Blindspot Gallery is pleased to present “Coastline” featuring emerging Chinese photographer Zhang Xiao’s award-winning series Coastline  that focuses on the continuous 18,000 kilometres of China’s coastline. The series does not merely capture the seaside landscape of these coastal areas, but also witnesses the changes of China caused by its economic reform in the past thirty years.  Zhang won the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie in 2011 with this series.

Zhang Xiao, who has found the sea fascinating since childhood, said, “the sea is the beginning of lives and dreams.” For him, the sea is a place of strong emotions and rich imagery. Since July 2009, he started traveling to the eastern coast and photographing the ordinary people’s circumstances in the most developed areas of China - the coastline.

His images of seaside landscape is often infiltrated with bizarre artificial objects or constructions, with people performing different types of random activities. These images reveal a sense of surrealism and precisely capture the absurdity in today’s China, reflecting the people’s desires and conditions of contemporary China under the changes taking place along the coastline.

To Zhang, this series is a documentation of part of the existing conflicts in contemporary China; and through the series, he hopes he would also be able to find the homeland of his inner heart.