BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Hirshhorn Museum -- Exhibit: A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China

DC -- Hirshhorn Museum -- Exhibit: A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China:

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Description of Pictures: A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China
November 4, 2022 – January 7, 2024
A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China is the Hirshhorn’s first survey of photography by leading multigenerational Chinese artists made between the 1990s and 2000s. The exhibition showcases 186 artworks made between 1993 and 2022 of which 141 are a landmark promised gift to the Hirshhorn from pioneering collector of Chinese art Larry Warsh. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a 1997 publication, a near manifesto, by Rong Rong and Liu Zheng that celebrated the possibilities in shifting the practice of photography away from realism toward a conceptual art practice.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. WINDOW_221124_001.JPG: A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China
2. WINDOW_221124_004.JPG: The past three decades have borne witness to profound political, cultural, and technological shifts in China. Nowhere are these changes more evident than in the evolution of photography from a political and documentary tool into a conceptual art form. Artists who had been trained in more traditional media, such as painting, recognized the camera’s unique capacity to capture and distill the dizzying transformation of the world around them as the rise of international commerce led to new, increasingly urban lifestyles. The beginning of the contemporary experimental art scene in China dates to the 1980s. After decades of isolation and strict control over artistic expression, the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 ushered in an era of openness, including international exchange, a flourishing of intellectual activity, and the creation of a robust artistic avant-garde. This exhilarating burst of freedom came to an abrupt halt in 1989 when pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square were violently crushed by the government, but in the wake of this tragedy, a dissident art scene emerged in Beijing that was centered around self-expression. This emphasis represented a dramatic departure from the collective ethos of earlier generations, a shift that artists Rong Rong and Liu Zheng documented from 1996 to 1998 in their self-published magazine New Photo. As they explained in the preface to the third issue, “When concept enters Chinese photography, it is as if a window suddenly opens in a room that has been sealed for years. We can now breathe comfortably, and we can now reach a new meaning of ‘new photography.’” This exhibition features more than 175 works by 25 artists who have revolutionized the medium of photography in China over the past 30 years. The majority of the works on view will enter the Hirshhorn Museum’s permanent collection in a landmark gift, offering the Museum the capacity to represent the prescient voices of these artists alongside those participating in other avant-garde movements around the world. Curated by Betsy Johnson, Assistant Curator, with Alice Phan, Curatorial Assistant
3. WINDOW_221124_011.JPG: Lin Tianmiao B. Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, 1961 Bound/Unbound Series (bicycles) 1996 Mixed media, bicycles, and twine Collection of Larry Warsh
4. WINDOW_221124_016.JPG: Lin Tianmiao B. Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, 1961 Bound/Unbound Series (bicycles) 1996 Mixed media, bicycles, and twine Collection of Larry Warsh
5. WINDOW_221124_020.JPG: Lin Tianmiao B. Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, 1961 Go? 2001 Black and white photograph Collection of Larry Warsh
6. WINDOW_221124_030.JPG: Lin Tianmiao B. Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, 1961 Bound/Unbound Series (bicycles) 1996 Mixed media, bicycles, and twine Collection of Larry Warsh
7. WINDOW_221124_034.JPG: Lin Tianmiao B. Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, 1961 Bound/Unbound Series (bicycles) 1996 Mixed media, bicycles, and twine Collection of Larry Warsh
8. WINDOW_221124_037.JPG: Lin Tianmiao B. Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, 1961 Growing 2003 Black and white photograph Collection of Larry Warsh
9. WINDOW_221124_044.JPG: Lin Tianmiao B. Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, 1961 Bound/Unbound Series (bicycles) 1996 Mixed media, bicycles, and twine Collection of Larry Warsh
10. WINDOW_221124_047.JPG: Wang Qingsong B. Daqing, Heilongjiang, China, 1966 Romantique 2003 Color photograph Collection of Larry Warsh Forced to support his family after his father passed away, Wang Qingsong worked as a driller for an oil company for many years before his mother encouraged him to pursue an art degree in his mid-twenties. This was quite unusual at the time—most of his peers in the painting department at the Sichuan Art Academy had parents who were traditional artists, not manual laborers like his own parents were. Instead of returning to the oil fields after graduation, he moved to Beijing, where he incorporated photography into his work, first printing images scanned from magazines on silk velvet before adopting Photoshop to create digitally layered works around 1996. After growing frustrated with digital technology, he began working with a Beijing film studio in 2000, casting and staging models in elaborate tableaux that he photographed in sprawling panoramic scenes. In some works, such as Sentry Post, seen in this exhibition, Wang Qingsong inserts himself as a protagonist in the action, posing as a border guard holding a Coca-Cola can as a grenade. Other panoramic works, such as Romantique and China Mansion, are strewn with references to canonical works of Western art history, ranging from Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486) to �douard Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Man Ray’s Ingres’s Violin (1924). These works coalesce an overabundance of foreign elements into sweeping, sometimes ostentatious visions of the new China.
