This unprecedented view of one of the world’s most dynamic cities examines Shanghai as a laboratory for 21st-century urban creation. Leading artists, architects and fashion designers provide an insider’s view of the high-speed, high-density, high-rise culture that is rapidly emerging in China’s largest city.

What started out as a bustling seaport known for its corruption, casinos and opium trade has quickly become one of the world’s most forward-thinking cities. From the Bund to Pudong, Shanghai has transformed itself into a leading destination. Business peoples, designers, investors and tourists collide in what is a remarkable cultural and urban whirl.

Shanghai Kaleidoscope presented four key aspects of the city’s vibrant culture: architecture, urban design, contemporary art, and fashion. The exhibition brought together an adventurous mix of architectural models and digital simulations; designer fashion apparel, drawings and runway videos; and paintings, photo-works and video installations by the city’s leading contemporary artists.

Watch guest curator Christopher Phillips talk about the exhibition below:

Yang Zhenzhong, Let's Puff, 2002 Video

Shi Yong, Gravity: Shanghai Sky, 2004

An International Discourse on New Chinese Video and Photography

January 31, 2004 – San Diego Museum of Art

Organized by Eloisa Haudenschild and Tina Yapelli (Director, UAG, SDSU)

Moderated by Britta Erickson (Independent Scholar and Curator, Palo Alto)

Presenters included:
-Betti-Sue Hertz (Director, YBCA) Performance, Masculinity and Photographic Approaches in East Asian Contemporary Art
-Barbara London (Curator, MOMA) China Now
-Christopher Phillips (Curator, ICP, New York) New Photography in China: Between Past and Culture
-Xu Bing (Artist) Space Between: The Art of Xu Bing

“The exhibition’s lead title, Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photograph and Video from the Haudenschild Collection (2003 – 2005), refers to three major concepts quintessential to the exhibition and the symposium: Chinese artists’ use of photographic and video camera to examine the quick transition in their culture, the incredible pace of growth in China’s urban centers, and the current attention being paid to China by the rest of the industrialized world, especially the West. Most of the artists represented in Zooming into Focus live and work in China’s swiftly expanding southern megalopolises and frequently address those issues that directly affect young urbanites – the social impact of burgeoning consumerism, the meteoric rise of youth culture, the threatening loss of identity amidst the city swirl, the persistent sense of time speeding by. Exploring contemporary Chinese art in light of these concerns, the symposium will provoke a fresh perspective on China’s role in the international milieu.

Zooming into Focus investigated the effects of accelerated change in China through the work of the country’s most talented emerging artists. The swift transformation of Chinese culture is reflected in the work of each of these represented artists who comment on contemporary Chinese urban life with intelligence, wit, foreboding and nostalgia. The works of Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Feng Mengbo, Geng Jianyi, Hong Hao, Hu Jie Ming, Lui Wei, Lu Chunsheng, Kan Xuan, Shi Yong, Song Tao, Wang Youshen, Weng Fen, Xiang Liqing, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Yong, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhao Bandi, Zheng Gougu and Zhu Jia were included in this exhibition.

Marking many important milestones, Zooming into Focus was the first exhibition and symposium of its kind in San Diego, the West Coast, and Singapore and the first contemporary Chinese photography exhibition at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico. It was the first time the Shanghai Art Museum exhibited works on contemporary Chinese video and photography from a private collection and most importantly, it was the first retrospective exhibition of Chinese photography and video ever held at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing.

Contemporary art in China reflects the country’s surging influence as an economic, political and cultural force in the global arena. Chinese artists, especially those working in photography and video, are gaining international recognition for their powerful artworks that comment on the consequences of a rapidly changing society.  To encourage awareness and consideration of topics relevant to contemporary Chinese art, An International Discourse on New Chinese Video and Photography brought together world-renowned artists, curators and scholars for a series of presentations and an open discussion.  This symposium provided a new lens through which to better understand China’s transformative development, as expressed especially through the dynamic work of a younger generation of experimental artists. In addition, the symposium enhanced the appreciation of many of the most noteworthy Chinese artist working today. A catalog of the collection, exhibitions and symposia was published.” -Tina Yapelli

About the Participants

Tina Yapelli

Professor Tina Yapelli is the director of the University Art Gallery, a position she has held since 1985. In that role, she has originated more than forty-five exhibitions of contemporary art by regional, national and international artists. Some of the exhibitions have been coorganized in cooperation with other galleries and museums, at which they also were presented. She also has organized a variety of educational programs for the University and off-campus communities, including symposia, lecture series, gallery talks and visiting artists’ residencies. As a professor of art, she offers a course each semester in Gallery Exhibition Design. From 1992 to 1994, during a leave of absence from San Diego State University, Yapelli worked as curator of exhibitions at the Madison Art Center in Madison, Wisconsin. There she originated an additional ten exhibitions. She has appeared on television and radio programs to speak about visual art, and has been a guest speaker, curatorial consultant and exhibition juror at several California art institutions. An advocate for public art, Yapelli has served on numerous public art selection committees in Wisconsin and California. Her writing on contemporary art has appeared in journals in the United States, and in a book published by Telos Art Publishing in England.

