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About Publisher
La Maison De Z is an ongoing project focusing on Chinese contemporary photography and independent publications. Using publishing as a way of researching the intricate relationship between realities and memories, La Maison De Z was founded by French-Chinese artist Zhen Shi in 2015. The first book was published in 2018 and the project allows a growing audience the discovery of the most recent works of emerging Chinese artists.
For inquiries contact Zhen Shi, zhen@lamaisondez.com
Even Us, Even Me
In the series Lost Souls that Sun Yanchu began in 2013, the subject can be loosely described as landscape, but it feels like much more. The images are full of strange details that reveal his eye for observation. Sun’s obsession belongs to a state of mind. What he observed most keenly were those minutiae within the changing environs, which might be construed as an attempt to provide evidence of existence.
As through the evolution of shanshui painting in China, in his work, nature serves as metaphor or vehicle for conveying a state of mind.
On the basis of Lost Souls, the book Even Us, Even Me includes images from Obsessed and Sun’s latest work Ficciones.
Publisher: La Maison De Z
Artist(s): Sun Yanchu
Contributor(s): Designed by Zhen Shi and Yinhe Cheng
Publication Date: 2019
Binding: Softcover with PVC jacket
Dimensions: 18.5 x 25.5 x 0.9 cm
ISBN: 978-2-9564071-2-6
Price: €200 (Special Box Set), €45 (Normal Edition)
TO PURCHASE: lamaisondez.com/product-page/even-us-even-me
About Author(s)
Sun Yanchu was born in 1978 in Zhou Kou, Henan Province, and currently lives and works in Zhengzhou. Yanchu has recently shown at Musée de l'Élysée (Lausanne), M97 Gallery (Shanghai), Star Gallery (Beijing), Art Basel Hong Kong and Three Shadows Art Centre (Beijing). Yanchu was also nominated for Jimei Arles Discovery Award in 2017, the prize winner of Gucang Dummy Award (Martin Parr Edition) in 2015, the prize winner of Lianzhou New Photography Award in 2011 and carried the MIO Photo Jurors Award of Morimura Yasumasa in 2010.
Uncharted+
Uncharted+ continues to carry the dystopian character of Wang Juyan’s work. As indicated in the title, the book features a series of uncharted landscapes, by their physical existence or by digital collages. From Wang’s project 2084, 2085 and 2086, Uncharted+ is inspired by the ambiguity and power of aerial images, which contains no linear narrative but monumental and metaphorical landscapes.
Publisher: La Maison De Z
Artist(s): Wang Juyan
Contributor(s): Designed by Zhen Shi and Yinhe Cheng
Publication Date: 2019
Binding: Hardcover in silver print, Contains 5 multi-layered booklets in form of byobu
Dimensions: 31 x 19 x 2 cm
ISBN: 978-2-9564071-3-3
Price: €50
TO PURCHASE: lamaisondez.com/product-page/uncharted
About Author(s)
Born in Beijing, Wang Juyan is an image artist currently based in London. Wang earned his BA in London College of Communication and has exhibited widely between China and Europe, including Foam Museum (Amsterdam), Beaconsfield Gallery (London), Base Milano (Milan), Singapore International Photography Festival (Singapore) and was nominated for the Foam Talent award in 2017. The unique visual language of Wang’s work heightens the ambiguities and the historical sublime in his large-scale landscape.
Tragédie, Coïncidence et La Double Vie de L.L.D.M
Tragédie, Coïncidence et La Double Vie de L.L.D.M is the second chapter in the trilogy Memories of Things Past, a fiction-documentary project based on historical records that Zhen Shi started in 2015. She uses a 19th century Belgian family diary as its source, retracing a series of events related to the diary that have taken place over the years. Combining text, image, letters, telephone records, archived material and other media in its presentation, the book seeks to explore the complex relationship between reality and memory in the context of contemporary art.
Publisher: La Maison De Z
Artist(s): Zhen Shi
Contributor(s): Designed by 1 and 1/2 Studio
Publication Date: 2019
Binding: Softcover
Dimensions: 16 x 21 x 1.4 cm
Pages: 192
ISBN: 978-2-9564071-4-0
Price: €45
TO PURCHASE: lamaisondez.com/product-page/trag%C3%A9die-co%C3%AFncidence-et-la-double-vie-de-l-l-d-m
About Author(s)
Zhen Shi was born in 1989, in Shandong, China. The artist employs various media and a process that combines a variety of media. Through her artificial manipulation on individuals' lived experiences by using literature, archival material, theatre and film as her sources, Shi's practice attempts to explore the complex relationship between reality and memory. Shi's practice also seeks to develop a discourse on how time exists and disappears in a soundless way from its historical context and continues to adapt to changing existence.
