Grand Amour

Lin Zhipeng(aka No.223),(b. 1979, Guangdong, China). Lin Zhipeng is a photographer and freelance writer based in Beijing. Created in 2003, his blog “North Latitude 23” where he published everyday pictures accompanied by short texts received millions views and made him famous among the web community. Presented for ten years in group exhibitions in China and abroad , Lin’s works have also been the object of several solo shows both nationally and internationally (Delaware Contemporary Museum ; Walther Collection Ulm ; De Sarthe Gallery Beijing ; Stieglitz19 Gallery Antwerp ; M97 Gallery Shanghai, etc). He has published several photography books.

Lin is a leading figure of new Chinese photography emerging in the last decade. Lin’s work has come to reflect and define a certain zeitgeist of the post-80’s and 90’s generation of non-mainstream Chinese youth. Amidst an otherwise conservative and often closed traditional society and cultural background, Lin’s photographs act as a collective not-so-private diary of a young generation wishing to escape the pressures from a high-stakes society and play within its limits. 223’s works are saturated with a soft sense of carefreeness, a playful innocence, and a certain optimism amidst a hedonist lifestyle going against the expected pleasures and entrapments of the middle class dream.