Zheng Guogu is a conceptual Chinese artist who emerged in the 1990s amid the profound shifts of China’s opening to a globalized world. Working with photography, calligraphy, painting, video and installation, Zheng revamps the local culture of his hometown Yangjiang and New China against the contexts and trends of global contemporary art. Zheng is also a member of Yangjiang Group, an art collective founded in 2002 in Yangjiang.
Zheng currently lives and works in Yangjiang, China.
The Vagarious Life of Yangjiang Youth weaves real life and play-acting into a series of docu-drama photographs, in which Zheng Guogu and his friends acted out scenes of the reckless lives of youth gangs. Inspired by Hong Kong cinema, the series alludes to the impact of mass media and commercial imagery on Chinese youths in the 1990s. It also pinpoints the fictive nature of images that inundate our everyday reality, as the artist juggles fact and fiction in his photography.
