Original photo

Zhang Haiying’s Anti-Vice Series is based on Internet photographs of young women caught up in the Chinese government’s efforts to purge the city of prostitution and pornography. The highly publicized campaign to “eliminate vice and illegal publications” focuses on the apprehension and detention of young women such as these, who are among the most powerless of the country’s citizens. Victimized on one hand by gangs and threatened with fines and prison by authorities on the other, they are often paraded through streets to face insults and ridicule.

Zhang renders these scenes with a master’s craftsmanship. Hair, flesh, fabric, objects are constructed as self-contained elements, their individual treatment creating a sense of isolation and disunity in the collage effect. His super-pop sheen is exaggerated through painterly veracity: camera blurs, print bleeds, and flash bulb glares are faithfully replicated by brushwork which borders on abstraction. In Series 005 the night vision video effect is perfectly replicated by impassioned smears and smudges, simulating photo realism with intuitive spontaneity.

Behind each of these paintings is a complex story: of destitution, desperation, abuse and entrapment, side effects of economics, migration, and progress; the human costs of commodity culture. By recontextualising the way prostitution is represented and perceived, Zhang’s paintings strive to convey the human condition, with all its indignities and weaknesses, as a duplicitous victimisation of both the oppressed and oppressors.

Zhang Haiying was born 1972 in Shandong, China. Now lives and works in Beijing.