Weekend Portfolio: Enze Wang

Images and Text by Enze Wang

In Cohabitation series, I have been exploring the dialogical relationships between two people who are a couple, myself and my partner. Close scrutiny of the routine parameters of our life together offers a rebuttal to the generalized, saccharine depictions of intimacy in media and popular culture. I can find intimacy in mutual desire, need, vulnerability, acceptance, satisfaction, and fatigue—in fact, in a wide range of our experience; instead of appearing as an overblown feeling or event, it permeates our shared cohabitation and its manifestations are sometimes contradictory and paradoxical. A pile of nail clippings, abject on their own, repulsive to some, are nevertheless observed as a household detail; the tolerance of each other’s unattractive aspects is a sign of intimacy and acceptance.

Examining the traces of our cohabitation, I also look at how we perform our roles, and how those roles evolve with our relationship over time. The photographs trace instances of shared intimacy as well as conveying hints of solitude and separateness within the relationship.

Performance and evidence subtly intermingle in a domestic space between reality and fiction.

More of Enze Wang’s work can be found on his website.