There are many forms of control in daily life. Some are very loud and overt, establishing the authority’s unwavering position, while others prefer more subtle approaches ranging from kind-hearted to downright manipulative. Xiuzhuo Zhou’s Under Instruction? (2025) examines control via knowledge, faith, and well-meaning gestures, highlighting the invisible power structures that permeate all parts of society.
Consisting of two photographs marrying socio-politics with preaching, their unified message allows them to operate like a diptych. In one image, a woman is photographed holding a sign with the slogan ‘WOMAN LIFE FREEDOM’ beneath a flaming red image of a woman’s head. The setting is London’s Piccadilly Circus, where Iranian artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat presented her digital art installation Woman Life Freedom (2022) on 1-4 October 2022 in response to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s religious morality police for not wearing a hijab.
In the other image, a Sámi preacher inside a traditional gathering tent (known as a lavvu) educates a group of young women in the warmth of a campfire. The simplicity of the custom and its setting serves as a transformative experience that temporarily removes the Sámi people from the distractions of modern life and fosters real connection between communities.
Although the two contexts seem like worlds apart, they both stress a universal desire to persuade others that their worldview is correct and valuable to human civilisation. Through this sense of correctness, a power hierarchy is immediately established in relation to all other worldviews, resulting in an unsolicited form of generational rivalry where humanity competes for the right to be arbiters of existential truth instead of living harmoniously alongside each other.
Zhou’s practice taps into these existential themes, considering the concept of space as a temporary landscape for attributing meaning. What does it mean to ‘belong’ in society? Who decides who belongs and who doesn’t? And crucially, what happens when time moves on but the space remains, leaving a site of memory that cannot ever be occupied in the same way?
His photographs encourage us to observe vacant spaces in everyday life, and to contemplate the activities that occurred there. Environments are built around communities, so it makes sense that they would retain visual traces of their past. Imagining those ghost conversations is exactly how we are intended to respond to Zhou’s photographs.
Looking through these images, one cannot help but be reminded of the works of Wolfgang Tillmans and Martin Parr, two photographers who documented scenes of daily life with a desire to reframe the world with new, even unexpected perspectives.
If photography is about finding connections between the observer and their surroundings, Zhou’s images expand on that concept with a philosophically humanitarian framework. We only generate as much meaning in this life as we choose to. In doing so, we are invited to look deeper within ourselves and our relationship with the wider world. That is the true message of Zhou’s practice, and it deserves to be wider known.
Written by Nigiel Ip
