Born in Yantai City, Shandong Province, China, Zhang Xiao graduated from the Department of Architecture and Design at Yantai University in 2005. Before becoming a freelance photographer in 2009, he worked as a photographer for Chongqing Morning Post. Zhang Xiao’s images often reveal his unique understanding of today’s China and a sense of surrealism that precisely capture the absurdity in the country due to rampant economic changes. The snapshot aesthetic and adoption of ordinary people from daily settings as protagonists are the common threads through his two iconic series They and Coastline.

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