Contemplation: The Anti-Vice Campaign Series
Zhang Haiying’s Anti-Vice Series is based on Internet photographs of young women caught up in the Chinese government’s efforts to purge the city of prostitution and pornography. The highly publicized campaign to “eliminate vice and illegal publications” focuses on the apprehension and detention of young women such as these, who are among the most powerless of the country’s citizens. Victimized on one hand by gangs and threatened with fines and prison by authorities on the other, they are often paraded through streets to face insults and ridicule.
Zhang is not attempting to present a case for the decriminalization of prostitution, but as an artist, hopes instead to portray their frail humanity and the sympathy their shame evokes. The series examines the anguish of the purge, from the crime itself to arrest and detention. Taken as a whole, Anti-Vice paintings reflect an awkward condition in contemporary Chinese society.
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