Evan Perkins and Zhidong Zhang In Conversation
Zhidong Zhang: Hi Evan! Greetings from the other side of the internet. It must have been months since the last time we talked in real life. Insanity. Time flies much faster in this state of chaos, right? Anyhow, I’m excited for this belated conversation.
It’s so strange, in an attempt to satisfy my ego with nostalgia I was searching through my memories and recalling the scene when we last met, I found myself swamped and surrendered to the accumulation of past memories. It reminds me of what Barthes wrote about the awareness of “having-been-there,” and its inclination in granting every photograph, or in my case, photographic memory, a touch of longing and nostalgia. I began to realize, at that moment, I was nostalgic for the inevitable nostalgia. Okay, if all those ramblings make any sense to you, I’d be curious to know your relationship to nostalgia.
Evan Perkins: While we’re only a few miles away from each other, we may as well be on opposite sides of the world, or at least it feels that way to me.
As for nostalgia, it’s a powerful sensation, one that I’ve become more and more skeptical of in recent years. It can coat our memories with an idyllic light and color similar to a Gareth McConnell photograph. I can see the comfort it provides, but it also has the tendency to blind us and distort reality.
We’re witnessing the poisonous effect of nostalgia played out in the emboldened right-wing politics plaguing us here in America. “Make America Great Again,” is at its core, a nostalgic cry. Nostalgia can create delirious alternate realities for those who get stuck inside the seduction of reductive simplicity. It’s something I haven’t been able to ignore, and plays a large role in the photographs I’ve been making over the last couple of years.
E.P.
ZZ: The term “nostalgia” definitely becomes charged when it’s put either in a psychoanalytical or political context. Especially when it comes to the active role of image making, the expression of nostalgia becomes a rather peculiar and insular action, or even hazardous in negligent hands. Given the fact that nostalgia is often manifest through personal experiences, and therefore is only decipherable to those who hold the key. Nostalgia in my practice doesn't necessarily function as escapist looking back, indulging in the past passively (as it's easily assumed to be), rather I hope it could be an active and constructive element. I imagine the unavoidably and overly nostalgic part would become a catalyst to decipher the undecodable in later years. Looking back to the work I made in the past three years, I see nostalgia as an invisible bond that connects my past, present, and future as I travel back and forth between the US and China.
In your latest body of work, Grab Your Bibles, There’s a Storm Comin,’ what strikes me most is the strong undercurrent of candidness and earnestness in these photographs. You’re addressing your upbringing, religion, politics, the history of whiteness and its accompanying privileges, in such an unabashed and straightforward way. How did this work come about?
E.P.
EP: When beginning to photograph for Grab Your Bibles, There’s a Storm Comin’ (2019-Present), I employed a skepticism towards the values and beliefs I was handed down growing up in both an American and evangelical community. Over the last decade or so I’ve been reevaluating this programming as I was experiencing a dissonance between what I had been told and what I was experiencing in the world. Up until recently I hadn’t considered that this inquisitive deconstruction could be integrated into my artistic process, but these ideas began to subconsciously creep into the images I was making. I had been witnessing an escalation in the white evangelical community’s adoption of radical viewpoints, tying their beliefs to a nationalism centered around whiteness and their own perceived persecution. Thinking back to my time in this community, I began to explore certainty and how it's used to both unite and divide.
How do you think your personal upbringing has affected how you think about and make images? You’ve written about how your work Natural Impersonation is closely tied to your experience being raised in a conservative Chinese family, as well as in a culture that represses the LGBTQIA+ community. In your work, you implement conflicting ideas of desire, trauma, humor, fashion, and fetish, both in the portraits and still lives that you construct. How do these personal experiences manifest in your image making? What is the programming that you’re deconstructing as well as expanding upon?
Left: E.P. Right: Z.Z.
ZZ: I don’t know if you feel the same, but I think in most cases, if not all, that upbringing plays a significant role in a photographer’s practice--not just limited to subject matter, but also in one’s way of thinking and approach to image making. In my own practice, I feel most of the time I’m negotiating with my own upbringing through an active act of recognition and reconfiguration. As a closeted gay kid raised in a traditional Chinese family, the expression of true identity becomes a luxury, or even a taboo if it doesn’t sound too daunting and self-pitying. There is no doubt that queer identities in China have become increasingly visible--as the government’s elusive policy towards homosexuality actually provides spaces for the formation of queer community and activist networks--but same-sex romance and sexual discourses are still outside the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable in society. This is especially true within my own family. So I think in a lot of ways, the work I’m making is derivative from my own personal experiences growing up in that suppressed societal and familial backdrop. I think making work about being queer is an act of imbuing queer invisibility with agency and power, and encouraging myself to see beyond what the dominant culture chooses to make visible and accessible. It’s important for me to make work that doesn’t subscribe to these limited aesthetics and audiences.
