Capturing the spirit of an old, traditional festival time
Print Edition
A trip to villages in Shaanxi Province during the 2007 Spring Festival brought photographer Zhang Xiao close to shehuo, a regional custom that still prevails in the countryside of the northwest.
A century-old carnival to worship gods and pray for a blessed new year, shehuo usually lasts a whole month, involving events such as parades, drum dance and lion dance.
Villages in Shaanxi bustling with shehuo celebrations are an obvious attraction to photographers.
“One minute they are just ordinary people doing chores at home or eating from a bowl,” Zhuang said. “The next minute, they put on heavy makeup, take up the prop swords and ride off on horses.”
A selection of his Shaanxi series is exhibited at the current exhibition, giving visitors a glimpse of the folk celebrations and villagers in costume. All the photos were snapped with a plastic Holga camera, along with flash at a close range. The camera was of low resolution, focusing on the center, with dark corners on the sides.
Zhang quit his job as a photojournalist for the Chongqing Morning Post in 2009 to became an independent photographer. He wanted to work on something with bigger and more important, so he turned to China’s coastline to showcase the nation’s development.
“All the political, economic and cultural changes start from coastal cities,” he said.
He started in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, visiting almost every county along the country’s 18,000-kilometer coastline. The project lasted for more than four years, on and off.
What impressed Zhang most was the homogenization in small counties.
“The same buildings, the same tiles… as if they were all planned by the same firm,” he said. “Sometimes I woke up in a hostel room and forgot where I was.”
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