Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China presents more than forty large-scale photographs created in China between 1993 and 2006. Featuring the work of fourteen contemporary artists, this survey represents a wide cross section of the new conceptual photography that flourished in the nation in the decades following the 1989 protests and massacre in Tiananmen Square—a pivotal moment of sociopolitical change that signaled the beginning of strict repressive measures and ended democratic, social reforms that had been initiated after the death of Communist leader Mao Zedong in 1976.
The exhibition is divided into three interrelated thematic sections—The Presence of the Past, East and West, and Performance and the Body—which together explore how these artists used performance and diverse photographic and aesthetic methods to capture, freeze, and criticize the new sociopolitical, economic, and cultural environment of China post 1989. The first and largest section, The Presence of the Past, demonstrates the significance of China’s sociopolitical struggle to cope with the rapid disappearance of its past, including its cultural values and traditions. Artists such as Hai Bo, Zhang Dali, and Wang Jinsong expressed their concerns through work that imaginatively connects past and present—Hai Bo through family portraits composed of old and new photos and Zhang Dali and Wang Jinsong through their documentation of the mass urban transformations in China around the turn of the millennium.
East and West explores how photographers used their work to reject the permeation of Western cultural and consumerist values. Wang Qingsong created highly composed cinematic tableaus that frequently resemble futuristic stage performances as platforms to criticize the capitalist market economy. Other artists were similarly attentive to digital formats and futuristic imagery: Hong Hao, for example, repeatedly staged himself as a somewhat displaced consumer of Western culture in self-portraits such as Hello Mr. Hong (1998).
In Performance and the Body artists employed photography as a tool of self-expression. Rather than foregrounding the medium’s indexical and optical qualities that freeze the past, artists engaged their other senses such as taste and touch to focus on lived, bodily experiences. For example, the artist Cang Xin took photos of himself while tasting physical objects, some of which feature explicit references to China, like a photograph of Mao. Other photographers such as Huang Yan sought to use their own body to physically connect to traditional Chinese fine arts practices, such as in his 1999 Chinese Landscape Series.
On view for the first time at the Kemper Art Museum, these glossy photographs—often beyond human scale—constitute a significant recent addition to the institution’s holdings of contemporary Chinese art. Created during a tumultuous period of recent history, they together make visible the radical transformations that China underwent during these critical decades—challenging past, present, and future.