Luo Yang (1984, Liaoning, China) is a photographer living and working in Shanghai and Beijing. Her work of the past decade has been focused on young women from different backgrounds in contemporary China. In 2012, she was pronounced by Ai Weiwei as one of the rising stars of Chinese photography. She was selected as one of BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women in 2018, and shortlisted for C/O Berlin Talent Award in 2019. Her latest project, Youth, is a collection of portraits of people in their twenties, who grew up during a time when China underwent enormous changes. They are photographs of men and women expressing their own identity, while also finding their place within a society where traditional expectations and gender roles are still dominant. Underlying tensions and ambivalent emotions lend friction to Luo’s images and deny a conclusive reading. Above all, her work is a testament to her subjects’ individuality.

 Mårten Lange nominated Luo Yang’s work for this special edition of Photopaper. He is an artist working on a wide range of topics, among them, nature, technology and the urban environment. Mårten Lange has published several books, including Citizen (Études Books, 2015), Another Language (mack, 2012), The Mechanism (mack, 2017) and Chicxulub (self-published, 2016). Lange studied photography in Sweden, Japan and the United Kingdom. He lives and works in Berlin.

This special edition has 32 pages. Images above showing selected pages.