Zhang Lijie: Midnight Tweedle

Description

Midnight Tweedle is Zhang Lijie's personal portrait of China's complex cultural and political history. Juxtaposing diverse and seemingly unrelated images with a collage technique, Lijie explores the depths of Chinese collective memory in a process she describes as "whispering to herself ...to understand where we come from and where we are going." This book combines materials as varied as found and original photos, posters, illustrations and even a meal ticket from the planned economy time which Lijie either collected from antique markets, newspapers and the Internet, or created herself. Here smiling families and uniformed civilians during the Cultural Revolution mingle with key historical figures such as the Empress Dowager Cixi and Mao Zedong, all interspersed by recent landscapes and photos as unexpected as a still life of mangoes. Lijie believes that "all kinds of identities and labels are nothing but fragments of history," and in this book she creates a new whole from these pieces.

Born in 1981, Zhang Lijie lives and works in Beijing. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Beijing Normal University and a master's degree in photography from the London College of Communication, UAL. Lijie's style combines a snapshot aesthetic with the documentary photography tradition, and her work has been profiled in the New York Times, Lens, Newsweek and China Daily. Her photos have been exhibited in "Rising Dragon: Contemporary Chinese Photography" (San Jose Museum of Art, 2013) and the Copenhagen Photo Festival (2015) among others.