Zhao, Zhi

Zhao Zhi, born in 1980, is a native of Dalian City, Liaoning Province, China. He graduated from the Department of Photography, Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in July 2004. Currently, he works and lives in Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, serving as a university teacher.

His research interest mainly focuses on exploring the connotation of regional culture and the deep connection between humans and land through the medium of photography. Since January 2016, he has been deeply engaged in the photographic practice of Heilongjiang regional culture, and gradually constructed the creative system of “Land Trilogy” centered on homesickness, focusing on three main themes: cold-region ice and snow, black soil farming, and borderland history. Snow Country Rivers and Lakes, the cold-region series, breaks away from the landscape-oriented expression of ice and snow themes, focuses on the humanistic daily life in the extremely cold regions, and captures the warm poetry of the mundane world amid the biting chill of ice and snow. Vast Sky and Fertile Earth — Beidacang, the land series, takes the black soil farming civilization as the starting point, uses the lens to string together the transformation process of Beidahuang from a wilderness reclamation to a rising granary, and engraves the richness of the land and the perseverance of the cultivators. Chinese Eastern Railway, the borderland series, gathers historical fragments along the extension of the railway tracks, and sorts out the unique development context of the borderlands through the collision between industrial relics and rural settlements.

These three groups of works are not only a multi-dimensional deconstruction of Heilongjiang’s regional culture, but also my personal visual interpretation of homesickness. In the process of creation, I have always taken documentary as the backbone and art as the wings, striving to make every image a carrier of regional spirit, so that the stories of the black land can be seen, understood and remembered.