China, land of wonders? It's with a certain irony that Alex Huanfa Cheng, 35, chose to title his project Wonderland. "To me, this word underlines all that is illusory in this very beautiful vision that China wants to give of itself: fantastic on the surface, but with many negative things underlying it," he said.

The photographer chose to settle in Paris 11 years ago, but the 30-something returns frequently to his native China, exploring with fresh eyes the rural region where he grew up as much as the megacities. From his recent visits, he has returned with a series of wryly poetical images: young girls in folk costumes, scenes of overcrowded beaches and family portraits under the eye of propaganda posters.

In particular, he enjoys surveying places of leisure, those spaces of pure artifice where a country puts on a show without really managing to hide its flaws. "It's easier to work with people in these places because elsewhere they're preoccupied with their work and therefore less available," he said. "Here, they're relaxed, which makes it easy to gather a lot of information, and to note just as many contradictions."

'Colors fight each other'

In his images, a panorama of tamed nature emerges, like this little monkey in a suit, chains on his feet. Flowers grow on screens and waterfalls flood restaurants in wallpaper. "To make the contrasts more blatant between the real and the fake in the scenes I capture, the colors in my photographs are highly saturated, fighting each other. There's no harmony in the coexistence of all these things."

During the early stages of his photographic research, Cheng had no clear idea of what he wanted to find in a China that was becoming increasingly alien to him. "But the distance allowed me to gradually sharpen my eye." He had chosen Paris "as much out of romanticism as for financial reasons, France being much cheaper for [his] studies than the United States or Great Britain." Eleven years on, he still loves his adopted country as much as ever and doesn't regret leaving his native land for a moment. In China, he was an amateur photographer.

At the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, from which he graduated with honors in 2018, he was introduced to the silver gelatin-based medium by the best, including visual artist and photographer Patrick Tosani. "I started thinking about photography as a language. That school changed everything; it was like a mother to me." He learned to conceptualize his approach and also to master chemistry, whose subtle reactions were fundamental to him.

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