Z.Z.
I think making work about being queer is an act of imbuing queer invisibility with agency and power, and encouraging myself to see beyond what the dominant culture chooses to make visible and accessible. It’s important for me to make work that doesn’t subscribe to these limited aesthetics and audiences. - Z. Zhang
ZZ: Do you have a specific audience in mind when making Grab Your Bibles, There’s a Storm Comin’ ?
EP: Thank you for providing a deeper cultural and personal context to your work, I appreciate the openness! I don’t know if you experience this as well, but I tend to get embarrassed when I share details surrounding my upbringing. It’s not based on shame, but rather I liken it to discovering that someone is peering into my apartment, or reading my text messages on the train. A type of insecurity via voyeurism, I suppose. Whether or not we choose to hold onto our familial values, none of us were able to choose the context into which we arrived on this planet, and in my own experience, I spend half of my time thinking, “How did I get here?” and the other half, “Now where do I go?”
Left: Z.Z. Right: E.P.
EP: I’m glad you brought up the idea of audience, as it's something that I’m constantly negotiating. There are days when artmaking feels vain and self-indulgent--an invitation for like-minded people to congratulate one another for their ideologies and intellect displayed on white walls. But then I’ve also had days when people reach out and share how the work has given a language to their own experiences of growing up in evangelical spaces and how they’ve been navigating that baggage as well.
For me, the work is most valuable when it acts as a catalyst for the same questioning and conversations I’ve been having internally for years. This work has allowed me to bring up topics of religion, white supremacy, power, nationalism, faith, and non-dual thinking with the same people I grew up with in these white evangelical communities.
I don’t want this work to force a strict narrative dictating how I believe someone should think or act. I’m not even necessarily advocating for people to abandon their relationship with religion. But rather, my hope is that it provides the space to initiate the self-examination and difficult conversations that are necessary to have if we’re to deconstruct our inherited ideas of certainty and dualism.
E.P.
EP: I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on how to best circulate this type of work.How do we expand our reach as artists to share our ideas with people not deeply involved in this community? We have to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that it’s quite a niche audience. If you had the opportunity to share your work with a specific person or group outside of the world of art and photography, who would you choose to share it with and why? What would you want them to draw from your images?
ZZ: I have to say, I constantly feel that kind of embarrassment when talking about my work. It took me a long time for me to get comfortable sharing such information with others who I’m not really close to. It feels the same every time I show my work to an unfamiliar audience. However uncomfortable it is, such embarrassment actually serves as a catalyst for deeper conversations both within myself and my interactions with the outer world. What does it mean to be a gay man in modern China? Is it possible to create a homosexual mode of life within societal and familial supression? And to what extent does representation reflect social reality?
Z.Z.
ZZ: I think photography for me, at large, is a description and an expression of rather peculiar experiences that are attached inseparably to the maker. It probably sounds self-serving, but in all sincerity, my impulse and desire is to make pictures of my loved ones–not limited to human subjects per se, but also objects, places, scenarios, or scents–that are reminiscent of a fading memory. And in turn, I’d like them to be my beloved audience with whom I’m willing to share that sense of empathy, without any hesitation or reservation. Of course if I’m lucky enough, I’ll encounter new people and new experiences. Given time and perseverance, I’ll open up and fall in love with them as well, little by little.
Z.Z.
EP: I’m glad we’ve come full circle and are back to talking about nostalgia! The way you describe making images while thinking of loved ones, places, scents, are all connected to this search for traces of our pasts in the present. While I chose to initially voice my cynicism with nostalgia, you’re providing an alternative with the intimacy you create in your work. We’re all accumulations of the small moments, memories, and experiences that we’ve amassed over the course of our lives, and oftentimes as artists, we use these specificites as the foundations of our work. I’m now sitting here asking myself, “Is photography inherently interwoven with nostalgia?”
Personally, I view the medium as a way to continually ask questions. Hints, traces, paradox, ephemera, these are the elements of the medium that interest me. I love how we’re able to contradict ourselves, continually questioning our intentions and biases through seemingly disparate imagery and ideas. I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this.
Z.Z.
