Behind the Curtains

 A new exhibition of documentary photography, Humanism in China: A Contemporary Record of Photography, is on view at China Institute Gallery from September 24 through December 13, revealing a glimpse of China never before seen in the U.S. The photographs, dating from 1951 though 2003, offer intimate portraits of rural and urban daily life in China, beyond the glossy veneer of the economic boom.

Humanism in China: A Contemporary Record of Photography was organized by the Guangdong Museum of Art, and represents the first large-scale collection of photography acquired permanently by any museum in China. The curators, Wang Huang-Sheng, An Ge, and Hu Wu-Gong, visited photographers’ homes and studios in more than 20 provinces and viewed an estimated 100,000 photographs before selecting 600 images by 248 photographers. The exhibition at China Institute Gallery offers a more tightly focused selection—100 photographs by more than 80 photographers—chosen by Dr. Jerome Silbergeld, Professor of Chinese Art History at Princeton University.

Together the images present an unvarnished, starkly realistic view of the hardships and rewards of social modernization. “These photographs are not just about society and history but are equally about photography itself and the history of documentary photography in China,” Silbergeld writes in the catalogue essay. An excerpt follows:

In the Chinese visual arts, balance is often a balance of opposites (Southern Song painting comes to mind), and Hei Ming’s portrait of a Muslim chef out in front of a crude construction workers’ restaurant in rural north China, finally getting his own meal after the customers are all gone and the bowls are all hung out to dry, makes the most of this.

The figure in the doorway on the left contrasts with open space in front of the window on the right; the rectilinearity of the architecture contrasts with the circularity of the improbably suspended bowls; the disposition of the bowls are endless varied; the bowls resonate with the bowl-shaped skullcap of the Muslim chef. The highly structured photograph was an immediate success, and one more unexpected dimension was brought into play:

Within a short period of time, Iron Rice Bowl was published in many local and international publications, which included People’s Daily, Bright Daily, Economic Daily, China Photographer, and China Travel. The photograph was accompanied by an editor’s note in many papers, associating the photograph’s artistic form with the structural reform in China. This was because China at that time was in the political climate of “breaking the iron bowl” [eliminating those occupations with income guaranteed by the state, at the end of the Maoist era]. Moreover, the almost one hundred bowls on the wall were made of enameled metal. Only the bowl in the old man’s hand was made of clay, Hei Ming said in an interview.

The stark setting of Hei Ming’s Iron Rice Bowl establishes the photograph’s formal qualities, yet the aesthetic pleasure of the work does not alleviate the stark poverty. Rather, the two exist as one, a reminder both of Sontag’s “two different imperatives.”