Wenxin Zhang: Beast by the Waterfall Guesthouse

Wenxin Zhang is a Chinese visual artist. Photography is one of the channels she uses to unload her urge to express herself. While now she is exploring other artistic genres, we go back in time and pause on a fragment from her days as a photographer. Beast by the Waterfall Guesthouse is part of a trilogy, exhibited at Lianzhou International Photography Festival, in 2014. In this project Zhang uses her powerful cinematic style to portray an immersive experience she undertook: getting lost in the forest to rediscover primitive sensations. The need to wander stemmed from her realization that adult life leads us to rationalize our surroundings, to seize the spatio-temporal dimensions of the world and determine our position within it. “When kids were still kids, all necessities of life were offered and received in cupped hands, no need to create a stake in the world”, she writes. Through this series, Zhang rediscovers the silence of the woods, the humane breath of the sleeping beast that, in her childhood fantasies, embodied the world.