Yanyan Zhao
CHINA
leahyan.com
Working through photography, Yanyan Zhao uses a highly feminine approach to explore desire and intimate spaces, and how they interact with external society. Her work is often biographical and self-explorative, reflecting on and analysing her own psychological world, her past experiences, hidden thoughts and fantasies, often deeply intertwined with the social identity of “women”, especially “East-Asian women” in a transnational cultural context. Born in 1997, in Chengdu, China. She currently lives and studies in London, receiving her MA from the University of Arts London.
• SERIES •
A Room of One's Own
Taking inspiration from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) where she explores the effects of poverty and marginalization on the achievement of women, this project mainly focuses on an exploration of the private spaces of East Asian women. In particular, I am interested in the ways that private space defined by East Asian women reflects and helps to develop an interior life which can be in tension with their unique and subtle external cultural environment. These private spaces which are outside of the official gaze of the dominant culture, with its own values and expectations, allow for moments of authenticity to emerge which I am interested in capturing and expressing. I have taken influence from the dreams and fantasies of my research and interviews to heighten the drama of the images produced.