ZZ: Yes back to nostalgia. What a lovely and seductive word. I’m totally with you regarding the potential cynicism you mentioned earlier. Thinking retrospectively, way back to the discovery of the camera obscura which was designed for artists to achieve an easy sketch. At the very beginning, the impulse behind is merely to create a device that “records” the light. How candid and objective it is! Anything but nostalgic.
Z.Z.
ZZ: I believe we can both agree that photography does not capture reality. Something changes fundamentally, the moment when the light hits the negative or the sensor. What kind of magic does a good photograph hold that I somehow forget it’s a scene extracted and repurposed from real life? In my own practice, I’m interested in the gap of photographic representation between the real and the imagined, and specifically, its functionality to articulate and manifest desires and sexual fantasies through particular regimes of representation. While constructing the image, I’m drawn to signifiers that are most readable for us, which allows the constructed images to transcend my own personal experience, and become perceptible and relatable to a broader audience.
I’ll pass the baton to you. I’m eager to know your thoughts on visual cliche in terms of image constructing?
E.P.
EP: I’m interested in using pre-existing visual languages and repurposing them through the act of photographing. Growing up in evangelical circles, the visual language presented to me was simple and digestible. Nothing could be challenging, it had to reinforce previously existing beliefs. It didn’t have to be good, it just had to be familiar. There was such a fear around exposure to anything outside of the heavily vetted canon of appropriate media, imagery, books, music, etc. While beginning to make photographs for Grab Your Bibles, There’s a Storm Comin’, I wanted to use the text and imagery from my youth as a way to explore this cultural addiction to certainty I was raised in. I began to reexamine these visual tropes and sought them out when photographing.
E.P.
EP: There’s a dark humor that creeps into these images in context with the work as a whole. They’re heartbreaking to me. I remember being so afraid to challenge my beliefs growing up, because deep down I knew that they were insufficient and was fearful of what that meant for my own identity. Who would I be without these beliefs? Where would I belong? Religion is inseparably linked to identity and community, which makes it even more difficult to break free from.
E.P.
I remember being so afraid to challenge my beliefs growing up, because deep down I knew that they were insufficient and was fearful of what that meant for my own identity. Who would I be without these beliefs? Where would I belong? - E. Perkins
EP: From what I’ve witnessed growing up in America, not being able to see beyond our own insular experiences has greatly contributed to the divisions and hate that we find ourselves in now. There’s a simplicity to tying your beliefs to your identity, and frankly, I’m not sure if it’s avoidable. It becomes easier to create an “enemy” through the otherning of those different from the group.
While this work is a reflection on my personal upbringing in an evangelical community, I want it to be used as an examination of our obsession with certainty and the rigidity of inherited beliefs on a larger scale. I was taught that there was good and evil, as these extremes were simpler to ascertain. A non-dual approach to our belief systems is necessary for seeing outside of ourselves and creating a sense of shared empathy with those around us. I have no idea what the antidote is to eradicate the hate that feels at the forefront of our cultural identity, but I believe that this approach to questioning our inherited biases and not allowing them to remain inseparably tied to our identity is a crucial first step.
I know I’ve DRAMATICALLY wandered away from your original question, but it’s all connected to me. These ideas have been the foundations for this new body of work and are continually evolving as the world unfolds around us.
ZZ: Wow Evan, what you’ve just articulated is profound and empowering beyond words. I want to thank you for being so honest and vulnerable in this liminal space we shared as “pen pals”.
As I’m writing down those words, it starts snowing outside. The snowflakes hit on my window, and melt into droplets in just a few seconds. At this moment, there are so many thoughts fleeting in my mind but my fingers are reluctant to keep up on the keyboard. How hard to grasp and how easy to let go? I’ll rest myself so that I will always know that there will be a dark hollow awaiting a beam of light. Instead, I’ll share a poem with you. Facing the sea by Hai Zi.
***
From tomorrow on, I will be a happy man.
Grooming, chopping and traveling all over the world.
From tomorrow on, I will care for foodstuff and vegetables.
Living in a house towards the sea, with spring blossoms.
From tomorrow on, write to each of my dear ones.
Telling them of my happiness.
What the lightning of happiness has told me.
I will spread it to each of them.
Give a warm name for every river and every mountain.
Strangers, I will also wish you happiness.
May you have a brilliant future!
May you lovers eventually become spouses!
May you enjoy happiness in this earthly world!
I only wish to face the sea, with spring blossoms.
***
Z.Z.