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Zheng Guogu’s ideas have often been born out of a balance between commitment to his hometown, engagement in global contemporary art, and his interest in how consumer culture has impacted Chinese traditions.
Zheng Guogu 郑国谷
“I always fashion myself as a member of the opposition party. I have dissenting views of painting, calligraphy, photography, architecture, even performance. So I end up forever unsuccessful, almost useless.” Zheng Guogu
-- Excerpts from “The Photoworks of Zheng Guogu” written by Christopher Phillips
Zheng Guogu participated in the 1990s photo-frenzy that swept the Chinese contemporary art world, yet he simultaneously stood apart from it. To suggest his disdain for those artists who paraded costly photographic gear, he regularly used the kind of cheap point-and-shoot camera favored by amateurs and family snapshooters. His early photoworks of 1993-96, which often record events that he staged or directed, usually take the form of simple documents, awkward snapshots, or bland commercial studio photographs; they manifest a blithe unconcern with anything resembling “artistic quality.”
In the later 1990s, as Zheng Guogu became fascinated with the ubiquitous presence of photographs in mass media, he gradually introduced more complex printmaking procedures and dizzyingly elaborate visual forms. While his early photo pieces were never particularly easy to understand, his later photoworks, often comprising 500 or more tiny, negative-size images, became increasingly a challenge just to see. Displayed in countless group exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art, Zheng Guogu’s photographic works of the 1990s gradually acquired an air of familiarity without ever shedding their essential inscrutability.
My Teacher, made in 1993, was Zheng Guogu’s first real photographic work, and it has become one of his signature pieces. The photograph shows him squatting in the street in Yangjiang next to a shirtless young man of about the same age; they are both roaring conspiratorially with laughter. Zheng Guogu has recalled, “I noticed this guy a few days before, squatting in the road out in front of my studio, so I wanted to see who he was, and once I did I thought he was really interesting, so I decided to make a photo.” Zheng Guogu felt that his new friend, a homeless vagabond, had much to teach him. “He has a lot of knowledge that I will never have. He’s crazy. When he walks, he turns somersaults. For dinner, he picks mostly scraps from the trash, and then smiles and laughs as he eats them.” For a year the two continued to run into each other, until the vagabond disappeared, leaving behind the lesson of a life unconstrained by everyday social conventions.
After using photography to document this intentionally baffling performance, In My Bride (1994) Zheng Guogu demonstrated that the camera could also be employed to create a seemingly truthful image of a completely fictitious event: in this case, his “marriage” to a young woman he barely knew. Over the course of three months during the summer of 1995, he “courted” a young Yangjiang woman, seeking to persuade her to pose with him in a set of wedding portraits at a local commercial photo studio. The young woman, who had no connection to the arts, was initially dubious of his intentions. “It took me a long while,” he recalls, “to court and persuade the ‘bride’ to be my bride. . . . I remember how my heart pounded when we were taking wedding pictures. Or perhaps my heart pounds like that whenever I create works. The bride beside me was scared and anxious. The whole thing was finished in a tasteful way, which kept the bride delighted for a few days. She thought that the fictitious wedding was a very beautiful and happy moment in her life.”
Of the eight color photographs in the series, three are absolutely typical wedding portraits that show Zheng Guogu and his “bride” dressed in elaborate, Western-style wedding costumes, holding a bouquet of flowers or lifting wine glasses in a toast. In the five remaining images, the camera pulls back to reveal the stagecraft that went into the making of the wedding photos. We see studio assistants fine-tuning the outfits worn by the “bride,” the “bride and bridegroom” adjusting their out poses in front of colored backdrops, and more studio assistants standing on chairs and positioning portable spotlights. The cumulative effect is to reveal the enormous effort and stylization that goes into producing a seemingly natural image of any newlywed couple.
