Zhao Liang 赵亮

Zhao Liang (b. Dandong, Liaoning Province, 1971), a graduate of the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang who originally specialised in art photography, is one of the foremost practitioners of Chinese 'new documentary'. After making a number of highly evocative 'essay films' and observational documentaries in the late 1990s, of which the best known are Farewell to Yuanminyuang, about the planned destruction of an artists' colony near the remains of the Summer Palace, and Paper Airplane (2001), about the lives of a group of heroin addicts in Beijing, Liang turned the spotlight on the administration of criminal justice in China in a series of documentaries beginning with Return to the Border and continuing with Crime and Punishment (2007) and the highly controversial Petition: The Court of the Complainants (2009). His most recent major work, Behemoth (2015), a 'guerilla documentary' about the ruthless exploitation of labour and the destruction of the grasslands of Inner Mongolia by open-cast coal mining, filmed in images at once beautiful and terrible, has attracted widespread critical acclaim in the West and has won a number of major awards in Western film festivals. Together (2010), a quasi-official documentary about the 'making of' the feature film Love for Life and the everyday realities of living with HIV/AIDS in China, represents something of an exception to Liang's earlier work, in that it was part-financed and sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Health and heavily promoted as part of a Government publicity campaign against discrimination and stigmatisation of HIV-positive people. However, Behemoth, with its dramatic exposure of the ruinous effects of open-cast coal mining on both the physical health of the miners and the environment of the Mongolian grasslands, appears to signal a return to Liang's trademark practice of ethically sensitive independent documentary film-making, but on a more epic scale.