Born in 1972 in Liaoning province, China, Wang Ningde graduated from the photography department of the Lu Xun Academy of Art in 1995. Soon after, he moved south to Guangzhou where he now lives and works pursuing a career as a photojournalist and editor with the specialist photography journal Focus Magazine. His first solo exhibition Walking Towards an Even Darker Place was held at the famed Liberia Borges bookshop in Guangzhou in 1999. In 2003 he staged his first overseas exhibition An Interesting and Singular Walk at the Centre Photographique d’Ile de France, Paris. Wang has since exhibited in the Czech Republic, Denmark, the United States, Italy, Japan, Israel and Singapore.
Wang Ningde is one of the most interesting photographers to have emerged from China in the last ten years. This forthcoming exhibition will demonstrate his very special place in contemporary photography. Although a working journalist, he still maintains the belief that photography is a tool for self expression and continues to make non-documentary, conceptual photography. The artist invites the viewer into the world inhabited by his characters by imbuing his photography with subtle narrative drama and staging his photographs from multiple angles. Drawing from his own experiences as a journalist having witnessed a multitude of extraordinary events, Wang Ningde invents a very personal visual language that is both intriguing and seductive.
In June 2006 The Red Mansion Foundation invited Wang Ningde to London for his first solo exhibition in the UK, Some Days.
