23 SEPTEMBER - 23 OCTOBER 2005

“Zhang presents young Chinese girls, living in both the East and West, in haunting images that provoke a multiplicity of responses.” Kathy Battista

‘My Little Girl’ covered two bodies of work made between 2004 and 2005. In the first series, ‘Horizon’, Zhang photographed young Chinese girls from a remote village in Southern China. The larger than life size images gaze at the audience with a natural confidence and iconic mastery. For Zhang “the little girls represent the new generation of China – the revolutionary future.”

“Horizon is an apparition of [O Zhang's] entire field of vision peopled entirely by the singular look of these children. Perhaps they constitute a force field that meets us at every point. If we might, for a moment, stand back from this level of intensity, we could say to ourselves that it is the hallucination of vision itself.” Jonathan Miles

In her new series, ‘Daddy & I’, she removed the girls from their rural Chinese setting, photographing Western men with their adopted Chinese daughters. Taken in New York the girls and their fathers are photographed posing in their gardens. The two series worked together, both unsettling and seducing their audience and reflecting a subtle, yet striking, document of an East - West cultural divide.

O Zhang MA is a photographer with a revolutionary take on Chinese and Western identity. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004 and has exhibited widely in London, Europe, New York and China. She has received numerous awards for her work including Mathews Wrightson Educational Trust and The Great Britain-China Educational Trust, and was nominated for Becks Futures in 2005. O Zhang - My Little Girl was supported by the Arts Council England.

Posted under archive-listing, project-listing