ZHUANG JAY

Born on May 7, 1964 in Hangzhou, China, Zhuang Jay graduated in geophysics from the Ocean University of China, in charge of computer processing for geophysical research at the Institute of Petroleum Sciences. CEO of a freight company until 2006, then investor and builder of Hangzhou Port, Zhuang Jay has been practicing photography since university.

The million images that this virtuoso amateur has already taken, especially in the world of culture and fashion, in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, compose a diary-like portrait of a China in full mutation.

In 2005, he exhibited large portraits of the artists participating in the Biennale of Chinese Contemporary Art in Montpellier.

Since 2009, he collects old lenses (cinema, projection...) that he adapts himself to his digital cameras.

Invited for a photographic residency in Deauville, he attended the Asian Film Festival, and took a unique look at the city with its Asian flavors!

"I don't remember ever seeing Zhuang Jay without a camera in his hand. For more than a decade, this jet-setter businessman has been methodically recording, compulsively some would say, everything that passes before his eyes, events, landscapes, loved bodies, unknown faces or friends, in Hangzhou, his hometown, as well as in Shanghai or Beijing, of which he has not missed any of the multiple and incessant changes.
He discovered Deauville during the Asian Film Festival, in February 2013, with this same need, this same mania some would say, to report and inventory, and he couldn't help but capture the city, perhaps without realizing it, through the filter of an eminently Chinese aesthetic. The thousand photos he took during his stay, with the help of digital cameras he tinkered with himself, seem to me, in retrospect, characteristic of a "Chinese eye", as if, in order to better taste Normandy, he had adapted it a little to the sauce of his country. The soft-sour colors, the panoramic frame in the manner of a scholar's scroll, the play on fullness and emptiness, the delicacy of the half-tones, a certain melancholic grandeur, all these features specific to the art of the Middle Kingdom can be found in the images he presents today. This is not their least quality. Here is an unusual Deauville, whose exoticism is reinforced by an unexpected snowfall: the Deauville of a son of the Dragon.
Serge Bramly