En 1994 comenzó a fotografiar figuras chinas arquetípicas en encarnaciones contemporáneas y, a menudo, en situaciones extremas e inesperadas. La serie resultante, ‘Los chinos’ (The Chinese), retrata una lucha de la sociedad con las contradicciones entre la cultura tradicional y la modernización. Esta serie es una amplia muestra representativa de la sociedad china incluyendo a ricos, pobres, transexuales, mineros del carbón, intérpretes de ópera, así como figuras de cera de los museos históricos.
Zheng utiliza la fotografía como herramienta para la construcción de una falsa realidad. Influenciado por tanto Diane Arbus y August Sander, ‘Los chinos’, presenta al espectador con un estudio personalizado de la cultura china, concentrándose en el lado oscuro de su psicología.
Liu Zheng was born in 1969 in the Hebei Province, China. His signature graytone photographs have for years starkly framed, in political and provocative situations, his human subjects. When he works in colour, the tones are awash in sepia or a doctored saturation that comments on the nostalgic nature of his topics his Peking Opera series in particular reflects this. Liu’s background is not rooted in arts. After majoring in optical engineering at the Beijing Institute of Technology, he joined a local paper as a photojournalist, where he covered the coal mining industry. This laid the foundation for his interest in the lives of the countrymen that toil endlessly; one of his first series as an artistic practitioner explored the lives of ethnic minorities and our perception of them. He continues to eke out of the histories and stories of his subjects and topics in photography, and has published several volumes of his series.
