China, wonderland? It is with a certain irony that Alex Huanfa Cheng, 35, chose to title his project “Wonderland”. “In my eyes, this word underlines all that is illusory in this very beautiful vision that China wants to give of itself: fantastic on the surface, but with many underlying negative things”, he comments.
It’s been eleven years since the photographer chose to settle in Paris. But the 30-year-old frequently returns to his native China, exploring with fresh eyes the rural region where he grew up as much as the megalopolises. From his recent stays, he returned with a series of images with grating poetry. Young girls in folk costumes, scenes of overcrowded beaches, family portraits under the gaze of propaganda posters…
He likes to survey places of leisure, these spaces of pure artifice where a country is staged without really managing to hide its flaws. “It is easier to work with people in these places, because elsewhere they are busy with their work and therefore less available, he points out. Here, they are relaxed, which makes it possible to collect, seemingly nothing, a lot of information. And to note so many contradictions. »
“The colors fight each other”
In his images, the panorama of a tamed nature is sketched, like this little monkey in a suit, chains on his feet. Flowers grow on screens, waterfalls flood restaurants with wallpaper. “To make the contrasts between true and false in the scenes that I capture more obvious, the colors of my photographs are very saturated, they fight each other. There is no harmony in the coexistence of all these things. »
During the first steps of his photographic research, Alex Huanfa Cheng did not have a very precise idea of what he wanted to find in a China that was becoming more and more alien to him. “But the distance allowed me to sharpen my gaze little by little. » He had chosen Paris “for romanticism as much as for financial reasons, France being much cheaper for [s]studies than the United States or Great Britain”. Eleven years later, he still loves his adopted country so much and does not regret for a moment having left his native country. In China, he practiced photography as an amateur.
At the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, from which he graduated in 2018 with the congratulations of the jury, he was introduced to the silver medium with the best, in particular the visual artist and photographer Patrick Tosani. “I started thinking about photography as a language. This school changed everything, it was like a mother to me. » He learns there to conceptualize his approach, but also to master chemicals, whose subtle reactions are fundamental in his eyes.
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