Impersonating Mao

Images: 

Impersonating Mao #12, hand painted photo

Impersonating Mao #15, hand painted photo

Impersonating Mao #10, before hand painting

Hi-res image: 

Impersonating Mao #12, hand printed & painted photo 100 x 120 cm

Impersonating Mao 

Photography by Nathalie Daoust   

The work of Montreal-born photographer, Nathalie Daoust, maps the blurred boundary between reality and imagination to explore ideas of fantasy and escape. For her new project, ‘Impersonating Mao’, Daoust focuses on the interior world of an impersonator who assumes the appearance and bearing of Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China. Daoust’s portraits record her subject’s desire to flee reality and take refuge in a dream world of half-truth and illusion.

 When Daoust first met her subject in 2008 - posing as Mao in Tiananmen Square as an act of personal homage - she was intrigued by his construction of an alternate identity from the iconography of his country’s troubled past. In 2010, she returned to Beijing and photographed the impersonator extensively, both in a domestic setting and at sites of historic importance. The juxtaposition allowed Daoust to interrogate communist China’s complicated relationship to Mao’s legacy, echoed in the internal negotiations of the impersonator as he transformed into Mao.

 Shot on a stash of old Chinese film uncovered in Beijing, Daoust physically manipulated the negatives in the darkroom to create a dreamy mood of memory and illusion. Each print is sealed in amber-like resin; the resulting portraits combine a 21st century handling of perspective with a visual timelessness, reflecting Daoust’s preoccupation with the borders between contemporary reality and an imagined past.

-Louise East -

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Biography

Nathalie Daoust's photographs reflect a love for random places and a wild, inexhaustible sense of inquisitiveness.  Exploring, experienceing and documenting rarely visited landscapes and carefully hidden hotel rooms, Daoust spent the last decade producing voyeuristic insights into these otherwise veiled existences.  The Canadian Daoust, who studied the technical aspets of photography at the Cégep du Vieux-Montréal, spent two years in the late nineties living in the Carlton Arms Hotel in New York. The rooms, all themed and decorated with wild projets which focused on the dark, obscure and, especially in those years, the ghostly.  Daoust has traveled extensively and took photos not only of New York hotel rooms but also of Tokyo's red light district, Brazilian brothels and Swiss naturists populating the Alps.

Daoust has created an oeuvre that is both diverse and intense.  Seeking to transalte her almost childlike curiousity, her perseverance and highly individual interpretation of the world into fairytale like stories, Daoust single-handedly creates new myths about modern day society, as well as real-life stories of the underdogs.

-Georgia Haagsma-

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Artist Statement

Since my very first experiments in photography I have been fascinated by human behavior and its various realities, by the ever-present human desire of living in a dream world.  The aesthetic of my new project continues this visual exploration at the border between dream and reality, yet this time embraces personal escapism and the act of losing oneself.

My objective as an artist is to push the boundaries of photography through experimental methods, working with new mediums and discovering new techniques in the darkroom.  Visit Nathalie Daoust