Spotlight :

Victoria Jonathan presents the chinese photographer Luo Yang

Born in the 1980s in northern China, Luo Yang in her artistic work, focuses on portraying the emergence of a Chinese urban youth that defies social codes and stereotypes.

In 2007, at the age of 23, she started the Girls series, which will introduce her from Berlin to Hong Kong, Bangkok and Paris. For ten years, Luo Yang followed her models and girlfriends at the mutations of their bodies and their lives, for several years, capturing in particular the delicate transition from adolescence to adulthood. It’s as if the photographer had held a mirror to see herself grow and evolve along with her models, capture their emotions of young girls … “Growing up, to relieve my loneliness, I have tried to find refuge in the tranquility of the photographic image. (…)”

Today, Luo Yang is 35 years old. Boys as much as girls, post-adolescents as young adults, are now capturing her attention. In his new Youth series, shown for the first time at Jimei x Arles this year, Luo Yang is interested in her friends, and explores through them the changes of a Chinese society now globalized and whose mutation has taken a new scale . Born in the 90s and early 2000s, her models are from a cool, urban generation that is firmly rooted in her time while being the opposite of the mainstream currents that make today’s young people tick in China. Using film, she applies for “documenting” a new youth that she meets daily, which she says it is her duty to keep a photographic trace.