Liu Zheng

Born in 1969, Liu Zheng is celebrated for his photography series simply titled "The Chinese." The artist traveled across China taking pictures of the people he encountered from 1994 to 2000, photographing factory workers, street performers, prostitutes, miners, and businessmen. In trying to capture a spectrum of Chinese society—from the fringes of society to the mainstream—what Zheng finally presents are people that are, most interestingly, somewhere in between. The resulting black-and-white prints are appealingly intimate and at times unnervingly voyeuristic. Liu Zheng has adopted the practice of a kind of subversive photojournalism, made famous by Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin among others, and made it unfamiliar again.