Britta Erickson

Britta Erickson is an independent scholar and curator whose work focuses on contemporary Chinese art. She has taught at Stanford University and University of California, Berkley. Her recent projects include a major exhibition of Chinese art at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington and the creation of an award-winning Bibliography of Modern Chinese Art website. She is currently the Festival Director of the Denver Film Society.

Betti-Sue Hertz

Betti-Sue Hertz is the Director of Visual Art at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and served as the curator of contemporary art at San Diego Museum of Art from 2000-2008. Prior, she was the director of Longwood Arts Project, Bronx, New York 1992-1998. Her recent major exhibitions and catalogues at SDMA include Eleanor Antin (2008); Animated Painting (2007); Transmission: The Art of Matta and Gorson Matta-Clark (2006); Past in Reverse: Contemporary art of East Asia (2004); She was adjunct curator of Contemporary Links, a series in which contemporary artists respond to works in SDMA’s collection.

Barbara London

London is a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She’s been there since 1974, when she founded the Museum’s ongoing Video Exhibition Program. She built an essential context for the visionary statements being made internationally in video and media art by multi-cultural voices, emerging talents, and more established artists such as Laurie Anderson, Gary Hill, Mako Idemitsu, Joan Jonas, Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and Zhang Peili. Her objective has been to link the electronic arts with the more traditional art mediums. To document, preserve, and support this vital art field, she the Video Study Center and assembled its unique collection of more than 1,000 independently produced videotapes and related historical and theoretical publications. She is also an Instructor at the School of Visual Arts, 1994-97. To further her professional development, London took two sabbaticals to investigate new trends in electronic technologies and the effects on the creation and distribution of the arts in Japan.

Christopher Phillips

Christopher Phillips, curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, is the guest curator of the forthcoming exhibition Shanghai Kaleidoscope at Royal Ontario Museum (Canada). Mr. Phillips is actively engaged with many facets of contemporary Chinese culture. With Wu Hung, he co-curated Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, which was originally exhibited at the ICP and the Asia Society in New York. It was also presented to critical acclaim at the Haus der Kulturern der Welt (Berlin) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and is currently at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art until September 2006.

Xu Bing

Xu Bing was born in Chongqing, China in 1955. In 1977 he entered the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) where completed his bachelor’s degree in 1981 and stayed on as an instructor, earning his MFA in 1987. In 1990, on the invitation of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he moved to the United States. Xu currently serves as the Vice President of CAFA. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Joan Miro Foundation, Spain; National Gallery of Prague and the Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas, amongst other major institutions. Additionally, Xu Bing has shown at the 45th and 51st Venice Biennales; the Biennale of Sydney and the Johannesburg Biennale amongst other international exhibitions. Over the years, Xu Bing’s work has appeared in high-school and college text-books around the world including Abram’s “Art Past – Art Present,” Gardner’s “Art Through the Ages” and Greg Clunas’s “Chinese Art” a volume in the “Oxford History of Art” series. In 2006, the Princeton University Press published “Persistence/Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing” a multidisciplinary study of Xu Bing’s landmark work “Book from the Sky.” In 2007, Professor Robert Harrist, Chair of Chinese Art at Columbia University, New York, began teaching a graduate seminar entitled “The Art of Xu Bing.” In 1999, Xu Bing was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his “capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy.” In 2003 Xu Bing was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize, and in 2004 he won the first Wales International Visual Art Prize, Artes Mundi. The Southern Graphics Council awarded Xu Bing their lifetime achievement award in recognition of the fact that his, “use of text, language and books has impacted the dialogue of the print and art worlds in significant ways.” “Art in America” listed Xu Bing, along with 15 others, in their annual Year in Review.

Chinese artist Yang Zhenzhong premiered his video installation Let’s Pray at the Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego on January 31, 2004.

This work was filmed during his residency at the haudenschildGarage from October 22 – November 12, 2003.  Let’s Pray was produced in collaboration with Tina Yapelli of the University Art Gallery of San Diego State University. Yang Zhenzhong was invited for the exhibition Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography & Video from the Haudenschild Collection.

Prior to the video installation premiere at MOPA, Christopher Phillips introduced the video screening, Chinese Video and Film NOW!; Yang Fudong present in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The videos included Song Dong’s My Motherland Made the Scene for Me, 1999; Wang Gognxin’s Fly, 2000; Cao Fei’s Rabid Dogs, 2002; and Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (Part I), 2003.