11. WINDOW_221124_057.JPG: Wang Qingsong B. Daqing, Heilongjiang, China, 1966 Left to right: Requesting Buddha Series No. 1 1999 Color photograph Collection of Larry Warsh
12. WINDOW_221124_071.JPG: China Mansion 2003 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh
13. WINDOW_221124_073.JPG: Wang Qingsong B. Daqing, Heilongjiang, China, 1966 Left to right: Another Battle Series No. 1 2001 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh
14. WINDOW_221124_082.JPG: Wang Qingsong B. Daqing, Heilongjiang, China, 1966 Sentry Post 2000 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh
15. WINDOW_221124_084.JPG: Cui Xiuwen B. Harbin, Heilongjiang, China, 1967–2018 Sanjie 2003 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Cui Xiuwen was a strong voice in the feminist movement in China from the very start of her career in the mid-1990s. As an art student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, she stirred controversy with a series of paintings that depict male nudity, disregarding cultural inhibitions around the female gaze and traditional preferences for the female nude. After graduation, she and three friends—Li Hong, Feng Jiali, and Yuan Yaomin—formed Sirens, a group dedicated to creating exhibition opportunities for women in a male-dominated scene. Her entry into video art was prompted by a visit to a nightclub, where she became fascinated by the dynamic environment of the ladies’ room, which men could not access, and decided that video was the only medium that could capture the vibrant reality of that space. Later bodies of work, such as those represented in this exhibition, made use of a female actress who resembled Cui Xiuwen to explore themes from the artist’s childhood, investigating topics such as puberty and sexuality. Both Sanjie and One Day in 2004 No. 1 show how young girls are, in the artist’s words, forced to carry “the weight of the consequences of history.” Wearing a Young Pioneers red scarf, signifying allegiance to the Communist Party through the symbolic blood of its martyrs, the young woman is posed as all of the actors in Sanjie’s Last Supper scene (Cui Xiuwen believed that “Judas is all of us”), and as a bruised, battered, and discarded figure in One Day in 2004 No. 1.
16. WINDOW_221124_102.JPG: Cui Xiuwen B. Harbin, Heilongjiang, China, 1967–2018 One Day in 2004 No. 1 2004 Color photograph Collection of Larry Warsh
17. WINDOW_221124_105.JPG: Cao Fei B. Guangzhou, Guangdong, China, 1978 RMB City: A Second Life City Planning No. 7 (still) 2007 Inkjet print on paper Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space
18. WINDOW_221124_109.JPG: Envisioning New Possibilities As technological advances have enabled artists to move from darkrooms to computers and into virtual realms, the technology of photography has pushed beyond the limits of reality, opening up novel windows of insight and experience. The Internet grew quickly once it was established in China, skyrocketing from 3,000 users in early 1995 to 111 million ten years later. Around the same time, digital photography became more prevalent with the introduction of the first available camera phone, the Nokia 7650, in 2002 and the iPhone in 2009. By 2021, China was estimated to have 971 million smartphone users as well as accounting for over half of the global virtual reality market. Although the Chinese government’s use of technology to enforce censorship and control over its population is well documented—its highly sophisticated Internet censorship system, known colloquially as the Great Firewall, has existed since 2000—new technological tools continually emerge to help people get around the wall. Contemporary artists, such as Cao Fei and LuYang, whose work is seen here, have embraced and explored virtual space as a site full of potential, where identity can be freed from societal constraints and the world can be reimagined.
