Photography by Luo Yang. Courtesy of Moonduckling.
Gazing directly at the camera, a woman and man sit beside each other, their arms angled over their knees. They wear nothing but red contact lenses, jewellery and tattoos. One red-irised person appears goth; when there are two, they either look blitzed or like it’s an accident of the camera flash. I love the red-eye effect in photographs. It unmasks the subject and makes the image feel finite, evanescent, seeming to last only as long as the pop of the flash. Here, I know their eyes stay the same colour after the shutter closes, and that split-second reveal spins out into the eternal.
This sense of immediacy, and of the ephemeral bleeding into the infinite, permeates the work of Beijing- and Shanghai-based photographer Luo Yang, who shoots exclusively with film. Ai Weiwei described her as “one of the rising stars of Chinese photography,” the BBC dubbed her one of the world’s 100 most influential women, and Simone Rocha follows her on Instagram.
Luo Yang was born in Shenyang in 1984. “The environment I grew up in was barren,” she says, “without art, cinema, galleries or exhibitions. I had to go through this national exam to get to a different world.” In 2008, while studying graphic design at college, she borrowed a camera and began shooting portraits of friends. This became Girls, an ongoing project shot across a decade and culminating in a multi-city retrospective last year.
Her latest series, New Generation, depicts the “fun and authentic qualities” of a group of individuals born during the ‘90s and ‘00s, whom she defines as “self-conscious, open, impetuous.” Luo says: “Girls is more like an expression of myself during adolescence, while the new series is more objective and more documentary like, with less personal emotions.”
The new generation is impulsive, self-assured, genderfluid. A sense of calm unruliness pervades the rooms in which they bond, primp, vape, smoke, cuddle and bathe, like young gods. Their nakedness is comfy, anarchic and uncontrived. Clothing is performative and genuine: sequins, lace, and costume elements teamed with sportswear and separates, the way you dress to get gently trashed with friends at home. Makeup is minimal, concentrated and succinct, and serves as punctuation, graffiti.
Luo usually photographs her subjects in their own apartments. The settings appear as thought bubbles reflecting the models’ inner worlds. Home altars appear in many of the images. Flowers, cosmetics, photographs and tchotchkes adorn dressers and coffee tables. The spoils of childhood reign ubiquitous. The shrine motif embodies the subjects generationally, as a palimpsest and as the tangible part of a cultural legacy, and individually, as an accretion of their personal histories.
In her essay “Melancholy Objects,” Susan Sontag observes that “photography is the only art that is natively surreal.” Luo invokes this core surrealism by inflicting and negotiating social and temporal distance especially through the implication of confidentiality.
A subject is always separated from a viewer by the time and distance ingrained in the surface of a photograph. An aura of safety and seclusion shrouding these subjects provides an additional protective layer so that their vulnerability translates as ethereality. Most of the exterior locations are semi-private (boat, balcony, rooftop) and often the models are barefoot, which renders these settings more intimate and suggests they feel at home anywhere in their cities. When shooting in public spaces, Luo allows subtly fantastic elements to intervene, photographing the subject lying in a field of brightly coloured flowers, standing barefoot in the middle of the road or leaning against a car wrapped in fabric, so that the scene transforms into a dream and is transported to the realm of secrecy. Landmarks such as the Jumbo Floating Restaurant and Berlin’s Fernsehturm are presented as incidental, subsidiary, like a postcard tacked to a wall, thereby reallocated as private property.
Luo’s images expose the small ways we connect: tapping cigarette ash at the same time into the neck of a bottle, embracing a loved one with shower-damp hair, chatting on the phone or striking a goddess pose on a shopping mall escalator. She describes these intimate visions as “an expression of my deep inner world. I try to go into their worlds and to capture the moments. I don’t try to change anything. I simply present what I think is reality.” The models’ performative awareness never appears externally imposed or stylised. Even where mises-en-scène feel premeditated, any artifice seems spontaneous and self-directed, as if the subjects are conscious of staging their own lives and performing in them always, regardless of the camera’s presence.
See more from New Generation below:
Luo Yang is represented by Moonduckling. She’s working on a film about girls and trying out some new art forms. All photography by Luo Yang. Courtesy of Moonduckling.
May-Lan Tan is a writer based in Berlin. Her short story collection Things to Make and Break was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.