Today I browsed the Photography section of Wül Magazine and discovered an interview with Chinese photographer Leslie Shang ZheFeng, who specialises in the documentation of the environmental and socio-political issues within China. This discussion specifically piqued my interest as it mentions themes present within my own current practice, such as the effects of urbanisation and the way in which place influences human experiences and vice versa.
Interviewer Nastasia Khmelnitski greets ZheFeng and opens the conversation with a question about his life prior to his career as a freelance photographer. ZheFeng talks about his past as an editor, designer and photography assistant before retiring in 2019 to become a freelancer and devoting his time to making images at his own expense. Cypress Slope, a project shot in 2020, was one of ZheFeng’s first projects following his retirement and looks into family roots by revisiting material up to four generations in the past. ZheFeng combines a selection of archival footage including old images, letters and VHS tapes in an attempt to understand and compare lifestyles. I feel that the work can be quickly understood as a personal series which documents ZheFeng’s emotional experiences.
This investigation into China’s quickly changing landscape continued into ZheFeng’s “Shanghai Scenery” project also produced in 2020. This work highlights the social and economic features of the landscape with the intent to relay the current situations and hardships of ordinary people. With this project, ZheFeng hopes to encourage other domestic photographers to continue to record China’s social issues to counter the strict censorship of these topics. Following this he refers to the work of Lu Guang, another chinese photographer who documented the wide range of consequences following China’s rapid industrialisation; primarily the presence of “cancer villages”. Although this work caused him to become a target for the Chinese government in an attempt to discourage further coverage of these topics.
For an extended look into this interview between ZheFeng and Khmelnitski visit https://www.wulmagazine.com/photography/leslie-shang-zhefeng where additional topics and photographs are mentioned.
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