19. WINDOW_221124_116.JPG: Zhang Huan B. Anyang, Henan, China, 1965 Left to right: Foam 7 1998 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Foam 6 1998 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Foam 9 1998 Color photograph Collection of Larry Warsh Raised by his grandmother in poverty in the countryside near Anyang, Henan Province, Zhang Huan moved to Beijing in 1991 to study oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He soon found himself living among other artists in Da Shan Village, Chaoyang, which he later was instrumental in renaming Beijing’s East Village. There, Zhang Huan staged several significant performances that were photographed by fellow East Village resident Rong Rong and can be viewed in the next gallery. In the first half of 1998, prior to moving to New York later that year, Zhang Huan created a series of fifteen photographic self-portraits titled Foam, which depict him slathered with foam holding portraits of his family in his open mouth. He explains, “Life is like a dream. It is transient. Just like foam, it sparkles and dies out in less than a second. I love this family and I hate this family. I wanted to eat them. I wanted to eat myself.” Visually reminiscent of the iconic Man Ray portrait of Marcel Duchamp covered in shaving lather, the Foam series connects Zhang Huan’s work with the Duchampian legacy of Conceptual art at this critical moment when he was severing ties with the past and preparing to leave China.
20. WINDOW_221124_119.JPG: Zhang Peili B. Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, 1957 Continuous Reproduction 1993 25 black and white photographs Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Known as the “father of video art” in China, Zhang Peili was an active member of the ’85 Art New Wave Movement, a group of intellectuals who sought to reconnect to the lineage of Modernism in China that had been interrupted by political suppression from the 1940s through the 1970s. Strongly influenced by European Dada and Surrealism and American Pop art, the ’85 Art New Wave promoted a critical engagement with art through public programs such as performances, lectures, conferences, and unofficial exhibitions. Optimistic about the potential for real change, this movement flourished from 1985 until 1989, at which point government crackdowns on artistic expression forced artists to find unofficial avenues of support. Continuous Reproduction, a rare photographic work by Zhang Peili, steadily degrades a Mao-era propaganda image of peasant girls over the course of twenty-five frames. A temporal meditation on the instability of memory, this seminal work encapsulates the conceptual framing that admitted new possibilities into photographic practice in the early 1990s.
21. WINDOW_221124_132.JPG: HISTORICAL TIMELINE | 1976–PRESENT Entering China shortly after the 1839 announcement of its invention in France, photography developed as a tool for portraiture, news reportage, advertisement, and art well into the early twentieth century. In the 1930s and ’40s, it was used for war propaganda, and, following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, it was employed to create an idealized version of New China to generate support for the Communist government. For the next three decades, photographers were constructed to work in this style, following Chairman Mao Zedong’s orders to produce photographs that would manipulate the masses. What follows is a chronology of events that contributed to the development of photography as an art form since Mao’s death in 1976.
22. WINDOW_221124_135.JPG: 1976 In early April, more than one million people gather in Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of Premier Zhou Enlai, who had struggled for power against the current governing regime. The demonstrations, which later become known as the April Fifth Movement, are forcefully suppressed and go unmentioned in official media. At great personal risk, several protesters photograph the movement, giving rise to an era of citizen photojournalism in China. On September 9, Chairman Mao Zedong dies, and in October, the members of the ruling Gang of Four (Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan) are put in prison. The Cultural Revolution comes to an end.
23. WINDOW_221124_137.JPG: 1978 The Beijing Spring, a brief period of political and artistic freedom, begins in November under the new leadership of Deng Xiaoping. In December, Deng announces the Open Door Policy, heralding a new era of economic and social reforms and increased openness to capitalism and Western culture. The same month, the first Chinese grassroots photography organization, the April Photo Society, is founded. 1979 In January, the book The People’s Mourning is published, featuring approximately 500 photographs taken during the April Fifth Movement. The one-child policy is introduced, requiring couples from China’s ethnic Han majority to limit their families to one child. The policy is officially implemented in 1980 and stays in effect through 2016, leading to population imbalance due to selective abortion and infanticide targeting girls and a larger percentage of the population now aging out of the work force.
24. WINDOW_221124_141.JPG: 1980 The southern city of Shenzhen is designated the first “special economic zone,” leading to its rapid transformation from a fishing village to a major manufacturing city. Today Shenzhen has a population of 12.7 million, the fourth-highest in China, and is often referred to as China’s Silicon Valley due to its status as a major technological hub and one of the fastest-growing regions in China. 1985 In November, a retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg’s work opens at the National Art Gallery in Beijing. This is the public’s first opportunity to see original works by a contemporary Western artist.
