Dashen Zhang (b.2002), currently lives and works in Jinan and Quanzhou.
He holds an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art. His work continuously explores the ontology and history of photography, using images as his primary medium while simultaneously investigating photography as a subject, connecting historical narratives and personal emotions.
dashenzhang02@outlook.com
Instagram: @dashshenz
02.
A Way to Measure the Universe
2025
Photography
Inkjet printed on paper
Variable dimensions
Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are and of things that are not, that they are not. -Protagoras
This work uses the photographic apparatus as a starting point to explore how we perceive the world through both sensation and structure.
I travelled around Britain with an old lens that has a depth-of-field scale in different measurement units. It revealed deeper questions about photography—not just as a tool for recording, but as a way of knowing. By overlaying technical diagrams of camera mechanisms onto landscape images, I aim to transform photography into a metaphysical language: precise yet ambiguous, mechanical yet intuitive. The camera is no longer merely an image-making device, but a tool for reflecting on the tension between the ordered systems we build and the elusive nature of lived experience.
Laws of nature are human inventions, like spirits. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like spirits. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed. But camera, what a great thing.
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