Born In ’84
Luo Yang and I were born in the same year—1984—and that detail felt important when we talked. Politics doesn’t preoccupy her much, she said. She doesn’t think it shapes her work or her life in any direct way. She’d rather watch the people around her, pay attention to how they actually live, even though obviously their lives are bent by forces much larger than themselves.
When Ai Weiwei came up, she was respectful but clear. She admires him, calls him a pioneer, but they’re working different angles. His practice is confrontation—society and politics put on display. Hers is interior, emotional. She photographs people and what they’re feeling, and that’s where her gaze stays. Different generations, different pressure points.
Ren Hang’s death had landed hard. He was a friend. They’d met years earlier when he was still building his voice, and watching him push against the machinery of being a Chinese artist, watching the West finally notice—that was something worth marking. Whether his work changed the country for the better, she couldn’t say. But he gave other artists permission to push. That matters.
Mian Mian came up naturally and she didn’t hedge. Famous in the West, less so where they lived. But the girls she photographs, the ones that catch her eye, they share something with Mian Mian—they’re brave and lost and young, willing to let their bodies and their lives spill into their work. That’s the thread.
There’s something specific about being born in 1984 in China: you grew up in a country remaking itself in real time, tradition and acceleration happening at once, the gap between what you wanted and what your family expected widening every year. She said everyone’s basically the same underneath—desires and conflicts, all of us, regardless of where we’re from. It’s a thing people say but don’t always mean. She seemed to mean it.
I asked what she wanted people to know about China’s young generation. She was optimistic without being naive about it. The kids coming up seem easier with themselves, more honest. The country keeps changing, keeps producing interesting people. The internet brought everyone closer. Come see it for yourself, she said. Learn the place and the people.