The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, is pleased to announce the selection of the 2018 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography. Following an international search, the Gardner Fellowship committee awarded the Fellowship to photographer Zhang Xiao (China). The Fellowship carries a $50,000 stipend to begin or complete a proposed project followed by the publication of a book.
Zhang’s work, deeply rooted in fieldwork and interactions with local communities, focuses on the impact of rapid economic change and urbanization on Chinese rural landscape and traditions. According to artist and curator Ou Ning, “[Zhang] has amazing skills to communicate with ordinary people, and most importantly the ability to transfer his research and observation into powerful visual works.” Peabody curator Lisa Barbash said “What is especially exciting about Zhang is that he summons new approaches to each new project, by shifting his perspective, changing his palette, choosing new printing forms and adapting his camera equipment to create completely unique portraits within an ever evolving China.”
For the 2018 Fellowship year, Zhang will expand on his earlier 2007 work in Shanxi which focused on individual performers in the annual spring festival (shehuo), to document the disconnection between the actors’ contemporary lives and the ancient traditions. Further research since then, inspired Zhang to revisit the festival to examine another aspect of the festival: the shift from the festival’s traditional meanings and props to kitschy entertainment and consumption. According to curator Lisa Barbash, “With his photographic focus on objects—costumes and props—Zhang propels the anthropology museum’s traditional concern with material culture into a dynamic present, where the objects are re-invented, re-shaped and re-purposed to, as he says, ‘cater to modern society’.”
An ancient agricultural festival, shehuo originated in the worship of the gods of earth and fire and was a time to pray for good weather for abundant crops (earth) and safety from evil spirits (fire). The festival includes ritual as well as family reunions and enactments of ancient stories and legends. The costumes and props of shehuo were once handed down generation to generation or remade in traditional ways, but with the explosion of the internet and diminishing of relevance, props and costumes are now largely obtained on the Internet, made from cheap kitschy materials, and often reinvented for modern society becoming disposable goods for a new fast-paced consumer society. Over the coming year, Zhang will examine the impact of these new costumes and props and online consumption patterns on the shehuo as well as on the communities producing and using them.
Born in 1981 in Yantai city, Shandong province, China, Zhang current lives and works in Chengdu, Sichuan province. He graduated from the Department of Architecture and Design at Yantai University in 2005, and began his career with the Chongqing Morning Post as a photojournalist. Zhang has won numerous awards including the Three Shadows Photography Award in 2010 for They; the second Hou Dengke Documentary Photography Award in 2009, the Photography Talent Award (France) in 2010, and the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie in 2011 for Coastline. His publications include Coastline, (Actes Sud, 2011; Jia zazhi Press, 2012); They (Editions Bessard Press, 2014); and Shanxi (Little Man Press, 2013).