Bedtime Story
The exhibition "Bedtime Story" is based on the artist's eponymous photobook, in which Zheng Chen cross-edits photographs taken in his hometown with 25 collected folk tales. These stories differ significantly from typical bedtime stories; they are not fairy tales conveying beautiful and kind messages, but rather possess a terrifying and eerie atmosphere, often associated with ghosts, spirits, and death. According to Zheng Chen, in rural areas, adults, lacking the time to discipline their children, often use these stories to frighten their children, keeping them away from dangerous places or activities. However, it is clear that the meaning of these stories goes far beyond that.
Through Zheng Chen's lens, we can step into this village in a "bedtime story," where time, place, climate, and emotions intertwine: in the pervasive mist, in the fields and forests at night, there are people with strange postures, people with blank expressions, constantly appearing cave entrances, flocks of birds and livestock flashing by, crawling insects, lizards, and mice, as well as shadows, light, flames, and chains. Such an atmosphere washes over us, as if there are always things beyond our sight, as if we are on the threshold of different worlds, where things that do not belong here exist, while things that should exist have disappeared. Those indescribable feelings begin to disintegrate our rationality.
A haunting feeling permeates the entire space, forming the core of the exhibition alongside the texts and images of the bedtime stories. Delving deeper into this emotional undercurrent, beyond the bizarre, the sinister, and the fearful, the act of haunting itself becomes a form of narrative. Outside official discourse, memories and emotions forgotten or marginalized by history, along with knowledge exiled to the fringes of institutional production, linger as a kind of unconscious presence. In the middle of his creative process, the artist experienced the passing of his grandfather and the birth of his cousin's child—history, in such personal, microscopic cycles of life and death, is quietly transmitted. As Gordon notes, haunting serves as an intermediary—"a process that links institutions and individuals, social structures and subjects, history and biography" (Gordon, 2008). Here, the artist constructs a village both familiar and strange to him—a hometown that can only be truly "seen" through the medium of ghosts. Zheng is not merely documenting stories or capturing scenes but negotiating relationships with the villagers, with history, and with his own roots. This resonates with Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory, giving voice and meaning to silent, traumatic fragments at the ruptures of history.
Text / Li Zijian
Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2nd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2008
