Chinese photographer captures 'horror and beauty' of modern China: from consumer culture to ancient waterways
Li Zhengde lives on the edge of Mount Wutong National Park, in Shenzhen. His one-bedroom flat is on the fourth floor of a forlorn, reform-era tenement building, beside some shabby farmhouses that date back a century or more. The interior is decorated with Li's own photography and brimming with enough books for a small library. It smells of Hunan chilli peppers.
Outside, tropical storm Ewiniar is menacing the mountainside, rousing a nearby river to burst its banks while shrouding Shenzhen's highest peak in continually shifting mists.
"Look how clear the water is," says Li, pointing out of the window at streams snaking down the slopes. "Mountain fresh!"
Removing a beer from the fridge and lighting a Hongtashan cigarette, Li settles into an easy chair to discuss his epic photographic project, "From the Zi River to the Yangtze", for which he began shooting images in 2009.
Yiyang, Hunan, in February 2012.
"In Anhui, I was hiking all day, every day, so I drank less beer," Li says. "The place is incredible, not overly commercialised like other historic parts of China. There's a sense of reality."
Despite his penchant for alcohol and tobacco, Li , who's in his early 40s, doesn't look his age. Born in 1976, in Hunan's Anhua county, he was the youngest of three boys and quickly found he had a problem with authority.
"I only managed 18 months of university in Changsha," says the photographer, who had attempted to study fine art. "I could never tolerate Chinese-style education."
At 21, Li waved goodbye to the remote river town of his birth - famous only for its signature dark tea.
"Until I was 30, I drifted between Beijing and Guangzhou," he recalls. "I worked as a hotel wedding curator, a calligraphy teacher, an advertising designer, a commercial photographer and a fine-food journalist. I never lasted longer than a year in any profession."
"My colleagues heard my opinions and thought I was from another planet," he says.
Going it alone in 2006, Li rode the economic wave of the Hu Jintao era with lucrative freelance gigs.
"I'd been thinking about how to be an artist for years," he says, "and when I arrived in Shenzhen, I finally began to work on the ideas I'd stockpiled."
Li began to gain attention as a photographer with his controversial "The New Chinese" series of images - a biting, satirical commentary on consumer culture that polarised audiences. The photographs, often taken surreptitiously while shooting corporate functions, were exhibited twice at the Lianzhou Foto festival, in Guangdong province, and eventually overseas in galleries in Spain and the Netherlands.
Keen not to be typecast as a Chinese Martin Parr, the British photographer best known for his sardonic take on modern life, Li put the award-winning series to bed in 2016. He had already turned his attention to less garish projects, notably "The Invisible World" (2009-2012), a haunting homage to Shenzhen's migrant workers who live in the margins beyond the gilded high-rise districts. The set was exhibited at the Dali International Photography Festival 2017, in Yunnan province, to much acclaim.
However, "From the Zi River to the Yangtze", Li's largest, and most ambitious, photo series, takes him beyond his adopted home to capture China's interior.
"Many southerners have a real feeling for water, having grown up on its edge," Li says, pouring himself another glass of beer. "At just nine years of age, I could already swim across the Zi River, and it was much choppier back then, before they dammed it upstream. When we were young, if we wanted to go to Yiyang [the prefecture-level city], you'd have to take a boat. There was no motorway. Life revolved around the river.
"In imperial times, Anhua produced tea, as well as bamboo and rice," he says. "It would be sent up the Zi River, via Dongting Lake, to the Yangtze, from where it could travel all the way down to rich cities at the river's end: places like Yangzhou and Nanjing."
A 15-year-old Li took a three-week trip on a cousin's boat that transported freight to Wuhan. "I worked, cleaning dishes and doing odd jobs.
"We passed countless riverside villages and towns, the overnight mystery of Dongting Lake, all the way to the banks of the Yangtze River, which left a profound impression on me. At night, heavy rain pattered on the boat. A group of dark grey, finless dolphins kept jumping out of the water beside us."
"I'm using an old Hasselblad film camera," he says, of his pale-hued and ghostly prints, which are the antithesis of the colour-soaked digital images of his earlier work. "It just fitted the mood I wanted to convey."
The subject matter remains recognisably Li, however: his camera once again trained on the dispossessed, the absurd and the juxtaposition of the commercial and the ancient.
"If you tie them together, 'The New Chinese,' 'From the Zi River to the Yangtze' and 'Peasant Park' [another Li series], you'll see China, in all its horror and beauty," the photographer says. "As an artist, I can't help but look down on this chaotic world like an alien who has just arrived and is wondering what the hell is going on. It's about asking questions."
The Zi River, in Anhua county, Hunan province, in February 2013.
A man prays at Yiyang's Bailu Temple, in February 2012.
In Anqing, on the edge of the Yangtze [in Anhui province, in November], I encountered a Muslim funeral, Li says. The deceased was an old lady. The Communist Party has some special policies for ethnic minorities. The Hui don't have to be cremated like Han people. They have their own ethnic graveyard and can be buried according to their traditions. At the funeral, people led prayers. No one cried. It was not until all the guests had dispersed that the low sobbing of the daughter of the deceased could be heard. This made me feel a sense of solemn ritual. Muslims don't use coffins, wrapping the body in white cloth and placing it directly into the earth.
A military band return from a funeral, near Yiyang, in April 2010. They are an amateur group, and the old lady in the front row [fourth from right] is my aunt, Li says. At the time, I was taking photographs in the countryside near her home and I did not expect to run into this surreal scene. I learned that this military band is very popular in rural areas of Hunan. Whether for funerals, weddings or other ceremonies, everyone likes to hire such bands; they consider it renao - lively. My aunt and her retired colleague organised the band, not to make money but to be happy, and to make their retirement more interesting.
A couple enjoy a cup of tea in the ancient town of Huishan, in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, in May 2013.
A man outside his home in Wuxi, in April 2013.
A man soaks up some sun in Xiangyin, Hunan, in March 2013.
Jiujiang, Jiangxi, in May last year. On the bus from [porcelain-producing town] Jingdezhen to Jiujiang, this tattooed and overweight young man grabbed my attention. His chest is decorated with green dragons and red tigers, and his back is inked with three of the country's famous stars. What is even more bizarre is that he has an eye in the middle of his forehead. In Chinese myths and legends, the god Erlang had a third eye. I talked with him and learned that he works in demolition in Jiujiang. I suspect he has a 'black society' background.
Construction workers pose in front of buildings they worked on and behind a real-estate advert in Jingdezhen, in May 2017.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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