The artist has had work recently shown at OCAT Institute (Beijing), Lianzhou Foto Festival (Lianzhou), national museum OCAT (Shanghai/Shenzhen), Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Beijing), Fisheye Gallery (Arles), Festival La Gacilly (France) and Festival Circulation(s) (Paris). Zhen Shi was also the prize winner of Emerging Gallery in Festival Photo La Gacilly (2017), nominated for Huayu Youth Award (2019) and for Foam Paul Huf Award (2019).
The Bliss of Conformity
The boyfriend’s parents can’t accept her age after all, and their relationship ended there. That’s how Chinese photographer Yingguang Guo – born in 1983 – became single at the age of 33, a ‘left-over woman’, considered by the eyes of contemporary Chinese society. Burdened by all of the questions she could not find answers to, Guo went to the People’s Park in Shanghai to perform as her own “matchmaker”, holding a sign with her own accomplishments, while the parents came sniffing around to assess her suitability for their children.
In addition to being a place of relaxation, Shanghai People’s Park is also a well-known market for matchmaking for the last 10 years. Hundreds of parents gather there every weekend regardless of the weather, clutching succinct summaries of their children on single information sheets that contain their age, height, education, job and salary, all in an effort to find an acceptable partner for their child to marry.
By photographing daily scenes and details of personal ads at the matchmaking corner, Guo also uses photo-etching techniques to create a series of abstract images that reveal the turbulent truths of arranged marriages.
The Bliss of Conformity is a photo-based mixed media series that combines elements of video, installation and the photobook. Guo explores arranged marriages in China.Starting from her own individual experience and the contemporary social experience at large, Guo combines documentary photography and creative artistic practices to create carefully constructed, highly contrasted visual structures that challenge stereotypical notions of women in a complex socio-cultural consciousness. – He Yining “On the Edge of the Abyss"
Publisher: La Maison De Z
Artist(s): Yingguang Guo
Contributor(s): Designed by 1 and 1/2 Studio
Publication Date: 2018
Binding: Velvet Cover (the book includes three "pockets" from where you can pull out a booklet with screenshots of the artist’s performance video)
Dimensions: 28.7 x 20.5 x 1.4 cm
Pages: 86
ISBN: 978-2-9564071-1-9
Price: €47
TO PURCHASE: lamaisondez.com/product-page/the-bliss-of-conformity
About Author(s)
Yingguang Guo began her photographic career with Reuters, China Daily, and other media groups after graduating from Communication University of China. Later Guo earned her Master in London College of Communication. Her creations revolve around social problems in contemporary China: women on the shelf, arranged marriages, and the pseudo-intimacy between husbands and wives who are the victims of such marriages.
The Bliss of Conformity was nominated for the Discovery Award of the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in 2017 and thereafter was the winner of the Madame Figaro Women Photographers Award.
1974
Li Lang’s work 1974 consists of 390 slides playing in a loop, accompanied by the artist’s voiceover of four stories extracted from his memory of 1974, a summary of the important events of that year, and vignettes of the voiceover on the site.
As an artist who mainly works with photographic images, Li Lang has inserted his observations of history and images in between reality and fiction. The slides in 1974 come from vintage photographs that he collected over the years from different sources, including studio portraits, travel photos, snapshots of work and everyday life scenes. After putting them into different categories, Li hand labeled them with dates based on a fictional timeline.
Li's work reconstructs images and texts so they are no longer just traces of the past. They also explore the dialogue between reality and imagination. Li never asks the audience to accept his narrative of history, instead, he invites us to join him as an explorer of the past.
Publisher: La Maison De Z
Artist(s): Li Lang
Contributor(s): Designed by Zhen Shi and Yinhe Cheng
Publication Date: 2020
Binding: Swiss binding, hardcover with silver and gold hot press
Dimensions: 10 x 15 x 7 cm
Pages: 760
ISBN: 978-2-9564071-5-7
Price: €49
TO PURCHASE: lamaisondez.com/product-page/1974
About Author(s)
Li Lang was born in 1969 and is a visual artist who currently lives and works in Chengdu, China. Beginning his photographic career in the 1990s, Li was awarded the Special Jury Prize by Lianzhou Foto Festival in 2015 with Father and the Mother and won the Medal of Excellence in 1999 with The Yi People. His work has been widely exhibited in China and abroad. His work is collected by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada, A4 Art Museum, Guangdong Museum of Art and Shanghai Art Museum in China, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno in Spain and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Li has often experimented with a deliberately subjective approach in his documentary, as it highlights the photographer’s perspective of the subject or the visual language at play.