Additionally, while in residence, the haudenschildGarage supported Yang Zhenzhong’s filming of the Spanish and English portions of his video I Will Die in San Diego and Tijuana. The ten channel video was later chosen for the 2007 Venice Biennale.

About Yang Zhenzhong

Born in Xiaoshan in 1968, Yang Zhengzhong now lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from the oil painting department of the China Fine Arts Academy in Hangzhou in 1993 and began working with video and photography in 1995. Yang Zhengshong’s work has showed at major biennales and triennials including Venice (2003), Shanghai (2002), Guangzhou (2002) and Gwangju (2002). Yang Zhengzhong became famous in 2000 with his ten channel video “(I Know) I Will Die” that features short sequences in which a series of people speak the phrase “I will die” to the camera. It is a disconcerting, soberly presented film that confronts the viewer with existential questions.

Yang Zhengzhong recognizes that individual participation is the starting point for the transformation of perception. The video “922 Grains of Rice” plays with the interaction of the image of a cock and a chicken pecking grains of rice and the sound of a male and a female voice counting the number of pecked grains. It is a humorous representation of the battle of sexes as well a comment on today’s competitive behavior.

The desire to challenge normative notions of social behavior informs the practices of Yang Zhenzhong’s work. He is pre-occupied with China’s intrinsic disharmony and extreme discrepancies and often touches upon taboos such as death and out-dated social norms. His approach is metaphorical rather than narrative. His videos often start from witty ideas, employing image repetition and rhythmic coordination of sound, language and image. “Let’s Puff” (4th Shanghai Biennale, Zone of Urgency, 50th Venice Biennial) similarly starts from the interplay of two images: a young woman puffing and a busy street. Every time the woman breathes, the image of the street moves away from the viewer. The rhythm of the traffic and the angle of perception are altered with the rhythm of the woman’s breath.

Yang Zhengzhong’s playful videos are more than visual reflections; they are intelligent comments on the design of contemporary society. In a series of photos entitled “Light and Easy,” he perceives the weight of urban changes as an exterior phenomenon, and literally depicts the process as a weightless factor, turning urban landmarks upside down. “Light and Easy” is based upon a conviction that the lightness of the isolated exterior or interior is a source of interesting material. The successful experiments the artists have executed to formulate connections are exciting, sincere and disturbing. (ShanghART; Shanghai, China)

The video installation Let’s Pray was commissioned by the haudenschildGarage and filmed during Yang Zhenzhong’s residency at the haudenschildGarage from October 22 – November 12, 2003. Yang Zhenzhong was invited as part of the exhibition Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography & Video from the Haudenschild Collection.

Let’s Pray was produced in collaboration with Tina Yapelli of the University Art Gallery of San Diego State University and premiered at the Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego on January 31, 2004.

Prior to the video installation premiere at MOPA, Christopher Phillips introduced the video screening, Chinese Video and Film NOW!; Yang Fudong present in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The videos included Song Dong’s My Motherland Made the Scene for Me, 1999; Wang Gognxin’s Fly, 2000; Cao Fei’s Rabid Dogs, 2002; and Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (Part I), 2003.

Additionally, while in residence, the haudenschildGarage supported Yang Zhenzhong’s filming of the Spanish and English portions of his video I Will Die in San Diego and Tijuana. The ten channel video was later chosen for the 2007 Venice Biennale.

About Yang Zhenzhong

Born in Xiaoshan in 1968, Yang Zhengzhong now lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from the oil painting department of the China Fine Arts Academy in Hangzhou in 1993 and began working with video and photography in 1995. Yang Zhengshong’s work has showed at major biennales and triennials including Venice (2003), Shanghai (2002), Guangzhou (2002) and Gwangju (2002). Yang Zhengzhong became famous in 2000 with his half-hour video “(I Know) I Will Die” that features short sequences in which a series of people speak the phrase “I will die” to the camera. It is a disconcerting, soberly presented film that confronts the viewer with existential questions.

Yang Zhengzhong recognizes that individual participation is the starting point for the transformation of perception. The video “922 Grains of Rice” plays with the interaction of the image of a cock and a chicken pecking grains of rice and the sound of a male and a female voice counting the number of pecked grains. It is a humorous representation of the battle of sexes as well a comment on today’s competitive behavior.

The desire to challenge normative notions of social behavior informs the practices of Yang Zhenzhong’s work. He is pre-occupied with China’s intrinsic disharmony and extreme discrepancies and often touches upon taboos such as death and out-dated social norms. His approach is metaphorical rather than narrative. His videos often start from witty ideas, employing image repetition and rhythmic coordination of sound, language and image. “Let’s Puff” (4th Shanghai Biennale, Zone of Urgency, 50th Venice Biennial) similarly starts from the interplay of two images: a young woman puffing and a busy street. Every time the woman breathes, the image of the street moves away from the viewer. The rhythm of the traffic and the angle of perception are altered with the rhythm of the woman’s breath.

