RONG RONG

In 1986, RongRong earned his degree from the Fujian Industrial Art Institute, where he began his studies in painting but, then changed his focus to photography. RongRong arrived in Beijing in 1992, already committed to photography as his primary means of expression. Young and impoverished, he gravitated toward an area known as the East Village that, though desperately poor, soon became known as one of the key locations for the creation of new art in China.

Eventually, RongRong moved beyond the confines of the East Village to areas that were on the point of disappearing under the wrecker's ball. In those places, it was the traces of what had been destroyed rather than the promise of the new that he chose to record with his camera. In the urban environment, where so much architectural change has occurred, RongRong commenced a ruins series in which he documented abandoned, dilapidated buildings and their traces of human occupation. RongRong's lyrical images of rubble and solitary walls are poignant examples of a lost world, shoved aside to make way for the heraldry of consumerism.

He has been recognised for collaboration with his artistic partner and wife, inri, whom he met in 2000. When the two artists met, their interests moved from personal introspection to an opening up to the world. They sought to explore their joint relationship with the landscape around them and to create their own space in it. In the way ancient artists might accompany a painting of a landcape with a poem, RongRong and inri use their own bodies to add a note of lyricism to the landscapes they discover.