​HUANG XIAO LIANG | 黄晓亮

Huang Xiaoliang was born in Xiangxi, Hunan province in 1985. He is a 2009 graduate from Qingdao University, where he studied Digital Media. In 2010, Huang was awarded the prestigious Tierney Fellowship as well as the Three Shadows Photography Award, and the Fang Jun Art Award by the Beijing Today Art Museum. In 2011 Huang Xiaoliang was nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award. Huang Xiaoliang currently divides his time between Changsha and Beijing. 

Huang Xiaoliang is a young emerging artist from Hunan who is currently working in Beijing.

"In this era of explosive information overload, we often feel the repetition of life, boredom, or numbness, so people seem to always be looking forward to the emergence or expectation of something else, some other form of stimulation, while gradually numbing to our surroundings and existence before us. If we can assume both the role of spectator and participant to understand everyday life around, the 'surprise' of life lies therein and is in fact all around us."

Xiaoliang Huang’s works are mostly about daily life, and by “daily life” he doesn’t mean anything necessarily extraordinary or negative. His unique photographic technique creates a cinematic, dream-like quality of the subconscious, or magical realism worlds out of projected shadows and layered images. By studying the most fundamental elements of photography – light and shadow – and following the ancient tradition of Chinese shadow puppetry, Huang stretches the boundaries of photographic representation in a masterful display of pre-production skills.

The photographs included in the book, Huang conceived them as if drifting through daily life from both the inside and out, as an objective bystander in the world, yet living as an active participant in this world as well. The most interesting part of this perspective is that the artist is able to look at his surroundings as a theater, a stage, and as time goes by, the storyline is constantly expanding, and he is also part of the story/history. This so-called daily life is the world everyday world that continually unfolds to creates our history. Although individually we and the ordinary events around us are often very small, but with a certain vantage point, everything can be seen as integral to the ongoing creation of history. What we tend to most easily overlook is the ordinary daily life all around us, and history and culture is the accumulation of this daily life unfolding before us.

https://vimeo.com/269071473