The following year, Zheng Guogu followed up My Bride with Honeymoon, a series of eight photographs that similarly unfolded on the borderland between real life and fiction. In this case, he did have romantic feelings for the young woman, Luo La, who accompanied him for a supposed “honeymoon” stay in an upscale hotel in Guangzhou. Some of the resulting photographs are casual, snapshot-like images that show the young couple shopping in Guangzhou; others, made selfie-style, show them blissfully snuggling on the hotel bed. The shadows of shopping bags are visible in the hotel room, for Zheng Guogu wanted to suggest the way that Chinese honeymoon trips were increasingly taking on the trappings of a shopping excursion—a reflection of the growth of Chinese consumer culture in the 1990s. Two of the photographs in the series show a related tabletop installation that Zheng Guogu made for a Big Tail Elephant exhibition titled “Possibility.” In it, two dolls representing a tiny newlywed couple stand in a field of Lucky Stars and colorful ribbon bouquets—an echo of the real-life adventure of Zheng Guogu and Luo La. The same dolls reappear, along with other plastic and cloth dolls, in his 1998 photo series The Sky over Tokyo, where an airborne puppet theater plays out a fairytale scenario high above the Japanese capital.
The Vagarious Life of Yangjiang Youth, also made in 1996, is darker and more anarchic. The series came about when Zheng Guogo noticed the growing obsession of his younger brothers and their friends with violent East Asian action movies like Young and Dangerous, a Hong Kong gangster film that was one of that year’s biggest hits. Such foreign films had become increasingly available in south China in the form of bootleg videotapes and VCD discs smuggled in from Hong Kong. It took him little effort to convince these young men and women to dye their hair, assemble an arsenal of guns, swords, and knives, and act out violent episodes from their favorite movies.
Of the 16 images in the photowork, twelve take place in a bare, modern apartment, where young men and women with blue, copper, and pink hair gleefully throw themselves into scenarios of sheer mayhem. The young men brandish knives, swords, pistols, and rifles, using them to threaten each other and the young women who accompany them. Four other images take place outdoors at night, in what appears to be a parking lot. There we see young gang members ferociously battling “soldiers” clad in camouflage gear. Frozen by Zheng Guogu’s flash, the swirling physical action is punctuated by the expressions of ecstatic laughter on the faces of the young participants.
With its cool, nonjudgmental portrayal of Chinese teenagers happily engaged in gang-war combat, The Vagarious Life of Yangjiang Youth provoked wide comment. One of the most perceptive observations came from the art critic Hu Fang, who argued that Zheng Guogu was not particularly interested in the sociology of Yanjiang’s troubling new youth culture. Instead, what attracted his attention was the power of imported mass-media products, which had persuaded the young people of Yangjiang to cast off their own cultural identity and adopt alarming new attitudes and styles of behavior.
From 1997 on, Zheng Guogu composed his photoworks primarily by arranging hundreds of small, intentionally hard-to-see images on single sheets of paper. Sometimes, as in Life and Dreams of Youth from Yangjiang, he arranged the images in rows, suggesting a kind of movie storyboard. At other times the photographic images appear on jigsaw-puzzle pieces, as do the casual portraits by Zheng Guogu and others in An Age Flooded with Images--Dolls Acting Everywhere (1999) and the fashion shots rephotographed from magazines in Flash, Flash, Flash It Away (2000).
In 1997, Zheng Guogu began his most ambitious and also most audacious photographic series, Ten Thousand Customers. In the event that it is ever completed, the series will consist of 10,000 unique works, all sharing a similar size and grid format, and all dealing with one aspect or another of the contemporary media environment. Most of the photographic images contained in the 200+ works executed so far are double exposures; they ingeniously overlay Zheng Guogu’s photographs of model cars, toy tanks, and human dolls with media images captured from TV or computer screens. An extreme twist on the idea of “variations on a theme,” Ten Thousand Customers is also designed to place maximum stress on the art market’s standard approach to print editioning. A collector intrigued by the prospect of acquiring a unique work—the holy grail of collecting—is guaranteed to have second thoughts upon realizing the potentially gargantuan size of the series to which it belongs.
Since around 2000, Zheng Guogu’s attention has turned increasingly to calligraphy as his involvement with the Yangjiang Calligraphy Group has deepened. He has also devoted more and more time to creating his own idealized landscape and architecture in his enormous “Liao Garden” project on the outskirts of Yangjiang.
Zheng Guogu
郑国谷
was born in 1970 in Yangjiang, Guangdong province of China. He graduated from the printmaking department at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art in 1992. Zheng Guogu utilizes performance, photography, painting, sculpture, embroidery and the environment in his work. Zheng Guogu’s work has been collected by major museums including the Guggenheim Museum; Hammer Museum; The Museum of Modern Art; and M+ Museum, among others. He received the Best Artist Award by the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in 2006 and currently lives and works in Yangjiang, China.
More information:
Zheng Guogu’s work on Eli Klein Gallery
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