Chen Ronghui, Freezing Land 30, 2016-2018

Courtesy Chen Ronghui & Three Shadows + 3 Gallery

4 JUNE 2020 - 26 FEBRUARY 2021

About Us.
Young Photography
from China

What does photography tell us about the life experiences of the individual faced with a radical transformation of society? What visual languages does a generation of younger artists in China invent in its search for self-understanding?

A selection of seventy photographs by fourteen Chinese artists is presented in this exhibition — all works that Dr. Eva-Maria Fahrner-Tutsek has acquired for the foundation on her numerous trips to China.

After Robert Rauschenberg’s great series in the last exhibition, Study for Chinese Summerhall of 1983, with its Western look at China, these photographs offered inside views of the artists living in that country. Their themes revolved around self-perception, subjective experiences, and everyday ways of living. They range from documentation of the explosive social change by way of critical perception of the new living conditions in the metropolises and in the countryside to attentiveness to its vanishing cultural heritage. Whether in quiet, black-and-white aesthetic suggestive of documentaries or as a dramatic presentation in color, they all told of the artists’ own experiences: About Us. With themes such as memory and history, melancholy and resistance, dream and vision, body and individuality, they concerned the search for one’s own identity. They were mirrors of ideas and fears, of isolation and lust for life, of curiosity and depression, of coolness and confusion of their authors.

Exhibition Venue
Villa
Karl-Theodor-Str. 27
80803 Munich

Directions

Yang Fudong, International Hotel No. 11, 2010

© Yang Fudong, Courtesy Yang Fudong & Blindspot Gallery

A new generation of artists completely transformed their artistic production in the 1980s and 1990s after the Cultural Revolution in China ended. After Socialist Realism, ideology and propaganda, they developed new concepts and visual languages and a wealth of styles and techniques. The concept “experimental photography” attempted to sum up the complex and yet very different experimental and conceptual works produced from the 1990s to the present. Their diversity was also reflected in the selection of artists represented in the exhibition, several of whom were internationally renowned, while others were largely unknown outside of China.

This exhibition was intended as a contribution to the discourse on contemporary photography in China, a country that is increasingly a decisive political and economic power internationally, though its visual worlds are little known in the medium of photography in the Western world. These photographs, where their autobiographical narratives, subjective worlds of ideas, alternative models and visions offered insight into the individual complex emotional and experiential worlds of a generation of young artists who use photograph as their medium in diverse ways in their search for identity in the turbulences of a changing society.

With works by:

Adou

Birdhead

Cai Dongdong

Chen Ronghui

Chen Wei

Gao Mingxi

Jiang Pengyi

Liang Xiu

Ren Hang

RongRong

RongRong & Inri

Wang Ningde

Yang Fudong