Deng Tai “Shadow” at MoMA PS1

While living in Beijing, Deng casually enlisted friends to shoot several series of haunting photographs in which he performed for the camera in public spaces around the city. Seen as a collection, these ecstatic and melancholic images suggest the intensity of Deng’s struggle to negotiate a subversively exuberant identity in China’s changing, yet traditional, society. Taken at night on the empty sidewalks and sprawling asphalt flats of Beijing’s tree-lined boulevards, Deng Tai’s Shadow series documents the artist as he performs, nearly naked, with a shroud of blood-red fabric flowing around him. Deng is at once visible and illegible, bare and costumed, a fugitive body enacting a private theater in which he is both performer and audience.