Yang Zhengzhong’s playful videos are more than visual reflections; they are intelligent comments on the design of contemporary society. In a series of photos entitled “Light and Easy,” he perceives the weight of urban changes as an exterior phenomenon, and literally depicts the process as a weightless factor, turning urban landmarks upside down. “Light and Easy” is based upon a conviction that the lightness of the isolated exterior or interior is a source of interesting material. The successful experiments the artists have executed to formulate connections are exciting, sincere and disturbing. (ShangART; Shanghai, China)

“The exhibition presented an invaluable opportunity to bring to southern California work that would not otherwise be shown in the region. The project was groundbreaking, as it was the first exhibition to feature the current generation of Chinese photographers and videographers.

The artists’ residencies were extremely significant for the University, as they provided students the incredible experience of working with two of the artists, Yang Zhenzhong and Shi Yong. In the case of Yang, students were involved in the creation of a new work commissioned by the haudenschildGarage, which premiered at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.

The project was also important because it created a network of collaborations with institutions in San Diego, Tijuana, Shanghai, Beijing and Singapore.” – Tina Yapelli Director of the University Art Gallery

Exhibition
October 25, 2003 – April 21, 2004, University Art Gallery, San Diego State University

Organized by Tina Yapelli and Eloisa Haudenschild.

Symposium
An International Discourse on New Chinese Video and Photography

January 31, 2004 – San Diego Museum of Art
Organized by Eloisa Haudenschild and Tina Yapelli (Director, UAG, SDSU)

Moderated by Britta Erickson (Independent Scholar and Curator, Palo Alto)

Presenters included:
-Betti-Sue Hertz (Director, YBCA) Performance, Masculinity and Photographic Approaches in East Asian Contemporary Art
-Barbara London (Curator, MOMA) China Now
-Christopher Phillips (Curator, ICP, New York) New Photography in China: Between Past and Culture
-Xu Bing (Artist) Space Between: The Art of Xu Bing

Video Screening
Chinese Video and Film NOW!
January 31, 2004, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego

Introduction by Christopher Phillips; Yang Fudong present in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The works screened included Song Dong’s My Motherland Made the Scene for Me, 1999; Wang Gognxin’s Fly, 2000; Yang Zhenzhong’s I Will Die, 2003; Cao Fei’s Rabid Dogs, 2002; and Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (Part I), 2003.

Video Installation Premiere
“Let’s Pray” by Yang Zhenzhong
January 31, 2004, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego

Let’s Pray was commissioned by the haudenschildGarage and filmed during his residency with the support of Tina Yapelli.

Artists-In-Residence
October and November 2003

Shanghai artists Shi Yong (November 3 – 10, 2003) and Yang Zhenzhong (October 22 – November 12, 2003) were in-residence at the haudenschildGarage; they were commissioned to produce new work.

Yong’s residency concluded with his performance of the interactive piece Super Angel at San Diego State University. Zhenzhong’s residency culminated in the premiere of the commissioned work Let’s Pray at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.  The haudenschildGarage supported Zhenzhong in filming the English and Spanish segments of his piece I Will Die (English, Spanish, and Chinese) while in San Diego and Tijuana.  I Will Die was later selected for the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Premiere Performance
“Super Angel” by Shi Yong
November 8, 2003, San Diego State University

Super Angel was commissioned by the haudenschildGarage; he worked with San Diego State University students.

Keynote Lectures
November 8 – 9, 2003 San Diego State University & the Chinese Historical Museum

Hou Hanru, Paris-based writer and curator of Zone of Urgency at the 2003 Venice Biennale, was the keynote lecturer at San Diego State University where he presented Chinese Artists (Digitally) Facing the Globalizing World as well as at the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum.

Video Dialogue: Shanghai/Tijuana
November 1, 2003, Centro Cultural, Tijuana, Mexico

This event was moderated by Norma Iglesias and included presentations by Yang Zhenzhong and Tijuana artists Itzel Martinez (Yonkart), Giancarlo Ruiz, and Salvador Vazquez Ricalde.

Marking many important milestones, Zooming into Focus: Chinese Contemporary Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection (2003 – 2005) was the first exhibition of its kind in San Diego and Singapore and the first contemporary Chinese photography exhibition at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico. It was the first time the Shanghai Art Museum exhibited works on contemporary Chinese video and photography from a private collection and most importantly, it was the first retrospective exhibition of Chinese photography and video ever held at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing.