25. WINDOW_221124_144.JPG: 1986 In January, Deng Xiaoping is named Man of the Year by Time magazine. He is depicted on Time’s cover as part of a collage with Robert Rauschenberg’s work China. 1989 In February, the first officially sponsored exhibition of avant-garde art, China/ Avant-Garde, is held at the National Art Gallery in Beijing. The exhibition is temporarily shut down just two hours after opening when one of the artists, Xiao Lu, fires a pellet gun at her work.
26. WINDOW_221124_147.JPG: 1989 Between April and June, thousands of pro-democracy student protesters gather in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square after the death of pro-reform political leader Hu Yaobang. During the last two weeks of May, martial law is declared in Beijing, and hundreds of thousands of troops enter the city. On the morning of June 4, troops advance on Tiananmen Square, killing and arresting thousands of protesters. A final death toll will never be confirmed for what later becomes known as the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. 1990 Government crackdowns cause avant-garde art activities to decline in China. In January, the periodical Fine Arts in China, which had played an important role in the avant-garde movement, is closed by the authorities. In September, Art Monthly is restaffed with conservatives. In November, the Shanghai Stock Exchange opens as the first stock market in Communist China.
27. WINDOW_221124_149.JPG: 1992 The International Monetary Fund ranks China’s economy as the third-largest in the world, after the United States and Japan. 1993 A community of artists forms in a low-rent area on the eastern outskirts of Beijing, just beyond the Third Ring Road. Later renamed Beijing’s East Village, its artists explore photography as an adjunct to experimental performance art and Conceptual art until police disband it the following year. In June, Chinese avant-garde artists appear for the first time at the Venice Biennale. 1994 The Internet arrives in China. Ai Weiwei, Xu Bei, Zeng Xiaojun, and Feng Boyi privately publish The Black Cover Book, containing recent works by 28 Chinese artists alongside essays by Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, and Jeff Koons and contemporary art news from around the world. Zhuang Hui joins Ai Weiwei and Zeng Xiaojun to publish two later editions: The White Cover Book (1995) and The Grey Cover Book (1998). In December, construction begins on the Three Gorges Dam, a hydroelectric gravity dam that will become the world’s largest power station by 2012. Built to protect residents of the surrounding area from floods, the dam has created environmental problems for China by triggering landslides and altering the ecosystem.
28. WINDOW_221124_152.JPG: 1996 The Shanghai Biennale holds its first show at the Shanghai Art Museum from March 1996 through June 1997. It later becomes the most established contemporary art biennale in China. In May, New Photo magazine is founded by Liu Zheng and Rong Rong. A total of four issues, all photocopied and hand-bound, are published until 1998. Circulation is limited, with only 20 copies for the first two issues and 30 copies for the last two issues. 1997 The United Kingdom transfers the sovereignty of Hong Kong to China. 1999 Nineteen Chinese artists, including Ai Weiwei, Ma Liuming, Zhuang Hui, Zhang Peili, and Zhang Huan, participate in the 48th Venice Biennale, which opens on June 12. Starbucks opens its first store in China in the Forbidden City, Beijing.
29. WINDOW_221124_154.JPG: 1999 Nineteen Chinese artists, including Ai Weiwei, Ma Liuming, Zhuang Hui, Zhang Peili, and Zhang Huan, participate in the 48th Venice Biennale, which opens on June 12. Starbucks opens its first store in China in the Forbidden City, Beijing. 2000 The third edition of the Shanghai Biennale, organized by curator and critic Hou Hanru, introduces foreign artists to a Chinese audience. 2001 In March, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Ang Lee) wins Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. In December, China joins the World Trade Organization. 2002 Digital photography expands as the Nokia 7650—the first camera phone in China—enters the market. (The iPhone becomes available in China in 2009.)
30. WINDOW_221124_156.JPG: 2002 Digital photography expands as the Nokia 7650—the first camera phone in China— enters the market. (The iPhone becomes available in China in 2009.) 2003 China sends astronaut Yang Liwei into space, becoming the third country in the world to send a human into space. 2007 Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, a nonprofit art center in Beijing, is established by photographer Rong Rong and his wife, Japanese photographer inri. Three Shadows is the first contemporary art space in China dedicated exclusively to photography. In October, China launches its first moon orbiter, Chang’e 1.
