and when they were going back to their hometowns. In the past 30 years the rapid developing speed of city which had never happened in the history of China before required much more immigrants to work in the city, so that many people moving back and forth like migratory birds. Almost everyone are on their road without yet being settled down, they left their hometown in order to make a living, but they couldn’t be embraced as real citizenship by city, they were like migratory birds scattering around the edge of city.
After I transfer thousands of hundreds pictures I took everyday to computer, I notice that these crowds in big density are just like ants, and I am one among them, too tiny to neglect. I hence start to bring this sensation to the trajectory of my work creation, I started to separate people’s figure from photos, removed and match up them, which totally changed the initial motivation of taking their pictures. I believe all things are part of life, I cut off one segment of life and reshape it, and after numerous displacement and adding-up, the meaning of initial timing and places totally disappeared. And, I make a new scenery that differs from reality with these figures and things placed under my own logical order, and from which, I obtain a new perspective of seeing reality. This explains how I made my work things series and they series in 2006.
My creation of work is all about people. I deeply understand Chinese people’s survival surroundings under social hierarchy. My work pyramid is a metaphor of this understanding. In the recent years, with more and more people been captured in my camera, I feel that people in Chinese society are like ants, the stronger sense of suppression and depression we experience, the harder struggling we are. Under this sense of desperation, the original structure of my work is looming and enter into a more abstracted way. In which, people are characterized as vanished figure, and degraded as a medium of viewing. I think it speaks well of the real situation of being a Chinese.
Besides, everyone I encountered is a mirror of my own, I see we ourselves in the mirror. That’s why I name the recent completed work we and its theme is us.
Text by Zhang Bojun
Image: © Zhang Bojun