Zooming into Focus investigated the effects of accelerated change in China through the work of the country’s most talented emerging artists. The swift transformation of Chinese culture is reflected in the work of each of these represented artists who comment on contemporary Chinese urban life with intelligence, wit, foreboding and nostalgia.

The works of Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Feng Mengbo, Geng Jianyi, Hong Hao, Hu Jieming, Kan Xuan, Lui Wei, Lu Chunsheng, Shi Yong, Song Tao, Tang Maohong, Wang Youshen, Weng Fen, Xiang Liqing, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Yong, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhao Bandi, Zheng Gougu and Zhu Jia were included in this exhibitions. Other artists in the collection include Gu Dexin, Hai Bo, Wang Jin, Zhou Tiehai, Yu Youhan, and Zhao Nengzhi.

Lorenz Helbling and Laura Zhou supported all exhibitions and organized the Hangzhou symposium at the China Art Academy. Shi Yong was responsible for designing the Zooming into Focus catalog and the installation design of Zooming into Focus at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing.

In addition to the traveling exhibitions, two symposia were held: An International Discourse on New Chinese Video and Photography at the San Diego Museum of Art and Envisioning the Future of Contemporary Art from Different Glocal Positions at the China National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China. Participants included Xu Bing, Waling Boers, Fan Di’an, Huang Du, Britta Erickson, Hu Fang, Yang Fudong, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Wang Gogxin, Hou Hanru, Betti-Sue Hertz, Xu Jiang, Evelyne Jouanno, Mami Kataoka, Martina Koppel-Yang, Pi Li, Barbara London, Zhang Peili, Christopher Phillips, Zheng Shengtain, Karen Smith, Rudolf Stoert, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Li Xianyang, Li Xu, Mo Zhelan, and Qiu Zhijie.

The haudenschildGarage launched their residency program in 2003 which invited Chinese artists and curators for the first time to the United States. Shi Yong and Yang Zhenzhong were the first artists in residence and Hou Hanru, Cao Fei, Yong Fudong, Laura Zhou, Lorenz Helbling, Evelyn Jouanno, and Victoria Lu were also invited to the Garage. Both Shi Yong and Yang Zhenzhong produced new works commissioned by the haudenschildGarage while in residence.

With the introduction of digital photography and high-tech printing facilities in China in the 1990s, a new generation of artists immediately embraced photo-based media as the perfect means for expressing the changes taking place around them.

The face of the new China is not the medical masks spawned by the SARS outbreak or the bubble- headed visor of the country’s first astronaut. Rather, it is the image of a lone young businessman howling in the middle of an empty highway, having just been hit in the head with a brick. This photograph, The First Intellectual (2000), by Shanghai artist Yang Fudong, captures the anxiety of life in a society undergoing rapid industrialization. And like its subject, the artist himself has been struck by an onslaught of international attention. His work, which sells for around $2,000 to $7,000 for photographs and $6,000 to $10,000 for videos, was featured at the Pompidou Center, the 50th Venice Biennale, Documenta 11, the Fourth Shanghai Biennial, and the First Guangzhou Biennial-all in the last two years. Yang, 32, describes his film Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2003), which he showed at the Venice Biennale, as one of his favorites. “I have only finished the first part,” he explains. “The whole work will have five parts and should be completed in two years.” The work reflects his early idealism as well as the disillusionment of his generation. “When I was younger, I was very idealistic and had some very pure dreams- deep beliefs that I wished to express,” he says. “The expectation in school when I was growing up was that we’d be inspired to be idealistic and pure and always pursue what we believe. Basically, the beliefs haven’t changed. Yes, school was under the Party,” he continues, “but you also learn to apply these lessons in your own life.”

The current international wave of shows focusing on China’s burgeoning photography and video scene are certain to draw ever larger American and European audiences to artists like Yang. This past summer, the Pompidou Center in Paris opened “Alors le Chine?” (What About China?), an exhibition of contemporary art from China, in conjunction with a cultural-exchange program, L’Annacute de la Chine en France, sponsored by China and France. And through April 21, part two of Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography from the Haudenschild Collection is on view at the art gallery of San Diego State University. The Denver Art Museum is showing, through May 9, Over One Billion Served: Conceptual Photography from the People’s Republic of China Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, curated by Julie Segraves of the Denver-based Asian Art Coordinating Council. Also, this month New York’s Museum of Modern Art has scheduled China Now, a survey of recent video works by 18 Chinese artists, including Yang, organized by film and video curator Barbara London. But the most extensive show is expected to be New Photography from China, a joint effort of the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, organized by ICP curator Christopher Phillips and Wu Hung, professor of Asian art at the University of Chicago and consulting curator to the Smart Museum. On view at the ICP and the Asia Society in New York from June through September, the show will include some 100 works by 45 artists.