31. WINDOW_221124_159.JPG: 2008 Apple opens its first store in Sanlitun, an entertainment and shopping hub in Beijing. In August, Beijing hosts the Olympic Games. 2009 China’s central government blocks Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
32. WINDOW_221124_162.JPG: 2010 Shanghai’s status as an international city is expanded by Expo 2010, running from May 1 to October 31 with the theme “Better City—Better Life.” Over 73 million people visit and 246 countries and international organizations participate. In October, jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” 2011 In January, WeChat, now the most popular social media platform in China, is launched. China overtakes Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. In April, Ai Weiwei is detained in Beijing, and police search his studio. He is held for 81 days under “economic crimes” without any official charges filed. He is later permitted to move abroad.
33. WINDOW_221124_165.JPG: 2012 Official figures suggest that city dwellers outnumber China’s rural population for the first time. 2013 Xi Jinping assumes office as president of the People’s Republic of China. 2014 China’s central government begins to block Instagram.
34. WINDOW_221124_168.JPG: 2015 The Shanghai Center of Photography (SC�P) opens in May. 2017 China overtakes the United Kingdom as the second-largest art market after the United States, accounting for 21 percent of the $63 billion in global art sales this year. China passes a new cyber security law that gives it more control over data from foreign and domestic firms.
35. WINDOW_221124_171.JPG: 2018 The National People’s Congress votes to remove a two-term limit on the presidency, allowing Xi Jinping to remain “President for Life.” Lianzhou, a small city in China’s southern Guangdong Province that is home to an acclaimed annual photography festival, opens the Lianzhou Museum of Photography, the country’s first state-owned museum dedicated to photography. 2019 In June, months of anti-government and pro-democracy protests begin in Hong Kong as citizens clash with the government over a proposal to allow extradition to mainland China.
36. WINDOW_221124_173.JPG: 2020 COVID-19 breaks out in Hubei Province and swiftly grows into a worldwide pandemic. 2021 Cao Fei becomes the first Chinese artist to win the Deutsche B�rse Photography Foundation Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the field of international photography. 2022 The Winter Olympics in Beijing successfully open, despite some boycotts from the West due to political tensions.
37. WINDOW_221124_178.JPG: Zhuang Hui B. Yumen, Gansu, China, 1963 One and Thirty—Artist 1995–1996 30 black and white photographs Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh The son of a professional photographer, Zhuang Hui grew up accompanying his father on trips to take portraits of regiments living along the northwestern border of China. He recalls the excitement of family members lining up to watch his father at work. This experience generated a lifelong interest in art as a social practice, and he collaborated with various social and political groups to produce portraits and art projects that visualize their shared identity. After witnessing the interplay between photography and performance in Beijing’s East Village, Zhuang Hui decided to embark upon a series of portraits of artists, enlisting the help of a friend with a camera since he did not own one himself. He photographed thirty artists, inserting himself into each frame as the “constant,” always wearing the same striped sweater. He later traveled to take similar portraits of peasants, workers, and children, completing a total of four iterations of the One and Thirty series.
38. WINDOW_221124_190.JPG: When concept enters Chinese photography, it is as if a window suddenly opens in a room that has been sealed for years. We can now breathe comfortably, and we can now reach a new meaning of “new photography.” —Rong Rong and Liu Zheng, preface, New Photo, no. 3, 1997
39. WINDOW_221124_206.JPG: Zhang Huan B. Anyang, Henan, China, 1965 Family Tree 2000 9 color photographs Collection of Larry Warsh
40. WINDOW_221124_212.JPG: Gu Dexin B. Beijing, China, 1962 Meat 1997 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Gu Dexin was one of the first artists in China to incorporate unconventional materials into his practice. In the 1980s, for example, while working part-time in a plastics factory in Beijing, he brought home scraps and melted them down into attenuated organic shapes that exhibit the range of the material. He was drawn to plastic due to its diversity and ubiquity—it is used in everything from tablecloths to toys—despite its relative newness in China. Later, he added organic materials to his installations (meat and fruit were two of his favorites), reveling in the perishable materiality of these items and the changes that occur as they decay. This interest in material transformation is evident in his two-year project Pinching the Flesh (1997–1998), which consisted of a daily practice of pinching a piece of raw pork until it was dry and documenting the action in a photograph. He often staged these photographs en masse, sometimes alongside dried pieces of pork to show the life cycle of flesh from his living hand to its desiccated terminus. While many other avant-garde artists left China for more receptive climates such as New York and Paris in the 1990s, Gu Dexin chose to stay, feeling that his work needed the constant push and pull of life in the capital city. In recent years, he has withdrawn from the arts and returned to what he has called a “normal life.”
