Ou Zhihang no longer knows if he is a photographer or a visual artist. This jovial Guangzhou-born Chinese man fell in love with photography with photography when he became a producer at the Canton television studios. In 2003, he was selected as China’s best fashion photographer. In 2009, he was named “Artist of the Year” at Lianzhou’s 5th International Photography Festival. The following year, the World Press Photo gave him an honorable mention.
Ou Zhihang, not satisfied with his achievements, persevered with a work very dear to him, which was already the subject of his first book, Push Up of Memories, or, to put it another way, the memories of a man doing push-ups! It is a photographic work made in several countries where he set himself into the scene, naked, framed in a given place where something is happening: a crime, a demonstration, a political event.
The position is the same throughout the work. As if he were carrying out a series of push-ups, he puts his hands on the ground, legs stretched out, naked body, ready to go. But his secret resides in the rapidity with which he carries out this session of poses. In general, it is early, around six in the morning, at a time where the chosen space is empty of onlookers, empty of vehicles. When in China, especially in places as strategic as Tiananmen Square, he has only a couple of seconds to undress, set the self-timer on his camera, do a push-up at the precise moment, and run to get dress…
No matter whether it rains, snows, whether Tiananmen Square has fifteen centimeters of snow, our valiant almost 60 something undresses to immortalize his work. He has no idea when it will be finished, ideas are continuously coming to him.
His work is the subject of several critiques so praiseful they mark him as an unparalleled artist. Many museums throughout China have exhibited him and are exhibiting him again. He was invited to Venice’s Infr’Action in 2015, to Houston’s FotoFest, and to Boston’s Festival Flash Forward. The exhibition of his “moments” in Sweden made a big stir.
We saw him doing push-ups before Mao’s house, before the symbolic place of the Cultural Revolution, before the scene of a crime in Beijing, in a Gansu farm, a murder scene, on the roof of a building overlooking where a student stopped a line of tanks in September of 1989, before a group of workers at the foot of the Chinese CCTV tower to stress the seriousness of pollution in Beijing. In Tianjin, he was naked in the harbour the site of a terrible chemical explosion. To stress the state of drought in the Yunnan province, he posed on the deeply cracked land. He revealed his distinguished bottom at the Yangtze to protest the devastation caused by the Three Gorges Dam.
Abroad, it is in front of the Statue of Liberty in New York where he gets undressed early in the morning, then at the site of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. In Paris, in the rain and in front of a few passers-by who have not even noticed him, while far off we see demonstrators, he takes off his clothes at the Place de la Republique. Very early, we can see him at the Grand Place in Brussels, before the Karl Marx House in Trier, before the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, and, of course, at what is left of the sinister Berlin Wall.
He must be cool-tempered, in both a literal and figurative sense, to have collected dozens of photos of his… buttocks, since Ou Zhihang has never shown his face for this work based on “the moment” of an event.
It is a way, after all, like any other, to remember the difficult moments of our daily lives. And when we ask him why he chose to pose naked in this very delicate position, he unapologetically responds that no one before him had the idea, and that it is a way to keep in shape all while operating a cultural mission…
Floris de Bonneville
Floris de Bonneville is a French journalist and former editor-in-chief of the Gamma agency between 1968 and 1996. She lives and works in Paris.
