Li Xianting, 1995 [China.org.cn]

Photographer:

Zeng Huang graduated from Syracuse University, NYC and published a personal photograph collection of the war in Bosnia. He won the first prize in the"Freedom Forum Professional Photographer Competition". Dozens of international news organizations use his pictures and the United Nations Children"s Fund (UNICEF) has hired him as a long-term photographer. Zeng has been interested in non-mainstream cultural phenomena in China for a long time.

 

Zeng Huang's "Life of Artists" depicts the life of avant-garde artists in Beijing in 1990s. As the first group of artists who escaped from Chinese mainstream art, they lived in villages in the western suburbs of Beijing. They tried to discover the meaning of their existence outside the non-mainstream system by totally individual artistic creation. Zeng Huang makes a complete record of their life in great depth. He does not deify the artists. They look as normal as everyone else in Zeng's pictures. After many of them became world-famous artists, Zeng asks his viewers: which life is their real life? (Curator: Liu Shuyong)