What should I make of the request by Foam to introduce and reflect on Chen Yiding’s Natural Born Left-Handed Killer? I am tempted to say that it comes from out of left field: I have not written for Foam for a few years, and the editors have no reason to know I am left-handed.  

Coming ‘out of left-field' is a term for the unfamiliar, for the surprising and for that which cannot be easily explained, and as such it describes how we seek a shortcut, a direct or convenient explanation for something not yet understood. The origins of coming ‘out of left field’ are hazy at best – rumoured to come from the early home of the Chicago Cubs Baseball team, and the field’s location near a psychiatric hospital, where that which came from ‘out of left field’ would be the screams of its patients. We can observe in both linguistic and visual histories a long tradition of superstitious interpretations of that which sits outside of the norm– speculations and projections which survive into the present day. The need to give meaning to the not yet understood, and the roles that a discipline like photography might play to question those collected or received wisdoms, are key themes which inform Chen Yiding’s practice.   

In Natural Born Left-Handed Killer Chen calls on us to encounter a series of image-objects in which photography and sculpture share a dialogue, where images are part of the world and its ways of seeing, with fronts and backs and blind spots. He zooms in on left-handedness to draw us into a web of historical materials: archives and popular culture, artefacts drawn from journalism, scientific studies, the history of art, and museum documentation of religious statuary. Modified reproductions, adapted archival objects, and subversively constructed studies of physiognomy are presented alongside literature for the correction of left-handedness. The striking statistical minority of left-handed people (between 9 and 12 percent of the global population) has led to social and ethical encodings of left-handedness as suspicious. Chen has in turn constructed his own, aberrant archive (in a wonderful twist, he has no skin in the game, being right-handed). Drawing our eyes to the often-innocuous appearances of left-handed and ambidextrous protagonists -who might otherwise be overlooked- the left-hand becomes significant, portentous, looming. Yet the images never fully acquire the status of a decisive or convincing body of evidence.  

YIDING CHEN is an artist working primarily with photography. His practice investigates how visual culture imposes control over bodies and reinforces social bias, revealing how images shape collective experiences. Chen was a participant in the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, and was selected for the Top 20·2025 Chinese Contemporary Photography Exhibition.

DUNCAN WOOLDRIDGE is a writer, and is Reader in Photography in the School of Digital Arts at Manchester School of Art, MMU. He is the author of ‘To Be Determined: Photography and the Future’ (SPBH & MACK) and the editor of the forthcoming ‘Written Down/Written Up: The Collected Writings of John Hilliard (MACK).