A’s Fables
Amount：story pages: 22+ / animal photos: 52+
on going project
“A’s Fables” comprises a series of photographs of various dimensions, of animals taken at zoos around the world, combined with altered pages of storybooks. These images and texts were produced from photographs shot using digital cameras and alterations by hand, with the aim of weaving together the fantasies and power relations created by personification and metaphor.
XiNing Zoo_China_2019
Shanghai Zoo_China_2016
Hangzhou Zoo_China_2018
Shanghai Zoo_China_2016
Guangzhou Chimelong Safari Park_China_2016
XiNing Zoo_China_2019
Shenzhen safari park_China_2016
Artist statement
Since the beginning of 2015
, photographing and observing the city, as well as the living things that inhabit it, have become inescapable habits of mine. In a self-established database of videos and images I have taken at the zoo, I sought to pick out images that were worthy of a contemplative gaze, and selectively added black bars that covered the faces of the animals in the images. My work is based on my personal emotions and made according to the rule that the images must contain both visible living things as well as artificially made objects. I try to transform the trivial into something important, using deliberately created points of focus—the black bars—to break past the existing order of viewing images. In 2018, I started reading and modifying the stories from Aesop’s Fables. In 2019, I tried to combine these altered images and texts into a book.