While the global art world has arrived on China’s shores-including biennials in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and the annual Pingyoa Photography Festival- contemporary artists in China are still relatively isolated, by language and geography, from Western influences. “For the moment,” says Phillips, “Chinese artists are paying attention mostly to their own country and their own context, and that has given recent Chinese art a very interesting and individual stance.”

Phillips notes how “industrialization, urbanization, dislocation of enormous populations from the countryside – the social conditions that spurred an enormous artistic response in the West between 1880 and 1920 – are happening and will continue to happen in China.” But certainly the images he and other curators are finding are a far cry from the pathos-filled village scenes Henri Cartier-Bresson portrayed in 1948 or the nostalgic temples that Lynn Davis created as recently as last year. Today photographers in China are being driven in large part by the swift development of Chinese cities and the introduction of a market economy, just at a time when “globalization” has become the hot topic at international biennials.

Weng Fen, 42, who shows with Courtyard Gallery in Beijing, has created a haunting series of images, which include Sitting on the Wall-Guangzhou No. 2 (2001), and Bird’s Eye View-Shenzhen (2001), in which two schoolgirls in uniform, backs to the camera, look toward the skyline of their once-rural hometown, now populated by skyscrapers. Yang Zhenzhong, 35, represented by ShanghART in Shanghai, will present his videos in the MoMA program, but he has also worked extensively in digital photography. His photo series Light and Easy (2002) shows him walking in city streets, balancing towering office buildings in the palm of his hand (an optical illusion generated in Photoshop), as if urbanization were merely another juggling act. His works sell for around $1,000 to $3,000 (photos) and $5,000 to $10,000 (videos). By contrast, Chen Shaoxiong, 41, favors lower-tech manipulation. This artist takes cutouts of street scenes in China that he had shot just a few years before and holds them up in front of the same, but newly developed, locations today. In the resulting photographs, such as Street-Haizu Square (1999), the juxtapositions of the old and new-bicycles vs. sports cars, kiosks vs. billboards-are disconcerting but beguiling.

Photography is a recent development in China’s relatively young contemporary-art history, which in itself is a post-cultural revolution phenomenon, emerging in the late 1970s with the relaxation of Communist controls, in force since 1949. But while an earlier generation of artists-many featured in the Inside Out exhibition (in New York at the Asia Society and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 1998)-was described as post- Mao, the younger generation is clearly post-Tiananmen Square, reflecting the modernization that has taken place since that event in 1989 and the adoption of a market economy in the late ’90s, when galleries began to open and foreigners provided a fledgling collector base.

The world learned about Tiananmen Square instantly through a photograph, headlined “Man Blocks Line of Tanks, Tiananmen Square, Beijing,” taken by AP photographer Jeff Widener. It was transmitted by the protesting students instantly over the Internet, documenting not only the event but also the ways in which technology was already transforming the country. In 1995, with the introduction of digital photography and high-tech printing facilities, a new generation of artists, though trained in traditional painting and sculpture at art academies, immediately embraced photo-based media as the perfect means for expressing the changes taking place around them. “When you speak to artists in China, they say that you can take a photo today and get it developed before tomorrow,” explains Melissa Chiu, curator of contemporary art at the Asia Society. “Photography represents an immediacy that allows them to record the changes going on in China as they are happening.”

Though all of the works discussed here were made in China, they avoid stereotypes of Chinese art-traditional scroll paintings and calligraphy and the Socialist Realism of the cultural revolution. “The biggest mistake that people make when looking at contemporary art from China, is either they look for Western references that are totally irrelevant or they look for very simplistic icons, like Mao,” says Meg Maggio, an American and longtime resident of Beijing, where she is director of the Courtyard Gallery. Maggio notes that the first Chinese contemporary artists to gain recognition in the United States and Europe in the mid-1990s capitalized on this “mistake,” working in the style of Political Pop, a blend of cultural-revolution icons with American Pop art. Though most of these artists are painters, there are a few photographers who continue to mine this vein. The Luo Brothers seamlessly insert Coca-Cola and McDonald’s logos into happy-faced scenes from cultural-revolution posters. And Zhao Bandi, 40, represented by Ethan Cohen Fine Arts in New York, is accompanied by a panda in his digital self-portraits, carrying on humorous dialogues (through cartoon-strip-style bubbles) with this symbol of Chinese kitsch. His photographs sell for $600 to $25,000.

