All images © Linda Zhengová
Every year, BJP publishes its Ones to Watch issue – our selection of the artists who epitomise the talent and creativity in international photography today, as nominated by a global network of curators, editors, and artists.
As we finalise this year’s list, to be published in Issue 7926, to be published this June, we’re revisiting the 2025 Ones to Watch. Today, Linda Zhengová, as nominated by Alex Blanco.
“A close friend told me over drinks that whenever she was photographed, she felt like a piece of furniture. Something to be looked at, not seen,” says Linda Zhengová. “So I asked her to let me photograph her the way she wanted, and in that moment, I saw something incredibly raw and pure. From then on, that pursuit of authenticity became my signature, and my obsession.”
A Czech-Chinese photographer, curator and writer, Zhengová’s work delves into sexuality and repression, motherhood and trauma. Known for capturing encounters with strangers, she also photographs close friends; either way, her aim is to question convention and capture something real. “Sex has become a commodity, and now we’re being sold the false impression that intimacy can be too,” she explains. “There’s an explosion of fabricated intimacy – hourly husbands, AI companions, ‘girlfriend experiences’ – as if closeness is something you can buy. So once we see a depiction of real intimacy, it pricks us, touches us and perhaps even disturbs us.”
Born in 1995, Zhengová mostly grew up in the Czech Republic, visiting China every summer. Her parents gave her a camera when she was 15, but discouraged her from studying it further; moving to the Netherlands to take up a degree in diplomacy, she felt “like I was missing a limb”. She ended up enrolling in a photography BA anyway, pursuing the two subjects side by side, and one of her university projects was KULISHEK (2018), a look at her parents’ unusual relationship. They met in Moscow in 1989, but were forced apart when the Soviet Union collapsed and, dreaming of a reunion, exchanged hundreds of letters and photographs. They ended up living separate lives, but remain married to this day.
“The way I portray intimacy isn’t just about the person in front of the camera. It’s about the emotions the image triggers” – Linda Zhengová
“They grew so distant that they could never truly return to each other,” says Zhengová. “But I understand. They endured the chaos of communism, cultural barriers, long distance and an unexpected pregnancy. KULISHEK is an ode to their endurance. It’s also a reflection on what it means to be part of a mixed-race family, on the way political regimes shape people’s lives, on unfulfilled hopes and how they seep into future generations.”
From this start Zhengová moved further into intimacy, especially during the Covid pandemic, when people had to repress their feelings, “bottling them up until they inevitably erupted”. She tried to capture these revelatory moments, always with her subjects’ consent. Trust is the foundation of her practice and she aims to create work that feels “equal, empathetic and free from exploitation”, in both image and text. “This wasn’t sex, this was naked poetry,” she writes in Strangers, the risograph zine she published with Editions Bessard in 2024.
A cross between photocopying and stencilling, riso printing has a roughness that resonates with Zhengová’s images; she has also made another zine, Katabasis (2023), as well other publications, The Ambiguity of Visual Representations of Trauma (2020) and Catharsis (2021). Work is ongoing on two more, one on Ukrainian models, the other with friend and collaborator Ronin de Goede. An earlier project, Nothing Will Be the Same, was also a collaboration, made during the 2020 lockdown with Alex Blanco, who recommended Zhengová for Ones to Watch.
“I have fallen in love with the rawness and drama of Linda’s view,” says Blanco, a Ukrainian artist based in the Netherlands. “Her sensitive approach to her subjects, combined with a deep spontaneity, makes her work both intimate and unfiltered. Through her female gaze, she captures eroticism in a way that feels real: never staged, always alive… Beneath her playfulness lies something deeper: a conversation about trauma, memory and the body’s silent power to heal. Her images are not just about seduction, but about personal freedom.”
Zhengová is moving to Paris, where she plans to draw together her long-term project Maybe, Happiness Is…, made all over the world since 2022. “The way I portray intimacy isn’t just about the person in front of the camera,” she explains. “It’s about the emotions the image triggers. The camera, like the people I photograph, becomes a portal to something deeper within us – our subconscious, our carnal desires, the parts of ourselves that exist beyond control and societal norms.”
