Zheng Guogu

Me and My teacher, 1993

In Zheng Guogu’s artworks recurring themes include the reinterpretation of traditional Chinese art and culture, and their transference into a post-modern language of images and forms informed by Asian cultural contexts. At the beginning of his career in the 1990s, Zheng worked primarily in the medium of photography – at a time when few Chinese artists were interested in this medium. Me and My Teacher, from 1993, is one of his early artworks. For six months, Zheng accompanied a homeless man with learning difficulties through the streets of Yangjiang, using his camera to record scenes from his companion’s day-to-day life. What primarily fascinates Zheng is the young man’s view of the world around him, which is unprejudiced and free from conventions. As the title of the artwork implies, this made the subject into a kind of mentor for the artist. Me and My Teacher was followed by a series of photographic works in which Zheng reinterpreted the relationship between fiction and reality. In their aesthetic language, these artworks are reminiscent of documentary photography: they are, in fact, ‘docu-fictions’.