Born in Buenos Aires and currently residing in San Diego, California, Eloisa Haudenschild, has one of the largest collections for contemporary Chinese photography and video art. “Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Photography and video from the Haudenschild Collection” exhibitions in US, China and Mexico included a schedule of Symposia, artist residency programs, commissioned works and a series of lectures, performance, video dialogues and screenings in US, China and Mexico. A passionate collector and art patron, Eloisa Haudenschild was interviewed after her appearance in Hong Kong in July 2004 for her talk on collecting at Bloomberg’s Hong Kong corporate headquarters. The following interview was conducted via emails.

[EH= Eloisa Haudenschild / PW= Phoebe Wong]

PW:    When and why did you start collecting contemporary Chinese video and photography?

EH:    My husband Chris and I started travelling to China on business five years ago. My experience as a collector of Latin American Art fueled my interest and appreciation for upcoming artists in different parts of the world. I tried to find connections with the art world and young artists. After a couple of years of searching we found in Shanghai the first group of artists that are today part of our collection. It was not my initial goal to have a collection of solely photography and video, but soon I realized that they were the media in which the artists were doing the most interesting work in my opinion.

PW:    What was your first piece in the collection? In what way, if any, does it help or determine your future direction?

EH:    There was not a first piece in the collection; there were a few artists I had collected initially. They included Yang Fudong, Shi Yong, Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen, Xiang Liqing, and Zheng Guogu and I met them personally in Shanghai and Guangzhou.

After my first encounter, I came back home and started doing some more research. That is how I met Hou Hanru, Huang Yongping, Wang Du, Yang Jiechang (he is part of the collection) and Martina Koeppel-Yang in Paris. Later, generous curators and artists, who are dear friends today, supported our first symposium in San Diego, California. They were Christopher Phillips, Barbara London,  Britta Erickson, Xu Bing, and Prof. Wu Hung, who wrote one of the essays for the exhibition catalogue of Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection. More fascinating people participated in our symposium in Hangzhou.

Subsequent trips brought artists Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Feng Mengbo, Hong Hao, Weng Fen, Yang Yong, Zhao Bandi, and Song Tao into the collection, all artists from Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Haikuo.

PW:    Did you gradually develop a theme in your collection, such as, urbanism?

EH:    Youth and urbanism seem to be very strong issues for these artists in the above-mentioned exhibition. It is expressed in different ways, often with images filled with fantasy and longing.

PW:    Indeed, the collection can be seen through the thread of “constructed visual fictions” as Wu Hung has commented. Also, you mainly collect works from artists who live and work in Shanghai and Guangzhou – two highly commercialised cities and in rapid transition.

EH:    Yes, I enjoy the unique and thoughtful way the artists from the south, they are individuals who operate independently.

PW:    To offer a better understanding of the context of the works (collection), what are the readings you suggest concerning what has given rise to these works?

EH:    Chinese Art at the Crossroads by Prof. Wu Hung and On the Mid-Ground by Hou Hanru are two very important books. Also there are a variety of articles by scholars and curators like Britta Erickson, Martina Koeppel-Yang, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Li Xu, Zheng Shengtian, and others that shed light into this new and exciting moment in contemporary Chinese art.

PW:    Are you among those collectors who also commission new work and offer residencies?

EH:    My interest in collecting extends beyond the acquisition of art works. Collecting allows me to share in the artist’s journey, to participate in the process at a point when I can make a difference in the career of these young artists. My interest extends to the creation of educational programs, residencies (Yang Zhenzhong and Shi Yong at present) and the commissioning of new pieces.

PW:    Using the work of Shi Yong as an example, how did the residency unfold?

EH:    I believe the launching of “Super Angel I” and “Super Angel II” on the internet, Shi Yong’s project in collaboration with the students at San Diego State University, was very interesting and complex. Once the data was gathered for a few months, Shi Yong came to San Diego, interacted with artists on both sides of the US/Mexico border and students. The final phase of the project was an interactive performance.

PW:    Being described as “one of the most important collections of contemporary Chinese art in the world”, indeed, how large is the Haudenschild Collection, to date? And, what is your future direction in collecting?

EH:    The exhibition Zooming into Focus is only one part of the collection. Artists like Yang Jiechang, Gu Dexin, Wang Jin, Wang Youshen, Zhou Tiehai, Hai Bo, Yu Youhan, Zhao Nengzhi are included in the collection as well. The collection, now numbering over 60 pieces, will continue growing; we are constantly in the process of buying new works from new artists and are continuing to buy more works from artists already part of the collection – there is always a long wish list.

