O Zhang

O Zhang (Chinese: 张 鸥, pinyin: Zhang Ou, born November 23, 1976, Guangzhou, China) is a Chinese artist based in New York. Although she is best known for her photographs depicting Chinese youth, Zhang also makes paintings, short films and installations. She was trained as an oil painter at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing before moving to London where she earned two MAs, the first in Fine Arts from Byam Shaw School of Art, and the second from the Royal College of Art in Photography. In 2004 Zhang moved to New York City where she has since lived and worked, making yearly returns to her native China. O Zhang is represented by CRG Gallery, NY, which will present her first American solo exhibition, The World Is Yours (But Also Ours), in December, 2008. Zhang is also represented by Pékin Fine Arts in Beijing and by FA Projects in London.

Zhang was born in the city of Guangzhou to English-translator parents who were forced, by the Chinese Cultural Revolution government, to move to the edge of Jishou, a village in the Hunan Province, soon after Zhang’s birth. In the countryside Zhang was exposed to and learned the language of ethnic minority groups like the Miao and the Tujia, and demonstrated her ability to adapt to situations where she was an “outsider.” Zhang remembers her childhood as “very peaceful and colorful,” and notes that this is where she established the foundation for her aesthetic preferences.

Zhang attended schools in both China and the United Kingdom.

After six and a half years in Jishou, Zhang and her parents moved back to Guangzhou, which she considers to be her hometown. Zhang studied art at the Guangzhou Children’s Palace, the Guangzhou Academy of Art affiliate Middle School and at nineteen she left Guangzhou to attend the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. It was in Beijing that Zhang discovered photography, yet to her dismay the Central Academy did not have a photography department. Thus, Zhang taught herself photography technique after hours when she often snuck into the school studios with models in order to shoot. For her first series, Masterpieces in my Eyes, Zhang projected images of Western figurative masterpieces on nude female models and photographed them in an effort to impose, “the male standards of female form” upon the models. Zhang graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2000.

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