Zhidong Zhang was born in 1996 in Hunan and is a Chinese artist based in Boston, MA. He is currently attending the second year of studies at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Through his projects, he investigates how the relationship between the photographer, the subject, and the observer can be created. The matters he tackles are about identity, representation, the role of the imagery in contemporary culture and how visual manifestations of desire codify sexual identities and practices.
About ‘Natural Impersonation’ – words by Zhidong Zhang:
This body of work, titled ‘Natural Impersonation’, tampers with the construction of sexuality and identity in relation to the unyielding repression of homosexuality in China where queer identities, same-sex romantic and sexual discourses are still outside the boundaries of what deemed acceptable.
Incorporating still life of found objects with portraits of my friends and family members, I construct scenes of desire, humor, trauma, fetish, and violence through the exploration of sentimentality, Asian bodies and cultural language. Those are deeply rooted in the specificity of my experience as a “closeted” gay man. And as a way of re-examining queer invisibility and claiming queer agency within such a heteronormative and patriarchal society, I allow perverse moments coalesce into gender performances which infiltrate and destabilize rigid and stereotypical codes of gender, sexuality, identification, and normality in Asian culture.
Within the performative and queer context, the chasm between rhetoric and reality permits those images to configure as a manufactured world where the patriarchal and phallocentric nature of society is dismantled, and where queer identities are embraced and celebrated without struggling to masquerade for the fear of societal and cultural consequences.
