Robert Zhao Renhui won Deutsche Bank Award in Photography in 2011 and the Sony World Photography Award at Cannes in 2010 in the Constructed and Conceptual category.
Once an animal rights activist he realised over time that he was more interested in watching humans watch animals and five years ago set up ‘The Institute of Critical Zoologists’, a fictional multi-media platform which provides him with a interdisciplinary construct to formally experiment, produce and map out his concerns. The objective of ICZ’s critique is scientism and its languages of persuasion using the exploitation of animals through tragic but enduring spectacles of zoos, circuses and seemingly art to provide an outcome which is both absurdist yet plausible, poignant and playfully politically.