Zhang Xianyong is part of a new wave of young photographers emerging from China. Inspired by both traditional story telling such as the Chinese Opera and contemporary images of the West, Zhang Xianyong’s photographs are carefully staged tableaux. His work is fresh and humorous, reflecting the dilemma of finding a place inside modern China that has one foot in the past and another in the inevitable globalization of the present. Eastern and Western civilization, foreign and native culture, all of them are intermixed to form multiple combinations in the word around us. Zhang Xianyong tries to dismantle these horizontal and vertical elements, coaxing them to mingle and collide. Disorders of time and space, intersections of multiple time points, the reinterpretation of characters and events form the special characteristics of his work. Zhang Xianyong works and lives in Shanghai.