Zhang Shuguang

Zhang Shuguang (b. 1984, Yongtai, Fujian) is a contemporary artist and writer working in conceptual art through the medium of digital photography, with a practice spanning more than two decades. His two principal series, Seeing Without Seeing and Beyond Appearance, focus respectively on the manifestation of thingness within the city's "second nature" and the perceptual recovery of natural forms. His work as a whole can be summarized as a single gesture: return — a return to the moment before concept and naming have hardened into fixity, to that original instant of feeling the swaying spring on his mother's back.
Within art history, his concept of Readymade Abstraction grows out of a perceptual experience rooted in the hills of central Fujian and in the contemplation of "form and emptiness are not two": moving nothing, creating no new image, and instead letting forgotten walls and plants manifest of themselves through minimal digital purification. These images are neither a created abstraction nor an abstraction of expression, but a Discovered Abstraction and a Purified Abstraction. This path shares certain outward affinities with Duchamp's readymade tradition and with the "found abstraction" current in Western photography, but its ...

2025 — Classified According to Their Kind, Southeast Art Center, Fuzhou
2025 — 10th PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai, Shanghai Exhibition Center, Shanghai
2024 — Beyond Appearance, BJOY IMAGE, Xiamen
2023 — 1st JINGPHOTO Art Fairs, 798 Art Zone, Beijing
2022 — The Emergence of the Manifest Image, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Xiamen
2021 — Seeing Without Seeing, Suzhou True Color Art Museum, Suzhou