But the University of Chicago’s professor Wu traces the various movements in contemporary photography in China to Beijing East in the early 1990s. This fringe neighborhood on the outskirts of the city was a convergence point for the most experimental artists in China at a time when arrests and government closures of exhibitions were still rampant; it spawned the first wave of art photographers. Rong Rong, who photographed the street life and happenings in this fragile bohemia and showed recently at Chambers Fine Art in New York, is often described as the black-and- white Nan Goldin. He cofounded the first avant-garde photography magazine, New Photo, in 1996 with Liu Zheng, another photographer engaged in capturing China’s transvestites and sick and homeless people, but in a style more akin to August Sander and Diane Arbus.

By contrast, performance artists such as Zhang Huan, 38, Ma Liuming, 34, and Zhu Ming, 31, among the first to gain gallery representation in New York and Europe, used photography to document their events, but those images often superseded the performances themselves. Photographs of Zhang’s works, such as To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond (1997), in which people stood naked in a pond of turquoise blue water, conveyed the quiet revolution taking place in China and became symbols of the avant-garde.

“I think it is impossible not to call it ‘Chinese,’ because that is the cultural context it came from,” says Chiu, “but at the same time, the kind of imagery that is being produced has an international relevance and is speaking about more universal issues.” Indeed, if there is anything unique about the situation of artists working in photography and video in China, it is the fact that they are working in a culture that intentionally separated itself from the modernist photography movements of the 20th century. Under Mao, photography was a propaganda tool, and during the cultural revolution, it could be downright dangerous, especially in family albums. “Chinese traditional history is very well recorded, more than that of any other civilization,” says Maggio, “so for a people who have always had an official record of history to suddenly have that ruptured in the 20th century, well, now everyone is hunting for their own take on history.”

Photography has become a means for reconstructing an erased past-or for underscoring the ways in which it cannot be eradicated. Hai Bo, 41, another Courtyard Gallery artist included in many shows, spent several years tracking down individuals whose anonymous faces he’d found in family photographs from the 1930s. He restaged the pictures with the people in the exact poses of the original snapshots and then exhibited the pairs of images, old and new, as individual artworks with titles such as The Three Sisters or Middle School. (Those now dead or missing are represented by an empty space in the newer grouping, a reminder of the casualties of political upheavals.) Similarly, the couple Shao Yinong and Mu Chen have photographed former Communist Party meeting halls, now reception halls, movie theaters, and senior centers. Again, the juxtaposition of old and new in these not-quite-renovated interiors demonstrates photography’s ability to wait out and to outweigh history.

Other photographers are going back further, to the iconography of Chinese scroll painting and the literati tradition, to find ways to incorporate their 3,000-year-old cultural history into contemporary art. Xiang Liqing, 31, who studied oil painting at the China Academy of Fine Art, has digitally manipulated views of China’s gaudy new apartment buildings into grids that resemble ancient calligraphy in his series Rock Never (2002). His images are priced between $800 and $4,000. On a much grander scale, Wang Qingsong, 37, is staging tableaux involving as many as 30 people, in ways that might be compared with Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall.

Wang, who is having his first solo show in the United States at New York’s Salon 94 in May, co-organized by Jeannie Greenberg and the Courtyard Gallery’s Maggio, says, “My works are looking at the changes in China in the last two decades and from before I first came to the U.S., in 1999. I thought these changes meant that China was becoming Westernized. But, then I came to the U.S. I found that so many of these changes were not exactly what the U.S. or other foreign countries are like.” They were something entirely new, he says. “The modernization China is undergoing,” he observes, “is a very backward kind of modernization, such as destroying all the ancient architecture in the cities. In the U.S.,” by contrast, he notes, “there is so much concern about preservation.” Although the photographs, he explains, “let people from outside learn about China, when I create the work, I don’t think how it would be accepted or not outside of China.” While Crewdson and Wall may allude to European history painting, Wang appropriates the elongated format of Chinese narrative paintings. His work Night Revels of Lao Li (2000) imitates the arrangement of figures in a 10th-century Song dynasty painting, Night Revel of Han Xizai by Gu Hongzhong, drawing parallels between the voyeuristic role of the painter in the emperor’s court and Wang’s own position as a successful artist in relationship to the contemporary-art scene in China.

But even as all this art represents a leap forward for China culturally, remnants of the past linger. Despite Mao’s famous adage that “women hold up half the sky,” women are still admitted to art academies at a lower rate than men, and fewer have garnered international attention. One exception is Lin Tianmiao, 42, who originally created installations, like Go? (2001), commissioned by Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in which she wrapped once popular but now discarded objects, such as bicycles, in white thread and then placed them in front of photographic murals. Lin has since shifted her attention from issues of industrialization to more personal statements about the body, especially in Plait/Braid, shown at the Guangzhou Biennial in 2002. In this piece the artist, who trained as a textile designer, projects a monumental self-portrait in which her head is shaved, onto a white cloth; from behind, streams of white thread sprout from the fabric, falling to the floor behind the image, an exploration of female identity. In collaboration with her husband, Wang Qingxin, she has also been making videos. Several other women photographers surfacing in international exhibitions are Cao Fei, Liang Yue, and Danwen Xing, whose 2002-3 disCONNEXION series of images of electronic detritus was one of the highlights of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “The American Effect” last year.

