Jeff Sheng ’02 got his start in photography picking out pictures of beautiful people for his high school yearbook. Four years later his subject—beauty—is the same, but his outlet is a little more high class. These days Sheng is a bona fide artist whose first professional photography exhibition opened last Friday at Jamaica Plain’s Gallery at Green Street. His journey from high school to Green Street has included both an introductory community college course and the most theory-heavy offerings of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies—and he has done most of it without the approval of his parents, who want him to be a lawyer.
A Los Angeles native, Sheng has taken photography courses at Harvard since his first year and is a VES concentrator. In high school, he was photo editor of his yearbook. He describes the L.A. suburb where he lived, Thousand Oaks, as being “like the movie Clueless. The yearbook was aesthetically pleasing, and [choosing pictures for layout] was a lesson in beauty.” Later, he decided he wanted to take pictures rather than merely select them and he enrolled in an “amazing” community college course that helped prepare him for photo classes at Harvard.
Sheng’s exhibition came about because of a Harvard photo class. When he took “History of Photography” during his sophomore year, he showed his work to the teaching fellow for the course, who put him in contact with James Hull, owner of the Gallery at Green Street. The gallery, which is on the second floor of the Green Street T-station in Jamaica Plain, is a nonprofit organization that promotes the work of “emerging and well-established” artists in Boston. Hull, who shows a wide range of media in his gallery, says he was impressed with Sheng’s portfolio. “I liked the fact that he was looking very carefully at what we believe about photographs still, the fact we still believe that they’re true,” he says. Hull was also impressed with Sheng’s ambition and affectionately calls him a “go-getter.” The end result of their meeting is the show “Once Upon a Time,” an exhibit that opened this past Friday featuring Sheng’s photos as well as paintings created by Katherine Taylor, an artist from Georgia State University.
Sheng believes the themes of his show, beauty and fantasy, will give the show mass appeal despite its esoteric nature. “The show references a lot of photo discourse and theory, but it isn’t so postmodern that it’s difficult to understand,” he says. Sheng describes his photography, shot in locations from Barcelona to Wyoming, as “anti-grunge,” referring to the grunge movement that he says has “been the dominant force in fashion for 10 years. [In the early ‘90’s] European magazines promoted this anti-fashion in response to over-hyped American fashion.” His show is about the emergence of beauty in fashion and photography. His work on display consists of nine striking 41 x 29 inch photos, all of a muscular blond man in various surroundings. In the photographs, the model reclines on a bed, eats chocolate, sits in the driver’s seat of a car and pushes a lawn mower. Some of the prints are slightly blurred, while others are sharply defined.
“The California feel of the natural beauty of the landscape [in Sheng’s photographs], the light, the interiors and the handsome male model parody the commercial photography used in Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch and Ralph Lauren advertisements,” Hull explains. Hull sees Sheng’s work as “deconstructing commercial photography and beauty at the same time—unveiling what is a very complicated idea of constructing these scenarios that look very casual but are seen in commercial, fine art and documentary photography.” Hull also appreciates the personal elements in Sheng’s work: “It’s a close friend who he was looking at through this lens. It’s interesting to let somebody tell you something that’s near and dear to them.”(In fact, the subject of all of Sheng’s photos is Glen R. Curry ’03, a psychology concentrator who lives in Mather House and is currently dating Sheng.) Hull noticed that by arranging his photographs in a careful sequence, Sheng kept the viewer wondering about the identity of the model. “I liked the way that a third of the way [into the sequence of photographs] we realize it’s all the same person in the photos, and at the end we see it is someone who has intimate relationship with [Sheng],” he says. “He spent time looking at idealized beauty without conjuring up the whole side of it which talks about gay lifestyle. That part was thoughtful.”
At the opening reception of “Once Upon a Time” last Friday, Sheng chats with friends and acquaintances. At one point he stops to discuss the price of art with Taylor, the other artist showing at the exhibit. Both artists are hoping to sell some of their work through the show. Sheng says his photos are “not as hard to part with as paintings because I edition them,” he says. Sheng will sell up to five editions of a given print.
Sheng is one of the few undergraduates to have a show off-campus and the first Harvard undergraduate to show at the Gallery at Green Street, which he has accomplished without the financial aid of his parents. “People say you have to be privileged to be a VES concentrator and to go to college to study art. But it’s not like my family is pouring out thousands of dollars to support my work,” he says. He has quickly learned that producing photographs is not cheap, and producing top-quality prints can be painfully expensive. “A photograph can cost hundreds of dollars to print,” he says. Sheng says he only uses the best printers in New York because he wants his photography to be perfect. For the Green Street show, Sheng saw five proofs of each print before the final versions and even asked printers to FedEx proofs to him while he was on a shoot in Hawaii over intersession. To offset the enormous cost of producing his photographs, Sheng has taken out loans, found funding through the Harvard College Research Program, used his personal savings and maxed out a lot of credit cards.
“The myth of the starving artists is gone now,” Sheng says. “Big time artists are celebrities in New York and there is a crossover between fashion and art photographers.” He spent last summer in New York doing portfolio reviews with Details, W, Vibe and the New York Times Magazine. He will show his thesis work from May 2 to June 6 at the Carpenter Center Lobby and the Sert Gallery on the Carpenter Center’s third floor with an opening reception in the lobby on May 3 from 7–9 p.m.
Despite his current success and promising future as an artist, Sheng has yet to tell his family about his work. He believes his parents wouldn’t approve of a career in art. They want him to go to law school, which he hopes to postpone for at least a year by applying to fellowships in China. After graduation in June, Sheng wants to study the fashion and photography of 1930s Shanghai as well as the current state of photography in China. He has told his parents he will be studying the influence of the government on the media in the country. He hopes that when his photography career gains momentum his parents will support him. If he doesn’t get the travel grant, Sheng will move to New York next year.
Sheng may be an up-and-coming artsy type, but he doesn’t look down on pop culture. “I watch ‘Will & Grace’ and ‘Friends’ every week,” he admits. “I derive inspiration from Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch ads. This is what people see. You could be showing at the best gallery, but more people will see your ads.” His current interest lies in fashion photography, but he would love to eventually make music videos or films. “I want to be there when Britney needs someone for her comeback video,” he says.