41. WINDOW_221124_223.JPG: Qui Zhijie B. Zhangzhou, Fujian, China, 1969 Left to right: Tattoo Series No. 3 1997 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Tattoo Series No. 6 1997 Color photograph Collection of Larry Warsh Tattoo Series No. 5 1997 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Qiu Zhijie’s training was steeped in traditional Chinese culture—he was first exposed to Literati brush and ink painting at the end of the Cultural Revolution, when many of its practitioners reemerged into public view. A class of civil servants within the feudal system that preceded the founding of the Republic of China, the Literati were scholar-artist-poets and master calligraphers whose work focused on transcending the everyday world. Qiu Zhijie accompanied his teachers on excursions to make cliff rubbings of calligraphic inscriptions and on temple visits with Buddhist monks, where he would grind ink for their calligraphy practice. After viewing the Xiamen Dada exhibition at the Xiamen People’s Art Museum in Fujian Province in 1986, which showcased works that link Zen Buddhism to European Dada ideology, he made up his mind to become an artist. His Tattoo Series combines Literati brushwork with a conceptual, performative practice centered around the use of his own body. For each work, he paints a composition—an overall pattern or a Chinese character—across his body and onto the surface behind him so that he and the wall appear to exist on the same plane. He advocates for what he has termed “total art,” an amalgamation of philosophies and traditions that span place and time to generate new meanings.
42. WINDOW_221124_227.JPG: Reviving Self-Expression After the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in 1989, Chinese artists faced tight restrictions on official exhibitions and freedom of speech. Many chose to flee the country, but others who remained in China went underground, organizing their own exhibitions, publications, and events with the limited means available to them. On the eastern side of the dynamically changing city of Beijing, a short-lived artist community emerged that came to be called Beijing’s East Village. A fertile hub from 1993 to 1994, the area was named after New York’s East Village, where prominent dissident artist Ai Weiwei had lived before returning to Beijing in 1993 after a decade abroad. In Beijing’s East Village, avant-garde artists came together to create work that was often provocative, testing authorities and sometimes leading to arrests. Before the community was forcefully disbanded by the police, the photographer Rong Rong documented the vibrant performance and installation art created by Cang Xin, Lin Tianmiao, Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan, and others. Over time, lines between performance and photography blurred as artists launched photographic explorations using their own bodies, prompting a consideration of photography as an artistic mode of self-expression.
43. WINDOW_221124_232.JPG: Cang Xin B. Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China, 1967 Communication Series 2 1999 54 color photographs Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Cang Xin began using his body in his art while he was a resident of Beijing’s East Village in the 1990s. In one striking performative work, documented by Rong Rong across the gallery, he placed thousands of plaster molds of his face on the ground and invited bystanders to crush them underfoot. Twice arrested as conflicts between police and residents of the East Village escalated, Cang Xin retreated from society for most of 1995, a period he describes as one characterized by heightened depression, anxiety, and strange ideations. He emerged from this spell with a strong desire to reconnect with the physical world by licking objects, registering their taste and sensation in his body, and documenting the action in photographs. Over time, he became more selective, choosing to “communicate” primarily with things that represent Chinese culture, as can be seen in this series of fifty-four photographs taken in 1999, which includes objects such as a photograph of Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) and a traditional Chinese compass used in feng shui. Steeped in the philosophies of Daoism and shamanism, Cang Xin completes this action with ritualistic intent and links his practice to the cultural importance in China of taking pleasure in eating and drinking.
