LUO YANG

Child of this generation, Luo Yang depicts the emergence of a Chinese urban youth who challenge social codes and stereotypes. Through her lens, she pays homage to the individuality and personality of her subjects. Femininity, gender, identity: it reflects the profound upheavals in China today.

It was in 2007, at the age of 23, that she began the Girls series, which made her known worldwide. For ten years, Luo Yang follows a hundred women through the transformations of their bodies and their lives, capturing the delicate passage from adolescence to adulthood. It’s a bit as if the photographer had held up a mirror to see herself grow and evolve at the same time as her models, to capture their (her) young girl’s emotions ...

Today, Luo Yang is 35 years old. Boys and girls alike, post-teens and young adults alike, now capture his attention. In her new series Youth, she takes an interest in her younger siblings, and through them explores the changes in a now globalized Chinese society whose transformation has taken on unprecedented proportions. Born in the 90s and early 2000s, his models come from an urban and cool generation well anchored in its time while being out of step with the mainstream trends that thrill young people today in China.

Using film, she strives to ‘document’ a new youth that she rubs shoulders with on a daily basis. Tattooed, hair dyed yellow or pink, ultra-stylish... those who pose in front of the photographer’s lens—musicians, artists, bloggers, friends or strangers—care about their image. But for all that, nothing seems manufactured for the objective of Luo Yang. Behind each portrait, we can guess singular stories: young adults already mature behind their childish appearance, or on the contrary, who play like the children they always are a little, boys who challenge the codes of virility by their disturbing fragility, girls who proudly display their androgynous character, couples who love each other.