Photography
Zhang Peng changed his art from painting to photography in 2006. When asked why he converted to photography, the artist replied, "There is no special reason. When I changed my genre from painting to photography, many people were just like you. They were curious as to why I changed my media so suddenly and kept asking me why. However, all I wanted was to express many thoughts and emotions in my mind through more diversified means." He feels that photography can capture the moment of an event, while painting offers only a limited time to express all of ones thoughts. He makes flawless compositions, carefully arranged as theater sets and elaborately controls the lighting effects to create dramatic scenes. Computer manipulations are also used to make abnormally big eyes and slender bodies.
The red used in Zhang Peng's paintings and full-color photographs symbolize "either China itself or blood. As the national economy grows, each individual within it becomes relatively small. Red implies the meaning of this duality." He doesn't use red in his recent black-and-white photographs, but the omission of it seems to add brutality and subtlety to those pieces.
Read more about this topic: Zhang Peng (artist)
Famous quotes containing the word photography:
“Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.”
—Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942)
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)