Censorship is another lingering concern, though government intervention has subsided since the 1990s. “At this point, in terms of visual art, as long as the artists don’t verbalize the meaning, they can get away with the depictions,” says Segraves. Professor Wu sees the situation as being far more complicated. “When you try to avoid censorship, it may become self-censorship, which is even more dangerous,” he says. “The artists now know the system so well and want to be part of shows that the government is sponsoring or supporting, and they may be becoming less radical.” Government officials still make the rounds before the opening of large exhibitions and biennials, which has a chilling effect. One incident occurred during the 2000 Shanghai Biennial, when a spin-off exhibition titled “Fuck Off” included photographs of performance artist Zhu Yu reportedly eating a dead baby. The work was singled out as a “social evil” by conservative delegates to the 2001 National People’s Congress. But, as Shanghai-born Zhou Tiehai made abundantly clear with his digital portrait of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani weighted to the floor by two lumps of elephant dung (also in “The American Effect”), the threat of censorship is not restricted to China.

As there are no constitutional guarantees for free expression in China, artists, dealers, and curators must feel their way, on a case-by-case basis. When asked if censorship is a concern, Lorenz Helbling of ShanghART Gallery replied, “There has never been a show that I knew for certain would not be closed.” But for most contemporary-art dealers in China working with new-media and photo-based artists, the primary concern is not avoiding censorship but finding buyers. “For several years, even at sophisticated places like Art Basel, we showed Yang Fudong and others-no reaction,” says Helbling. “These works do not shout ‘Chinese,’ so people did not know how to respond.” While many collectors of contemporary photography are adding this work to their collections in anticipation of the upcoming shows, few can match the depth of San Francisco and Vail, Colorado, collectors Kent and Vicki Logan’s holdings in contemporary art from China. Eloisa Haudenschild, president of inSITE in San Diego, the collaborative exhibition program between Mexico and the United States, has also assembled a major trove, specifically concentrating on photo-based works created in the past three years. “These artists are good enough without being too Chinese-y,” she explains. “I stay away from works that are directly political or exploit any kind of exoticism.”

Yet even as these artists gain recognition in the United States and Europe, many New York dealers who worked extensively with Chinese artists in the mid-1990s have concerns. Zhang, like other Chinese artists today – Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang, Chen Zhen – is “independent,” after having had one-shot solo shows with Max Protetch Gallery, Deitch Projects, and Luhring Augustine Gallery. Dealers, both in China and in the West, say they have found that many of these artists are unfamiliar with the gallery system and the politics of “exclusive representation.” Curators confirm that even when they are working through a gallery, the artist often approaches them directly, offering works on the side. Max Protetch, who still works with painters Fang Lijun and Zhang Xiaogang, stressed the importance of avoiding generalizations but noted that it takes a number of years to develop the artists’ trust. “With Chinese artists, I felt that I had to buy the work in order to get them to save it for a show,” he explains. “With artists from Europe or even Mexico, I could take things on consignment with no difficulty. After all, this is a very well known gallery.”

Ethan Cohen explains the current status and the reasons for it: “Ten years ago, people would say that there was only enough room for one or maybe two Chinese artists in the contemporary-art market. Today we are seeing that more and more Chinese artists have become powerful forces in that market. Everyone thought this was going to be a short trend, the way it was with the Russian artists, but an abundance of fresh material keeps coming out.” Cohen sees great talent in China-”their refinement, innovation, and seriousness is simply outstanding,” he says. “The art schools there are so good and so selective that even before the artists enter, many have been recognized as virtuosos. These artists worked very hard, and as they became more exposed to the West, they worked at becoming more sophisticated.”

Recently, Zhu Ming, who is represented by Cohen’s gallery, performed his Bubble Man, naked on the beach at Art Basel Miami. He comments on censorship and body art: “I don’t believe that the government clampdown in the early 1990s had any effect on my work, but I felt it always in my bones. I feel more liberated these days, but my mind has never been free, ever since I went to prison in 1994 for three months. From that moment, I have always been terrified, in my body, in my human core, and I have never done a performance in China without feeling scared that a policeman would come and arrest me.” Photographs of Zhou’s performances sell for $2,000 to $20,000.

He found this, his first performance outside China, liberating. But then Cohen interjects, “I felt like he feels in China, worrying about the police, whether the nudity would be permitted. I was haunted by the shadow of Giuliani, or maybe the mayor of Miami.”

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Barbara Pollack is a contributing editor of ARTnews