Liu Zheng

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Liu Zheng
Image Not Available for Liu Zheng

Liu Zheng

Chinese, born 1969
BiographyLiu Zheng was a child during China's Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. Only seven years old at its end, Liu remains clearly aware of the legacy of that cataclysmic period especially the role of orchestrated photography in political drama, propaganda, and social control. During the April 5th Movement of 1976, Chinese people took their own photographs of real events, for the first time since the unfiltered photojournalism of the 1930s. In fact, Liu began his career as a professional photographer and an editor of the journal, "New Photography"

Liu uses his camera on his countrymen to show their present individual and historical collective circumstances. For the epic two-part series, "The Chinese," Liu recorded his encounters with men and women from his own wide travels across China, and he also staged scenes drawn from past events. An especially important feature of Liu's work is its concern with the body, as individual, and body politic, often stripped naked or partially clothed, thus a subject revealed to the viewer and unprotected from any surrounding environment. Photography's twin elements of realism and fabrication allow Liu to bare not only his subjects but his own memory and understanding of history through invented semi-historical imagery. The artist has stated, "In the process of my photographing, I have come to understand many abstract concepts, such as truth and falsehood, emptiness and reality, and gradually the division of these concepts has lost meaning to me." F. Klapthor notes, 2015

Person TypeIndividual