Jiazazhi Press, Ningbo, China, 2017.
184 pp., 160 illustrations, 8¾x12½x½"
I have been traveling down Feng Li's deep, and deeply weird, Instagram rabbit hole for about eight months now. Normally, I consider myself fairly jaded about IG. By now I figure that I've seen just about everything on there. But Feng Li's stream spits out consistent WTF surprises: Pigs on a bedspread. Twins heading a yacht. Levitating bodies. Bizarre smoke rings. Bubble baths. Where does he find this stuff? In a recent YouTube video he explained, "My photographs are something you can only find by accident."
There's no telling what's next, a quality as beautiful as it is rare among photographers today. Not even Feng Li knows. "The element of surprise is what is most exciting about cosmopolitan street-life," he tells Elephant.art. "You can never prepare yourself for what is around the corner. I don’t stage photos because there is no need to. Reality itself is enough to amaze, terrify or even beguile us. I just capture these moments as evidence that they happened."
Instagram's fleeting pace lends itself perfectly to the chaotic musings of Feng Li. Adjusting that style to a book is a taller task. Nevertheless, Feng Li gave it a shot last year with White Night (白夜 Baiye), his debut monograph published by Jiazazhi Press out of China. The book became an instant underground hit. It was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture First PhotoBook Award, earned a year-end nod from Martin Parr, and eventually sold out all 1000 copies. 
"A good picture prevents you from understanding what happened," explains Feng Li, an outlook at odds with most of photojournalism, not to mention his day-job as propagandist for a Chinese news agency.
Feng Li primarily shoots verticals. He is mostly interested in people, whom he tends to capture at night with a full flash at close proximity. The book's form adapts itself to his methods.
Feng Li's visual style lends itself to excess. His deft palette mixes grey skies and rich colors in tonalities nearly as dense as oil paintings. Capturing his profligacy in book form is tough, but White Night does it as well as possible. "Since I am constantly photographing," he says, "this quantity really matters. I don’t have to only select four or five great pictures that are meant to capture the essence of many years of work. What I’m doing reflects what is happening on a daily basis in my life, and a book mirrors this frequency much better."
It will be interesting to see if Feng Li slows down at some point, or how his work might translate into the next book. In the meantime, I'll be following on IG.
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