My commitment to the artists is to continue exposing their work, having the collection travel, supporting the development of the artists, and opening opportunities to them. Most importantly is my relationship with the artists – I think of them as friends. I only collect works from artists I know personally, I live surrounded by their work, I have never sold a piece of any of our collections, and do not purchase works that I feel exploit the exotic or the oriental. I have supported the participation of many Chinese artists in exhibitions such as the Venice Bienale, “Past and Reverse” at the San Deigo Museum of Art, and as well at Berkeley University in San Francisco.

The collaboration with international institutions was key to our project as was the organisation of lectures, symposia, video screenings, and video premieres – activities that took place in the US, China and Mexico.

PW:    Your being an avid collector, I am able to the feel emotional investment in your collection and in your endeavour to bring educational programmes to it. In hindsight, do you think your collection reflects your sensibility, or, offers you a new understanding of yourself? As for the works shown in the exhibition as well as in your talk, they are edgy works – some rather provocative.

EH:    I imagine the collection reflects my interest in the discovery of new and untapped works and artists. I enjoy participating in the artist’s process and development as much as I can.

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Having studied in design and cultural anthropology, Phoebe Wong is a Hong Kong-based culture worker specialising in art, design and visual media. She is currently a researcher of the Asia Art Archive.

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

As the opening of Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection at its final venue the National Gallery in Beijing draws near, it is time to pause and reflect on the exhibition’s significance. Since its inaugural showing in 2003, at the University Art Gallery, the San Diego State University (U.S.A.), the exhibition has traveled to the Shanghai Art Museum (China), the Centro Cultural Tijuana (Mexico), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (Singapore) and, now, the National Gallery in Beijing (China). During these two years, interest in contemporary Chinese photography and video has mushroomed. When Eloisa and Chris Haudenschild began collecting, only specialists in the field had heard of the young artists whose works so fascinated the Haudenschilds. Now, many of those same artists are in very high demand for international exhibitions and important collections. The Haudenschilds were prescient in their focus, driven by Eloisa’s enthusiasm, and guided by Lorenz Helbling, director of ShanghART in Shanghai.

Two years ago, Chinese photography and video was poised on the brink, its sheer energy, mass and quality readying it for launch into an international presence. Just last year, the major exhibition, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (2004),[i] did much to promote Chinese photography and video, with a touring schedule that includes New York, Chicago, Seattle, Berlin, and Santa Barbara. Yang Fudong’s nomination for a Hugo Boss Prize in 2004 signified that the international art arena was ready to seriously consider new media artists from China. In 2005, Oxford University Press added entries on three Chinese video artists to the online reference work, Grove Art Online.[ii] Clearly, Chinese photography and video has come of age since Zooming into Focus first opened in 2003.

As the exhibition of a private collection, Zooming into Focus has had a certain nimbleness and allure. Representing a personal vision, it has not been expected to present a complete or historic view of the field. Nevertheless, it has captured a major slice of Chinese photography and video, representative of a signal moment. Private collections are well suited to capturing the life of a vibrant art movement, driven as they are by passion, unencumbered by institutional impedimenta. The Haudenschilds’ enthusiasm for the field extends beyond collecting: as part of the overall Zooming into Focus program, they have commissioned new works (not necessarily collectible), have sponsored lectures and video screenings, and have supported two symposia focusing on contemporary Chinese photography and video, in San Diego and Hangzhou.

Because Zooming into Focus has been exhibited in diverse parts of the globe, its significance shifting with place and time, I have asked people close to the collection and to the exhibition for their thoughts on what Zooming into Focus has meant.

On The Collection

Lorenz Helbling, Director of ShanghART
The collection is a very “open” collection. “Open” may be a strange word here; I mean different things. It a collection of works of artists who are themselves very open, exploring new ways, asking more questions than giving answers, artists also who are still developing. It doesn’t aim to fix images people should have of China, or to transmit stereotypes of China. It is not about “signature works” or “trophy pieces” it’s more about a spirit, about involvement. It is an open cooperation between a special collector, artists, curators and a gallery. It is not an overview, it is an entrance.

Eugene Tan, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore
The Haudenschild collection is, for me, exemplary of good art collecting practices. It is not only impressive for the way the Haudenschilds have built up such a significant and focused collection during a short period of time, it is also exemplary for the attitude they have adopted in their support of the artists whose work they collect. By exhibiting their collection in Singapore, it was also my intention to draw attention to the way the Haudenschilds go about their collecting activities, and raise awareness of the role and responsibilities of collectors.

Tina Yapelli, Director of the University Art Gallery, San Diego State University
The Haudenschild Collection consisted of approximately a dozen pieces when I first proposed the project to Eloisa. In part because of my interest in exhibiting the work at San Diego State University, Eloisa was inspired and encouraged to both broaden and deepen the collection, which is now the most important collection of contemporary Chinese photography and video in the world.

