(In)directions: Queerness in Chinese Contemporary Photography by Phil Zheng Cai

Eli Klein Gallery is honored to present “(In)directions: Queerness in Chinese Contemporary Photography” a group exhibition and catalog of 21 artists who see queerness as a possibility, embracing the imaginative even when the status quo might otherwise be limiting. The title acknowledges that the means through which each artist expresses this notion takes a variety of modes in the photographic medium, at times boldly and directly celebrating the beauty of queer bodies and at other times obliquely gesturing, winking, or suggesting that another reality is at play. This range of photographic expressions of queerness is similar to common understandings of discursive approaches in Chinese culture, from the artfully indirect to the abundantly explicit. The show brings together the present and future, a spectrum of genders and sexualities, questions and expressions of identities and beliefs, assertions about kinship and belonging, and complications and affirmations about cultural sensibilities into a critical conversation facilitated by photographic images that document, celebrate, complicate, invite, expose, question, and destabilize.