No.223 Lin Zhi Peng:::..

No. 223, or Lin Zhi Peng, stirs up controversy with his highly sexualized photography and is out to draw attention to the art created by the youth of China. But Lin’s elements—the snapshot aesthetic, half-naked bodies, and occasional prurient leer of the camera lens—have less in common with Richardson’s full-frontal wish fulfillment than it does with the stylized documentation of, say, Wolfgang Tillmans or Ryan McGinley. Lin, a former magazine editor at Guangzhou’s entertainment tabloid Modern Weekly, named himself “No. 223” after the lovelorn cop played by Takeshi Kaneshiro in Wong Kar-wai’s cult classic Chungking Express. A voracity for international fashion mags led No. 223 to begin snapping his own portraits, turning a Lomo on his circle of friends. Their friendship and desire to see themselves as a part of a global youth culture allowed Lin to capture images that would have been difficult to imagine coming out of China in the not-too-distant past. “A lot of my friends do creative things, so they are probably more open than most. This allows me to photograph them the way I do. They understand what I’m doing,” says Lin. in theme magazine »» [here]