| Zhou Jun likes to speak lightly of his own abilities, but his arresting images of the new China are the work of a sophisticated artist and a master of the photographic craft. The Nanjing-based photographer came to Beijing in 1995 as an Artist in Residence at Red Gate Gallery. He found a city being transformed by economic development and the looming Olympics. Everywhere cranes soared over half-built office blocks, each tower swathed in construction mesh. The same distinctive cocoon hid many of the city’s old monuments, which were getting their 2008 facelift. |
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Zhou Jun at Red Gate Gallery
“After all these years of exposure to art, I still can’t tell south from north or east from west.”
Zhou Jun likes to speak lightly of his own abilities, but his arresting images of the new China are the work of a sophisticated artist and a master of the photographic craft.
The Nanjing-based photographer came to Beijing in 1995 as an Artist in Residence at Red Gate Gallery. He found a city being transformed by economic development and the looming Olympics. Everywhere cranes soared over half-built office blocks, each tower swathed in construction mesh. The same distinctive cocoon hid many of the city’s old monuments, which were getting their 2008 facelift.
Looking for a way to capture the visual drama of this transformation, he conceived the idea of using black and white prints on which the scaffolding and green netting were picked out in red. A long-time devotee of analogue photography, he first tried traditional hand-tinting, but the technique didn’t yield the color saturation he wanted.
He realized that digital printing could extend his palette, and hit on a fusion of new and old technologies. He first worked up his large-format prints in the darkroom, then created fine-grained digital images with a high-end scanner, adding the brilliant red he was looking for at the end of the process.
His first Beijing show, at the Red T Gallery in September 2006, focused on some of the capital’s iconic monuments. The images created an immediate buzz. In one, the famous flagstones of the Forbidden City dominate the foreground, while, in the middle distance, the 580-year-old Hall of Supreme Harmony wears a scarlet carapace of modernity that has an unsettling but thrilling effect. The works were widely discussed, and Zhou Jun went on to develop a portfolio based on sites in southern cities to be shown at Studio Rouge in Shanghai. The show included a brilliant panorama of that city’s riverside skyline, its silvery perfection punctuated with tiny patches of red.
All the prints by the 42-year-old Zhou Jun display his pedigree as a photographic professional. He graduated from the Department of Photography at the Art School of Nanjing Normal University in 1990 and later secured concurrent posts there as instructor and organiser of the department’s creative program. He now works as a full-time artist.
Despite his recent success with digital printing, Zhou has no inclination to abandon film as his shooting medium. He works with a conventional Sinar 4×5 camera with a fixed focal-length 150mm lens. He enjoys the technical challenges posed by analogue in the field and in the darkroom—something that is reflected in the quality of his finished prints.
This year, Zhou Jun signed with Beijing’s Red Gate Gallery, and his first exhibition there this summer explores how modernization is transforming the Chinese landscape.
His “Development Zone” series shows farmland trapped between the past and present, new structures looming as a colored band on a dark horizon, or towering luminously over roads that come from nowhere and seem to lead to an uncertain future.
