Sean O'Hagan 

Mythical beasts and voodoo worship: photographing pagan rituals in China

Sean O'Hagan: Using a cheap Holga film camera, Zhang Xiao captures the otherworldliness of a new-year festival that has survived China's surge towards modernity in Shanxi, a haunting new photobook
  
  

Costume drama … an image from Zhang Xiao's Shanxi showing a girl dressed up to celebrate China's lun
Costume drama … an image from Zhang Xiao's Shanxi showing a girl dressed up to celebrate China's lunar new year. Click for full image. All photographs: Zhang Xaio Photograph: Zhang Xaio

A young girl dressed like an angel, her face painted deathly white save for her red lips and the bright pink crescents around her eyes, is led on horseback through a curious crowd. A man wearing a demonic mask smokes a cigarette while cradling a sleeping baby. White-faced figures in bright robes emerge from the twilight mist like ghosts from ancient times. These are just three of the mysterious images in Shanxi, a hauntingly beautiful photobook by the Chinese photographer Zhang Xiao, which captures the age-old rituals of the annual lunar new year festival in the country's Shanxi province.

"These photographs document ancient customs originating [in] pagan beliefs – voodooesque forms of totem worship," he writes in his afterword. "A number of these old rites still survive and remain central to cultural practices throughout the region."

Using a cheap, mass-produced Holga film camera for its hazy lo-fi aesthetic, Zhang has created a series of evocative, painterly images, which capture the otherworldiness of a festival that has somehow survived the brutal reforms of the Cultural Revolution and China's ongoing surge towards modernity. Young and old alike partake in the customs, dressing up and painting their faces to resemble mythical beasts and near-forgotten pagan deities.

As well as the processions and rituals, Zhang documents the preparations – girls dressing up and applying their dramatic makeup – and the funfairs and stalls that spring up around the event. Old women drape the branches of trees in bright paper leaves and flowers. Children queue to try and throw wooden hoops over packets of sweets and small toys. Men carry trays of brightly painted fruits and vegetables on their heads.

This is a glimpse of contemporary peasant life in rural China, shot through with history but rendered almost hallucinatory by the muted colours and the sustained sense of the supernatural.

Born in 1981, Zhang studied architecture, then worked as a photographer for the Chongqing Morning Post in 2006 before going freelance. His first series, They, featured everyday scenes from life in Chongqing that look semi-staged, but are not. They present the tension between the traditional and the modern in affecting vignettes: street parades passing beneath towerblocks; young girls in a village beauty pageant; a man sitting on a stool amid the rubble of a demolished house. When asked about their sense of melancholy, Zhang said: "I find that the heart does not grow as fast as one's ability to have more money in one's pocket. There's a huge discrepancy between the state of the economy and collective spiritual wellbeing."

Zhang then spent four years photographing every city and town along the 18,000km Chinese coast for a series called Coastline, which was shown at the Format festival in Derby in 2011. Again, there was a palpable sadness in the photographs. "Even when there's a crowd, there may be this lonesome soul in the mix."

That still seems to be the case, even with a subject matter as exotic as the pagan festivities in Shanxi. Amid the festivities, he often homes in on a single figure: a young girl lost in reverie as she stands on a misty road; a boy in bright costume standing in a snowfall. Sadder still, though, are the glimpses of drab blocks of flats in the background of some of the images, their looming presence disrupting the sense of ancient mystery. Shanxi is a seductive book, a glimpse of a world of pagan custom that somehow endures against the odds, dreamlike and entrancing.

"When I first witnessed the festivalgoers parade around the village," Zhang writes, "I repeatedly asked myself if I had stepped into some kind of surreal wonderland … With every glimpse of the unfolding events, I felt an overwhelming sense of joy and happiness. Trying not to disturb this beautiful trance, I truly hoped that I would never wake up."

Shanxi by Zhang Xiao is available now, published by Little Big Man books

 

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