Backstory Mo Yi

Mo Yi is known by everyone in the Chinese photography world but by few outside of it. Born in 1958, in Tibet, to Chinese parents assigned there as Communist Party functionaries, Mo grew up wearing the red scarf of the Young Pioneers (the party youth organization) and diligently carrying the Little) everywhere. As a young man, Mo earned his living as a professional soccer player; after retiring from sports, in 1985, he took a job as a hospital photographer in Tianjin, a coastal city about ninety miles from Beijing, and began to explore that bleak industrial port with his camera. When his early, documentary-style images of street scenes and city dwellers were criticized as too gloomy, Mo devised a number of unorthodox techniques meant to purge his own taste and psychology from his photographs. By the 1990s, a host of quirky photographic series won him a place within the burgeoning field of Chinese experimental photography.