I’ve searched for images in my memory and realized some people and events may not be real. To check, I asked my parents and friends; the more I revisited them, the more they blurred, until I understood that remembering keeps rewriting. I was born in a small city in Northeast China. Years later I read Proust on the “lost paradise.” Since then I’ve wanted to photograph my Northeast: the certain, the blurred, the rewritten—letting images move between evidence and imagination into a series about childhood, family, and home.
Zhao Peng (b. 1996, Jilin, China) is a Shanghai-based photographer. With a background in electrical engineering and railway work, he approaches photography through attention to structure, traces, and lived detail. His practice focuses on Northeast China, examining how family memory and working-class spaces are reshaped by time, migration, and disappearance. Working in long-term, sequence-based projects, he moves between documentary observation and conceptual narrative. His current project Paradise revisits childhood fragments and their uncertainties, photographing the certain, the blurred, and
