Zhong Lin
Early life and cultural influence
Zhong Lin is a self-taught photographer originally from Malaysia who rapidly became famous in 2020 for her project "photo 365". She started her project because of the Covid-19 pandemic through Instagram. Zhong Lin thinks "photography is one of the simplest ways to present its beauty and allure" (Dinsdale 2020) and represents her ideas through her photography. Zhong Lin's cultural background plays an essential role in her art journey. She was born and grew up in Malaysia, and then moved to Taiwan. (Tsui 2020). The infusion of cultures influenced her style of art and became her inspiration. Furthermore, her family strongly influences her ways of creation, especially her father. Zhong Lin's father is a cinema aficionado, and he has often taken her to watch movies since she was a kid. (Dinsdale 2020). In addition, her parents were educated in different cultures, which also affected her mindset. Based on her interview, Zhong Lin's father speaks English, and her mom is educated in Chinese, so she has been brought up in a culturally diverse environment (Nonino 2021), which further cultivates her art style.
Style
Zhong Lin's photography style is unique and demonstrates the connection between humans, nature, and life. Her artworks often include female bodies and use them as a medium to express her understanding of nature, connection, and love. She often uses natural elements such as water to emphasize the feeling of void. Her photographs have a bright and vibrant tone that brings people strong visual contrasts. The angles of her photos are unique. Many of them focus on specific female body parts and create a sense of exaggeration.
The capture of body parts takes an uncommon view of "beauty" by focusing on a single piece of a woman's body. It creates room for the audience to picture the rest of the image and extend their mind to a social and spiritual level about humans.
Her pictures are also delicate in destigmatizing women's bodies. They represent the diversity of women's bodies and directly tell her audiences that women should not be defined by their body types, ages, or appearances.
She does not limit her models to a specific body type or age, and she includes techniques like Photoshop to create magnificent effects to demonstrate her ideas. She likes to play and experiment with colour palettes to create different effects and results (Nonino 2021).
Many of her photos include impossible scenes, such as in one of her photos, a woman has three heads with different facial expressions. The woman in the image is in a thinking mode, and the strong contrast between the background and the woman creates a sharp tone. Elements such as water, blood, flowers, and body paints are commonly used in her artworks.
Her artworks also demonstrate her thoughts on social topics like pollution, expressing her concerns about the environment and philosophical issues such as the coexistence of humans and other creatures.
Representation of women
Zhong Lin's images often include her thoughts about life and women. Although there are many representations of women in her artworks, there is clear evidence of the normalization of sexuality. Based on her ideology, she wants to create art freely, which includes the representation of sex.
Some of her photos, such as the one she made on day 301, captured a female body with a flower covering the private part of the model. This image demonstrates the beauty of women's bodies and creates a sense of secretness. This also plays a role in destigmatizing sex by talking about sexual representation openly and freely.
In another work, she uses a black cat and a female model in black behind it, the facial expression and the eye expression of the woman are quite similar. In this work, she represents that every being has a spirit and has a common beauty. The beauty of a woman is like a black cat, full of spirit, mysterious, submissive, and unrestrained at the same time.
Art Market
Zhong Lin has collaborated with various famous media such as Vogue, The Perfect Magazine, etc. She established a long-time relationship with The Perfect Magazine based on her Instagram posts. She also gained attention from other people to involve her in projects. Artists such as Steve Mackey collaborated with her after gaining various attention from the field. The purpose of that collaboration mainly focused on raising awareness for a minority group, underground musicians—this collaboration closely connected to her ideology, bringing more attention to minority groups through art. Her career is developing rapidly. She later began to create an advertisement aesthetic video for Gucci. She also had many collaborations with Chinese celebrities, such as Ouyang Nana recently, one of the top influencers in China.
Social media exposure
During the pandemic, Zhong Lin created the "Photo 365" project. She posted one portrait every day. This project gained her a lot of media exposure, and the public started to notice the rising star in the photo industry. Media like "Id_Italy," "Milk," "Ignant" began to pay attention to her in early 2020. The magazines enormously boosted her fame and gained around 346k followers on Instagram. She also actively participated in the Chinese market, with 40k followers on Weibo. Her career seems not to have been influenced by the pandemic since it began because she usually does online media. Based on her Instagram data, comments about her posts reached a peak in September 2020, when her project was halfway through. This is mainly because of the help of interviews she did with media channels.
Project 365
Zhong Lin is famous for her project 365. Her idea for creating this project was from the results of the pandemic. As a photographer who uses travel as one of her inspirations, she found herself stuck in Taiwan, China, due to the Covid-19 travel restriction (Nonino 2021). Because of the limits of the pandemic, she decided to start this project on April 23, 2020. Based on her interview with "Dazed," her initial thoughts about the project are that she believes art should not have boundaries. This project starts from 'nothing' as everything begins with null and void. (Dinsdale 2020). She was travelling and working in different places for some years and constantly meeting talented people around the world (Dinsdale 2020). She used those experiences as her inspiration, and she was eager to explore and try new things. Zhong Lin also faced a lot of difficulties during her process of creation. A lot of them came from inner struggles. She imposed quite a lot of stress on herself in the first and the second week when the project just started. She had difficulty in coming up with ideas and finding collaborators such as subjects, hair, and makeup artists (Dinsdale 2020). With the help of her assistant, Big Wang, she successfully recovered from her low point, and the project has gone smoothly since then. On the last day of Project 365, she created a photo in which almost all her female models stand in a piece of red fabric, facing where the sun rises. I think it is an expression of hope for the future of women, the future of photography.
References
1.Emily Dinsdale， "Photographer Zhong Lin is creating a new image every day for one whole year." Dazed, July 27, 2020. https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/49922/1/photographer-zhong-lin-project-365-new-image-every-day-for-a-year
2.Karina Tsui. "The surreal and sensuous world of photographer Zhong Lin." CNN Style, September 8, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/beauty-photographer-zhong-lin/index.html
3.DI CHIARA BARDELLI NONINO. "Zhong Lin - Project 365." Vogue Italy, April 22, 2021. https://www.vogue.it/fotografia/article/zhong-lin-project-365
4.Looft, Ruxandra. “Girlgaze: Photography, Fourth Wave Feminism, and Social Media Advocacy.” Continuum (Mount Lawley, W.A.) 31, no. 6 (2017): 892–902.
5.Rolien Zonneveld, "Zhong Lin challenged herself to take one portrait a day for an entire year." i-D Magazine, July 16, 2020. https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/ep4a9z/zhong-lin-photography-interview
6.Steph Wade. "In Project 365, Zhong Lin’s Vibrant Photography Captures the Subtleties of Everyday Life." IGNANT, https://www.ignant.com/2020/12/24/in-project-365-zhong-lins-vibrant-photography-captures-the-subtleties-of-everyday-life/
This article "Zhong Lin" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Zhong Lin. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
