Chen Yiding

    Works
      




     
       
     Infos
     CV

    The project begins with a historical absurdity: the belief that the way one holds a pen or lifts a fork could reveal criminal intent. In 19th-century Europe, left-handedness was not merely regarded as eccentric—it was treated as biological evidence of deviance. Figures like Cesare Lombroso classified inmates by their dominant hand, convinced that bodily gestures could predict moral destiny. From this emerged a visual taxonomy in which physical posture was equated with guilt.

    Rather than simply revisiting that superstition, this project uses it as a lens to examine a larger question: how does photography participate in constructing social suspicion? When does a hand become “evidence”? When does a pose become “threat”?

    Drawing from the aesthetics of forensic archives, I fabricate staged scenes, paper reconstructions, and manipulated catalogues. Real archival fragments are spliced with fictional captions; photographs are titled like specimen records or police inventory codes. The result is a system that looks official, yet its authority quickly unravels.

    What seems like historical documentation is, in fact, an unstable arrangement of image and language—each legitimizing the other, yet neither to be trusted.

    Natural Born Left-Handed Killer is therefore not solely about left-handedness. It is about how the camera, the caption, and the file number collaborate in manufacturing belief. The hand is only a proxy. Any gesture, under the right lighting and the right label, can be turned into prognosis—or prophecy.








    ©CHENYIDING
    Homepage   Next →