Lin Zhipeng (No.223) (b. 1979, Guangdong, China) lives and works in Beijing, China. Zhipeng, also known as No. 223, is a leading figure in new Chinese photography emerging in the last decade. In the era of globalisation and the Internet, his work was originally popularised through social media and other online platforms, as well as his self-published magazines. Zhipeng reflects and defines a certain spirit of the post-80s and 90s unconventional Chinese youth.
Amidst an otherwise conservative and often closed traditional society and cultural background, Zhipeng’s photographs act as a collective intimate diary of that generation willing to play with the limits of a high-stakes society, to which past generations have given shape. His works are saturated with a soft sense of carefreeness, a playful innocence, and a certain optimism amidst a hedonist lifestyle going against the expected pleasures and entrapment of the middle-class dream. Faded flowers entangled in bodies merge with a myriad of motifs from which emanates an emotional ambiguity mixing love and chaos, fantasy and eroticism.
