A Portrait of Modern China
New photography exhibition offers images from fifty years of change
A new photography exhibition entitled 'China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic' will be on display at the Asia Society in New York until 2 January 2000. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Aperture Foundation, the world-renowned publisher of photography books.
No place on earth has changed so much over the last fifty years as China. From civil war following the Japanese occupation, to Communist revolution and rigidity, to an emerging capitalist economy that is among the world's fastest growing, the Chinese people have undergone a half century of transformations. This exhibition distils the essence of this period in 160 images by 33 photographers from Asia, Europe, and the United States.
For this exhibition photographers have been sought who have spent a lifetime in China, or in the case of Western photographers, those whose long-term commitment to the country and its people offers a view from within.
Michael Hoffman, Executive Director of Aperture, has brought together work by a number of image-makers who are less known internationally, including some whose works have never before been exhibited in the West: 'In addition to presenting images by internationally recognized photographers such as Sebastião Salgado, Wu Jialin and Hiroji Kubota, it is our hope to provide a meaningful view of China through the personal perspective of the photographers.'
To set the scene, the exhibition begins with a selection of black-and-white photographs from the era before the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. One picture, taken by U.S diplomat Owen Lattimore (1900-1989), shows the youthful Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai posing for a photo-journalist at their Yanan refuge in 1937. In keeping with the emphasis on the artistic value of these works, the rest of the exhibition is arranged not chronologically but in groups of images by individual photographers. Japanese-born Hiroji Kubota captures the excitement of a 1985 festival in Guandong province in a red spray of fireworks. The large-format panoramic photographs of Lois Conner, who has been working in China since 1984, offer evocations of classical landscape paintings as they present views of well-known sites. In a series focusing on the generation of his parents, Wang Jinsong photographed members of it in their homes, surround by household objects that speak of class and status as much as they do of personal taste.
According to Vishakha N. Desai, Director of the Asia Society Galleries, the exhibition and accompany publication 'China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic' is not a documentary survey but a 'highly personal, engaged, insiders' view of China and the Chinese during a time of unprecedented change.' *
CHINA: FIFTY YEARS INSIDE THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC
Until 2 January 2000
Asia Society
725 Park Avenue
New York 10021
New York
United States
http://www.asiasociety.org