Exhibition: China then and now

From 4 to 20 March 2008 Quaritch will be holding an exhibition of Chinese photographs covering the period 1945-2004. 

Since the end of the Chinese Civil War (1945–49) the place of photography in Chinese society has adapted to changes in the political and intellectual culture brought about by the shifting relationship between the state and the individual.  China has always lured and challenged foreign photographers; John Thompson was one of the earliest Western photographers to work in China and publications like China and Its People made his name. Following the foundation of the People’s Republic of China a few foreign photographers whom the authorities felt would be sympathetic observers were granted entry.  Prominent photojournalists like Marc Riboud and Henri Cartier-Bresson were among these foreigners and, like Westerners before them, their work in China helped cement their reputations in the West and influenced how the West imagined China. 

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) the authorities recognized the value of photography in projecting the official vision of society and it employed state controlled photographers to produce images that were used as propaganda.  Unofficial photographs were regarded as a means of ‘fictitious truth telling’.  The rejection of Confucianism and much of Chinese culture and history, which had bound Chinese society for millennia, meant that a new type of social cohesion had to be formed and state-controlled interpretations of history and society were an integral part of this.  The work of these state photographers embodies the authorities’ ideal vision of a unified society with a common identity.
 
Post-Mao, the official establishment gradually allowed some discussion of cultural issues, and by the nineties state restrictions on artistic expression and photography eased.  A new generation of photographers, among them Bai Yiluo and Cui Xiuwen,  has flourished creating work that communicates a strongly individual voice as it tries to reconcile the history of the Cultural Revolution and repression of the individual with the consumerism and relative freedom of today.  There is an immediacy, vibrancy and unease communicated by much contemporary work that begins to accept and focus on the individual: society can now identify with the individual and vice versa. 

‘For its own sake, this art decided to go for an individualist solution: the subjectivity of a personal view, the individually reflected reality of the ordinary day using a certain amount of hedonism, a seemingly shallow restlessness with an often surprising dose of irony and self-parody’ (Petr Nedoma in A Strange Heaven: Contemporary Chinese Photography, p. 11).