Zhang Zhidong explores gender identity in a context of China’s repression of homosexuality. He creates worlds that transpose his friends and family into an alternative, subversive reality, in doing so denouncing the constraints of a heteronormative system.
As the artist states: "When I was thinking of the working title for the series, I really didn't know how to encapsulate what I was trying to say. Often, I find language so limiting compared to visual language. When I looked at the images I made, I found them to be the opposite of natural. Something that didn’t fit the norm. The ideas that I am trying to express in these photographs are about proximity to an alternative reality, one that exists outside of the real. It's my own imagination; my own narrative of an almost utopian world without all those hierarchies, hegemonic masculinity, and patriarchal structure. I'm saying: this is natural — why would it not be? The word impersonation is about how photography is kind of a performance; impersonating some sort of reality. I'm also channeling this queer theory of how gender is just, you know, a social construct. Placing the words ‘natural’ and ‘impersonation’ together has its own conflict. I often juxtapose elements that don’t really fit together at all. But then, why can't they fit together? Why do we have all these rules to limit our imagination? The series investigates that."
Zhang Zhidong is originally from Hunan Province and graduated from Central South University in Changsha with a degree in Applied Mathematics. He continued his studies in the United States and has a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He lives and works in Boston (United States).
