Conversations with Yuqiao Zhang

Today we’d like to introduce you to Yuqiao Zhang.

Hi Yuqiao, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Photographer, as a definition of myself, wins the final war of self-consciousness. The sublime moment of original friction between photographic paper and magnified gravel always reminds me of a contrary memory—the repetitive practice. This is how I had to do well in physics exams in the high-stress education of high school. However, mathematical arguments and observational evidence are probably similar, for both have something happen and irreversible change in a flash. Repetition is their shared enemy. My passion and impulse for physics and photography have achieved empathic communion on their way to freedom. It explores the world to find a spark in how the universe operates, and how I am operating internally. Am I a physics student, a person who learned journalism during undergraduate, an observer, or an unprofessional psychologist pursuing to spy on humans’ lives? I kept moving and moving until I had found my scattered footprints united against the impatience into a whole, a focus on photography since such a moment on a normal afternoon in my youth. Now, I’m studying photography as a candidate for an MFA, and new stories will happen in this place.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I feel comfortable when I am creating, or to say I only create when sparks gushing. For my current stage as an explorer, the deep thoughts of creation itself, when scrutinized it back objectively are more important than external difficulties such as the eternal choice between ‘the Moon and sixpence’.

I noticed that confusion and misunderstanding are common for people who are expressing themselves, so I started to think about the function of art as a communicating tool; when it comes to the original sin and the unbalanced power structure between the subject and photographer, I see my selfishness. How to be seen, how not to be seen, and how to balance the positive and negative aspects of perfectionism? Too detailed, but the existing struggles above always remind me that creating might be a sudden process, but a fully finished piece is not; it takes time.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I do poetic photography and photographic poems. It sounds like a rhetorical device, but I do use the poem writing process as a preview and a side branch of synaesthesia of photography. My work is like a big secret that is euphemistic and obscure. I am interested in the creation of luck, fantasy, supernaturalism, the mystery of the universe, and how they react with humans in a psychological way. Most of my works are inspired by the observation and psychoanalysis of the society system from an individual perspective. I build concrete abstractions and internal communication within the photos. Today, great ignorance is compressed into the vortex of knowledge along with accelerated time, and then a concrete abstraction is formed. This abstraction is concrete due to the fineness of the information carriers, and it becomes an abstraction due to the variability of combined meaning.

Growing up in a country with a large population, I am keenly aware of the particularities of society resulting from this parameter – the disappearance of the individual. I walked moment by moment, until into the sea-like crowd, until disappearing. A common horror and numbness sprouted in the hearts of this generation. We are all waiting for an unexpected guest, preferably a great fortune, yet it can also be a misfortune. Anything is good as long as the life moments become more special in the bland memory. Lucky Spots is a series of photographs that capture stories from criminal cases, gossip, and first-hand observations that have a common context: the underlying expectation for the lucky spots where the special moment takes place under the potential oppression of uniform rules. The special moments caused by the fortune and misfortune that befall us are an individual’s event of refuge.

A not-so-good photograph is the equivalent of my unhappy child, and I am committed to maintaining its mental and physical health with timing, mood, and occult as if it is constantly renewing itself after being given life. Before photographing the hidden casino in Lucky Spots, I was confident to find an appropriate house that was as lucky as its name along that strange railroad. It formed a halo around its edges by the diffuse reflection of my illumination, thereby stabilizing the image.

Reflecting on my growing-up experience, I created Song of the Locked Tears. It is a series of collages with the theme of forced growth – a story of a woman from far away and my own growth got entangled together in a dream way. The brutal bloodshed in the coming-of-age ceremony was accompanied by joyful singing and dancing which led to a kind of contradiction and dissonance. Both the special and the universal rite of passage come from outside of the humans themselves – the expectations and discipline of the clan or society – and not from the growth inside oneself. The blade cuts off her labia, and the proposition of a lifetime is condensed into a cocoon-breaking moment before it is sewn back together, self-healing, cut open again, and healed again. Is growing up instantaneous? There are indeed many moments when we are transformed by new ideas in a flash, but certainly not in an external ritual force. Growing up is a long aftertaste, a recurrence of pain and pleasure in successive moments until self-awakening. Also, my poem about the evaporation of tears trapped in an airtight container empathically migrated to forced growth—a dull ache but difficult to verbalize acutely.

Recently, I’m working on a new project. It is about the difference in speed at which humans perceive love in a corner where time is compressed. It consists of a drama-style-dialogue poem and color film photographs.

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
There are two energies entangled, fighting and promoting with each other inside my body. One is strict contemplation accompanied with the blame, perfectionism and controlling. The other is using humor to dissolve the struggles, to play with it, to show the rebellion. I catch the pain from the former and release from the latter.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: luckyevol