Zexuan Zeng
Germany
Biography
He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication from SHNU (2015–2019) and completed a Diploma in Media Art at KHM (2021–2025).
His work has been published in Networked Practice, Fisheye Magazine (#74 Éthique), Der Greif (Issue 16), photoED magazine (#73 MEMORY), and Kurze (Vol. 6). In 2023, he presented his solo exhibition Remember to Call Your Mother, Son at Case Projektraum.
He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including To Dwell in the Same Time and Space at Glasmoog/Photoszene Köln, GRINDING PRESENT GLITCHES at Galerie 52/Folkwang Universität der Künste, Double Presence at Case Projektraum during Photoszene Köln, SPIELPLÄTZE at KHM, and Photographic Utopia at KunstWerk Köln.
His work has also been featured in international festivals such as Bold, the Self-Published PhotoBook Weekend in Paris, IPMA Lithuania in Kaunas, 212 Photography Istanbul, and Der Greif x VARIOUS OTHERS in Munich.
He has received significant recognition, including being named a Top 10 Critics’ Pick in the 2025 LensCulture Critics’ Choice Awards. He was shortlisted for Carte Blanche at Paris Photo, un/fund 2025, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Self-Published PhotoBook Award, and the Booooooom Art & Photo Book Award, and was a finalist for the Lucie Scholarship.
In 2025, he was selected for the Autumn Residency at Landskrona Foto in Sweden, further expanding his international artistic engagement.
Project
“The Internal Crusade” by Zexuan Zeng is a long-form photographic project in which the Chinese-born artist retraces and reflects on the lasting influence of China’s historic “Long March” — not simply as a historical event but as a narrative deeply embedded in collective memory, everyday life and individual identity. In the summer of 2024, Zeng travelled for two months along the route of the Long March, documenting landscapes, monuments, people and symbolic remnants that still carry echoes of this myth-making epic, exploring how political narratives shape personal experience and community imaginaries.
Born in Ganzhou (Jiangxi) — the starting point of the Long March — Zeng grew up surrounded by patriotic imagery and stories that framed struggle as a necessary journey toward success. The Internal Crusade challenges this inherited narrative by presenting quiet, subdued images that sit between documentary and metaphor, questioning how ideology becomes internalised, routinised and transformed within daily life, and urging viewers to consider the psychological and cultural forces that define what we carry from history into the present.