44. WINDOW_221124_240.JPG: Lin Tianmiao B. Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, 1961 Left to right: Spawn 2001 Mixed media Collection of Larry Warsh Seeing Shadow 2006 Digital photograph on canvas and thread Gift of Cynthia Hazen Polsky, 2015 (15.8) Trained in the traditional arts from a young age by her father, who was an accomplished painter, Lin Tianmiao spent eight years assisting in the studio of her husband, video artist Wang Gongxin, and working as a textile designer in New York before returning to Beijing in the mid-1990s to pursue her own artistic career. Today she is best known for sweeping mixed-media installations created with cotton, silk, and other textiles wound around found objects, attached to photographs, and used in video artworks. This practice of “thread winding” was inspired by her mother’s use of raw thread in household tasks and similarly takes many forms, such as the small balls of thread affixed to the surface of her photographic self-portrait Spawn and the delicate strands that add depth to the clouds in Seeing Shadow. Although her work is often viewed through a feminist lens—her self-portraits are intentionally androgynous, and the objects she uses are often associated with the domestic realm—Lin Tianmiao has said that it is, first and foremost, autobiographical in nature and derives from an intuitive interest “in the conditions and transformations of the body in a way that [isn’t] self-consciously feminist.”
45. WINDOW_221124_261.JPG: Hai Bo B. Changchun, Jilin, China, 1962 Left to right: I Am Chairman Mao’s Red Guard 1999/2000 2 color photographs (diptych) Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh They No. 5 2000 2 black and white photographs (diptych) Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Hai Bo uses his camera to compress time by restaging photographs of his friends, family, and himself decades after the original images were made. He recalls the moment when this idea first came to him: “I found a picture totally by chance and in the left corner were the words: ‘For the future 1973.5.20.’ Suddenly, a not-so-distant generation became so familiar that it seemed to be engraved on my bones.” He considers the recreating of these photographs to be a form of time travel to the original moment, if only “for 1/125 of a second”—the duration of the camera shutter’s release. The time span visualized in I Am Chairman Mao’s Red Guard and works from Hai Bo’s They series, such as They No. 5, is laden with social and political implications that permeate the images through clothing, posture, facial expressions, and, in some cases, absence, as seen in the seats left empty by people who are no longer living. By collapsing history in this way—for instance, by visualizing how a young woman who was part of the student brigades that persecuted millions during the Cultural Revolution has matured—Hai Bo offers a glimpse of the humanity that shines through complex histories, showing that people remain true to themselves regardless of the forces of time and changes that push against them.
46. WINDOW_221124_279.JPG: Huang Yan B. Jilin City, Jilin, China, 1966 Left to right, top to bottom: Chinese Landscape Series No. 1 1999 Color photograph Collection of Larry Warsh Chinese Landscape Series No. 6 1999 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Chinese Landscape Series No. 3 1999 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Chinese Landscape Series No. 8 1999 Color photograph Collection of Larry Warsh
47. WINDOW_221124_282.JPG: A poet by training, Huang Yan began painting Chinese landscapes on unusual surfaces—such as furniture, instruments, and the human body—in the mid-1990s, often in collaboration with his wife, Zhang Tiemei, a skilled painter who created the landscapes depicted here on his chest and arms. Huang Yan’s landscapes are rooted in his interest in the Literati, an elite civil-servant class of scholar-artist-poets who yearned for the mountains, where they might directly contemplate their relationship to nature, giving expression to their thoughts and experiences through writing and painting. He explains: In 1994, I realized that the thinking of the Literati was germinated through the alternation of their will to remove themselves from the world and their desire to be integrated within it. The history of landscape painting serves as a concrete example of this fact. . . . The landscape is the most authentic representation of their philosophy, of their personal way of conducting themselves in the world. Each mountain, each stone, each blade of grass, each tree acted as a conduit for the expression of their feelings. This emphasis on self-expression had been eclipsed by the rise of collectivism in the early twentieth century, but it returned in the mid-1990s as artists again sought to articulate personal truths. As is the case in Huang Yan’s Chinese Landscape Series, many artists utilized their own bodies as a conduit on this journey back to the self.
