Arno Zhao

Country where you live:

France

City where you live:

Paris

Website:

https://www.arnozhao.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/arnozhao/?hl=fr

Statement :

‘Photography = Scenography’ is a formula that sums up my work.

As a trans-disciplinary artist and Franco-Chinese set designer, I infiltrate the worlds of cinematography, documentary photography, advertising, design and layout.

My ambidextrous artistic production is most often incorporated into a theatrical gesture, despite its status as photography, sculpture, film, etc.; an ongoing research into theatricality : the frame, the address, the exaggeration, the spectator... the double devices that create points of view, in the physical sense, and points of view, in the conceptual sense.

The photographic series "Zhaocollection" is a linear and typical constant of my process, consisting og representing the banal in an outrageously theatrical, advertising way.

My work, in all its forms, is driven by the desire to create meaning. However, each of these canvases is not just the fabrication of ‘scenes’ building up a dramaturgy, it is also a doorway open to sensation and abstraction.

Quote:

Feigning is not about offering decoys, it's about creating intelligible structures. (Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du Sensible)

A Martyr Shall Thee Become

analogic photography, silver print from 35 mm film, 90 x 60 cm, 2023 This composition depicts an unloved figure of ecocidal capitalism, facing the sky. The warm tone of the sky slips into a small over-frame, a miniature theatrical scene provided by the opening in the windscreen. There, the orange tone of the clouds, which we would like to think coming from a fire, converses with the flaming rust of the metal. The handle stands centrally, like an invitation. But the door seems irreparably closed. This spectral object, both subject and frame, could be an offering to heaven, or a bloody wreck seeking salvation, or a guardian of the gates of paradise. The 4 elements of alchemy are discreetly summoned. The air in the sky, the metal of the earth, the fire of carbonisation, and the water of rust. The magic of physics and chemistry have reduced this sophisticated chassis to the vulgar stage of raw material; raw material that was necessary for the construction of this astonishing graphics.

Squaring the Circle

analogic photography, silver print from 35 mm film, 90 x 60 cm, 2023 The Squaring of the Circle is not only a mathematical problem, it is a meditation on human on one hand, and divine on the other. In many cultures, the square represents the earth, the knowledge, the science, while the circle represents the sky, the unknown, the irrational.

Untitled

analogic photography, silver print from 35 mm film, 90 x 60 cm, 2024, Zhaocollection Zhaocollection is a panoply of documentary photographs depicting everyday life without rules, but with the intention of making the banal outrageously theatrical, advertising.

Portrait(s)_of_China-9485

Digital photography, 2056 x 3088 px, 2012, Portrait(s) of China I only knew China as a child, when I spoke only Chinese and nothing else. Shortly after my Pekingese grandmother died, I went back there with my brother. It was 2012, and my camera was low-quality... but my trip was spontaneous and sincere. Portrait(s) of China is both the personal exploration of my motherland, and a documentary work depicting China post-Olympic Games 2008 and pre-Covid 2019.

Decima

Digital Photography, 4024 x 6048, The Afterlyfe Triptych Decima is part of a "the Afterlife Triptych" : the Three Fates represented as an apocalyptic Trinity.

Bio:

Entrusted to my Manchu and Pekingese grandparents, I spoke and wrote in Mandarin before speaking and writing in French. Symptoms of this remain in my visual work. My Chinese culture, although it largely disappeared with my childhood, installed in me the motivation of signs, different logics and imaginary graphic languages.

Also I've been drawing since I was very young, but when I entered the Haute école des Arts du Rhin (Strasbourg's decorative arts school), I've been drawing with objects, drawing with spaces, and drawing with cameras. Whatever the form, each of my works is handled using a variety of techniques. What's more, the vocabulary I use to talk about it is that of a trans-disciplinary art: scenography.

I graduated in 2018 (in Art / Object / Scenography) and now live and work in my studio just outside Paris. I'm a researcher who seeks to lose control, amidst creative obstacles, constraining and structuring... a ‘labyrantin’... And I myself proudly play the role of the architect of the maze in which I sow my self.

Ever since I can remember, I've felt suited to creating logic in brackets, and sometimes logic as an aside. Everything I do, despite a constant background of surrealism bordering on Heroic Fantasy, has to be held together by a conceptual force. So my artistic approach is often a « mise-en-logique » (rather than « mise-en-scène ») of unreal topographies, towards a coherent system of creative constraints, whose resonance I configure.