Teiko Ang Zheng – 25

Solo Photography Exhibition

21.08.2019  -  24.08.2019

Opening Tuesday, August 20th 2019, 6-9pm

During his two-month residency at SomoS, Chicago-based Chinese photographer Teiko Ang Zheng has focused on visual and written storytelling, subjectively documenting inhabitants of Berlin and the city itself within a queer and digitalized narrative. Referred to by the artist as “encounters,” the bank of impressions and engagements with people has generated a subjective and honest narrative of life in Berlin, a city with an attracting aura that links it to an influx of queer migrants.

“25” is the title of Zheng’s solo photography exhibition, reflecting on the implications of this sphere at the juncture between queer identity and a search for belonging in the context of increased global mobility. 25 stands for not only the age of Zheng, but also for an age when many feel prepared and comfortable enough to leave their city in search of something else. People leave for a reason, yet they also arrive for a reason. With queer dating apps as a basis, yet not a restriction, to Zheng’s modes of encountering, its algorithms meant that he was connected with people around his age. In this sense, Zheng could not deny the intertwinement of his self in the narrative portrait of queer migration amongst the aura of Berlin that he has been subjectively gathering. Rather, he puts himself also under the spotlight, as reflected in the diary-like texts that accompany each work. Furthermore, his landscape photography, impressionistic representations of parks and cruising spaces, describes the setting of this story and adds physicality to the digitalized notions surrounding the soft portraits. Meanwhile botanic still lifes punctuate Zheng’s visual and written narrative, becoming appendages of the everyday.

Zheng has sought inspiration from Christopher Isherwood’s novel The Berlin Stories, set between 1930 and 1933 during the coming to power of Hitler as the author himself travelled to Berlin. Detailing the encounters between various characters, the novel ventures through themes of power, money and sex work. Yet it was in 1976, when Isherwood published his memoir Christopher and His Kind, that new light was cast on The Berlin Stories. In fact, Isherwood not only outed himself as homosexual, but also revealed that he had changed the gender of many characters so as to conceal their true identity and sexuality and thereby protect them from discrimination. Nevertheless, for Zheng, although fascinating, his main interest lies not in the uncovering of the queerness of many of the novel’s characters decades after its publication, but rather in the implication that The Berlin Stories has created its own life. That is, the story embarks on its own trajectory through history, legend and reinterpretation which is distinct from its written fictionalization. This is an approach to storytelling which informs the semi-documentative, semi-autobiographical and relentlessly personal 25. While seemingly just a number, 25 therefore reveals itself as an embodiment of the personal, global and independent qualities of visual and written storytelling through a queer lens in Berlin.

About Teiko Ang Zheng

Teiko Ang Zheng completed his education in Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University and is now enrolled in a MFA at the Photography department of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He worked as teaching assistant for numerous courses in the Photography department since his enrollment. His interest for research lies in the theory/criticism of art and literature, (post-) modernism/structuralism, queer theory/art/literature and East Asian (diasporic) art/literature, and media theory and theory and history of photography.

The artist took part in group exhibitions including the Open Studio Show, Sullivan Center, Chicago IL, USA, Pick Me Up, 062 Gallery, Chicago IL, USA, and Portrait, Through the Lens, Black Box Gallery, Portland OR, USA; his work can be found in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL, USA; Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection, SAIC, Chicago IL, USA; Chicago Artists’ Archive, Chicago IL, USA.
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Opening Tuesday, August 20th 2019, 6-9pm
Duration – August 21st-24th, Tuesday-Saturday 2-7 or by appointment. Free entry.
SomoS Art House, Kottbusser Damm 95, 1.0G, 10967 Berlin
(U8 – Schönleinstraße)

This post is also available in: German

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