Resting with Pearl Pillow, 2015

In his series Pillow Book, photographer Bruno Zhu references the well-known book from Japanese literature by the same name, completed in the year 1002 and containing the personal reflections of a lady-in-waiting at the Japanese imperial court. The term later came to stand for a whole genre of diary-like texts. Resting with Pearl Pillow, 2015 shows a specific page from Zhu’s 'Pillow Book', where he has pasted photographs of pillows into a telephone directory. This gives the work an absurdist character. The two-dimensional pillow on the paper pages forms a stark contrast with the soft feeling of a real pillow. The work contrasts visual motifs from the personal sphere with the public sphere. In his practice, Zhu playfully explores his fascination for photography as an ambivalent symbol of surface and object, representation and appropriation.