Boway is a photographer lives in London. He is born and raised in a traditional Chinese Christian Family in Hangzhou, a southern city in China. He graduated from Beijing Film Academy and is trying to further his theoretical study recently. Boway’s practice talks about nostalgia, fantasy of childhood, self-identification, Oedipus complex, and documenting the contemporary Chinese LGBT community. Through constructing a story blurring the conception of fiction and non-fiction, Boway attempts to penetrate into a deep layer of those young queers’ psychic world by producing projection or even staged scenes in his photographs.
Soft Thorn
Soft Thorn (2013 – current), with the initial intention to record a journey of nostalgia after the departure from my home, contains candid and staged portraits as well as moments in the backdrop of my hometown. Inspired by Robbe-Grillet’s Voyeur, which described the whole fiction in another subtle view instead of the subjective view, it occurred to me I could accomplish a description of myself through those directed portraits. As those models are mainly my close queer friends and Christian relatives, I am prone to perform my sentiments and sorrows so as to capture myself in those portraits of people I shared intimate relationships with. A Dream in Red Mansion, a traditional Chinese fiction, also impressed me with its fabulous depiction of dreams mixed with bittersweet stories which provided me with ideas to structure my dream world. I anticipate that viewers may finally reach the deepest ideological layer where truth and fantasy are buried through my works.
To view more of Boway Young’s work please visit his website.