48. WINDOW_221124_287.JPG: Reckoning with the Recent Past The twentieth century in China was marked by revolution. The last imperial dynasty, the Qing dynasty, was overthrown in 1911 and replaced by the Republic of China (1912-1949), a modern state established to shed the decadence of feudal society. Many of the Literati cultural traditions that are associated with traditional Chinese culture—landscape painting, calligraphy, and poetry—were deemed elitist by revolutionaries and suppressed for much of the rest of the century. With the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Chairman Mao Zedong initiated even stricter regulations, requiring art to adhere to prescribed aesthetics and limiting people’s clothing to government-issued uniforms. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) further tightened restrictions on artistic expression. Even after it ended, the government exerted power over people’s lives in extreme ways, as in the one-child policy, a population control initiative launched in 1980 that limited families to a single child. Beginning in the 1990s, experimental photographers such as Qiu Zhijie, whose work is seen in the previous gallery, and Hong Hao, Hai Bo, Huang Yan, and Hong Lei, whose work is seen here, used their art to visualize the impact of these restrictions and to revive cultural traditions that had been pushed aside by the revolution.
49. WINDOW_221124_294.JPG: Sheng Qi B. Hefei, Anhui, China, 1965 My Left Hand (Mother) 2004 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Following the brutal events that transpired at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, when government troops opened fire on student protesters, killing hundreds and arresting thousands, crackdowns on avant-garde art activities resumed in China. Sheng Qi was one of many artists who fled the country at this time, living in Italy from 1989 to 1992 before pursuing his MFA at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Heartbroken, he cut off the little finger on his left hand and buried it in a flowerpot that he left behind in Beijing, determined that part of him would remain rooted in his home country while he lived in self-imposed exile. He recalls: “When I cut off my finger, I felt betrayed. It’s like you know someone for 20 years, then one day you discover he’s a total liar. It’s like the church falling down. You don’t know what to believe . . . you feel like killing yourself, because everything you believed before is just worthless. Life feels worthless.” In hindsight, this defiant act has been seen as a precursor to the body-focused performance art scene that developed in China in the early 1990s. After returning to Beijing in 1998, Sheng Qi embarked on a series of photographs called Memories, in which he held small images of his family or newspapers in the palm of his mutilated hand, bringing the anguish still present in his body into contact with other versions of the past.
50. WINDOW_221124_308.JPG: Responding to Profound Transformations The 1990s were a decade of great economic and cultural transformation in China. Following Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 announcement of the Open Door Policy, the country had begun to participate more fully in global markets. Foreign investors were encouraged through the establishment of Special Economic Zones offering tax and business incentives—ultimately leading to the rise of megacities driven by industry and technology, which feature significantly in the work of Chen Shaoxiong and Xing Danwen. Foreign business had tremendous impact on Chinese artists, as it connected them to the international art world: many artists began to travel and exhibit abroad, and by the mid-’90s, international art galleries had established a presence in major Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai. The rise of commerce also created new forms of employment and thus new lifestyles for many Chinese citizens, reflected here in parodies of the newly affluent business class by Qiu Zhijie and Hong Hao. Urban centers were in a constant state of upheaval, with populations moving in from rural areas and construction transforming the built landscape in ways once unimaginable, as seen in the work of Zhang Dali and Wang Jinsong.
51. WINDOW_221124_326.JPG: Chen Shaoxiong B. Shantou, Guangdong, China, 1962–2016 Left to right: Street Scene Series: The Third Street—Potsdamer Platz 2001 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Street Scene Series: The Third Street— Ged�chtniskirche Berlin 2001 Color photograph Promised gift. Collection of Larry Warsh Chen Shaoxiong was a founding member of Big Tail Elephants, an artist group that staged underground performances and exhibitions in ad hoc spaces such as bars, basements, and outdoor venues throughout the 1990s in Guangzhou, a southern port city that is the third-largest city in China after Shanghai and Beijing. As Guangzhou underwent rapid development, Chen Shaoxiong began to extensively photograph the city, cutting out individual elements and layering them into miniature three-dimensional street scenes that collapse time and space to represent the complexity of reality. He later expanded his subject beyond Guangzhou, writing: “I hope to be able to photograph every street in every city, every person and every single thing in the streets. And then I can blow them up in proportion, creating many streets that make up a ‘pocket kingdom.’ The city of Guangzhou would then become something portable. This could satisfy Westerners’ touristic mentality and desire for exoticism, and also tally with the slogan of the Guangzhou Municipal Government: ‘Connecting Guangzhou, Connecting the World!’”
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