Unintended Homecoming started with no intention. The earliest image in the series was taken in 2010 when I was wandering in China for another project that was later entitled Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost. Yet Unintended Homecoming has continued my wandering across China. It is an open journey to gasp the life experience of others’ and of myself before they are diluted in my memory. Rather than a journey of discovery, it uncovers layers of a society, which makes me feel both familiar and alien. I am hoping one day the images could turn the camera back on me, facing myself inward. I would see myself in these situations and be able to reconstruct my own identity as a Chinese and to understand the country in which I am rooted.
Hai Zhang
Hai Zhang was born in Kunming, China in 1976. After the graduation of his college in Chongqing, he moved to the US in 2000. For Zhang, an architect by training and profession, photography was at first a work-related activity and then became a tool to quest the contexts that his identity roots in whether his homeland and the US; whether his intimate personal subjects and broader projects related to the society at large.
Since 2008, he has been deeply devoted to photographing the ever-changing and sprawling Chinese urbanized landscape. Zhang’s photographs taken in China from 2008 through 2012 constituted Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost, an unsettling journey into the understanding of the tomorrow that the new China is leading its people towards.
Hai Zhang’s photographs have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and cultural venues in France, New York, Washington, China, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Costa Rica. He has lectured at numerous artistic and cultural institutions in New York, Turkey and Beijing including the Museum of Chinese in America, Queens Museum of Art in New York, Asia Society in New York, as well as the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Currently he commutes between China and New York.
Unintended Homecoming Hai Zhang
From July 1st to September 22nd, 2013
On the walls of the buildings of Griffeuille
Arles
France