On The Exhibition

Lorenz Helbling, Director of ShanghART
The most important thing is, of course, that this collection could happen. But it is also very important that such prominent museums here in China were ready to show this kind of art.

Eugene Tan, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore
As the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore is committed to showcasing significant trends as well as the best examples of contemporary art practice, Zooming into Focus was an ideal exhibition for us to organize at the gallery. Not only does the exhibition highlight a major trend among contemporary Chinese artists towards the use of video and photography, many of the artists in the exhibition are also internationally renowned, thereby providing audiences in Singapore a rare opportunity to see their works. . . . [It] was also a “first” for Singapore to have an exhibition of this kind, a major exhibition of contemporary Chinese photography and video.

It was an important exhibition for highlighting and raising the level of discourse of photography and video in Singapore. Photography and video are still, as yet, relatively new mediums in art practice in Singapore. It was therefore useful for artists and the public to see how widely used these media are and also the interesting and innovative ways in which Chinese artists are using them.

Li Xu, Curator, Shanghai Art Museum
This exhibition was the first time for the Shanghai Art Museum to exhibit a collection of Chinese contemporary art from the United States, and the first time for a special group show of Chinese video and photography in this museum (although some of the artists or works had been shown here in some other exhibitions).

The audience and media were very excited about the exhibition. It seemed as if they had discovered some kind of new cultural environment in one night, but these artists and works had already been in Mainland China for a long time! The importance of the exhibition is in no doubt: it showed some truth of Chinese contemporary art to the public and to the cultural circle, and it prodded the Chinese art museum circle to realize it would be very important to start collecting video and photography works.

Teresa Vicencio Alvarez, General Director of the CECUT
Zooming into Focus was the first contemporary Chinese photography exhibition that took place in the Centro Cultural Tijuana. The fast growth that has characterized our city is also one of the characteristics of the society in which these fourteen Chinese artists have lived, being this a generator of the wide interest from the artistic community, art and design students of the state, as well as an important amount of articles in the local press.

Tina Yapelli, Director of the University Art Gallery, San Diego State University
Working with Eloisa Haudenschild to organize the exhibition allowed me an invaluable opportunity to bring to San Diego (and 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, whose work had been featured in Europe and elsewhere, but not in the United States.

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 Haudenschild Collection, which premiered at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego. They also assisted him in the continuation of his ongoing project I Will Die.

Another reason the project was important was because it created a network of collaboration with institutions in San Diego and Tijuana: the San Diego Museum of Art; the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico; El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana, Mexico; and the San Diego Chinese Historical Society and Museum.

There is the general sense that everywhere, the exhibition was breaking new ground, supporting the development of the field, sparking the interest of local artists, and forging new institutional alliances. The San Diego, Tijuana, and Singapore venues had not previously exhibited Chinese art of this kind; in China the museums had not shown a comprehensive exhibition of photography and video. Perhaps in the latter case, the fact that the exhibition was drawn from a foreign collection gave it a certain attraction, even imprimatur. As Lorenz Helbling commented, “It is an entrance.” Zooming into Focus has served as an exemplary entre en matie, with lasting repercussions.

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[i] Co-organized by the Smart Museum, University of Chicago and the International Center of Photography, New York, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Asia Society, New York; curated by Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips.

[ii] Britta Erickson, Biographical entries on Song Dong, Yang Fudong, Zhang Peili, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, September 2005

Photography became art again in China in the late 1970s and 1980s. Whereas this visual technology was largely reduced to a propaganda tool during the first thirty years of the People’s Republic, it reconnected with individual expression after the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was over. The April Photographic Society – the first unofficial photo club in post-Cultural Revolution China — emerged in 1978; the exhibition it organized in Beijing the following year, entitled Nature, Society, Human, attracted a huge audience hungry for images outside the official media. The 1980s witnessed a delayed introduction of the major schools and masters of western photography from before World War II. Their techniques as well as social and artistic aspirations influenced a generation of young Chinese photographers, whose first goal, not unexpectedly, was to regain photography’s credibility as a record of real social events and human lives. The result was a sustained “documentary movement” from the 1980s to the early 1990s, which produced many works with a strong political agenda, either exploring the dark side of society – poverty, deprivation, social stratification, and political injustice — or glorifying an idealized, timeless Chinese civilization unspoiled by Communist ideology.

This initial process, which Chinese critics have termed a “Photographic New Wave” (sheying xinchao), lasted about a decade and laid the ground for a new generation of photographers to undertake wide-ranging artistic experiments beyond realism and symbolism. Photography became linked to an ongoing experimental art movement in the early and mid-1990s, employed by avant-garde artists to record performances and staged scenes. Since then, a brand of image-making, often referred to by Chinese artists and critics as “experimental photography” (shiyan sheying), has grown into a broad trend; its continuous, exciting development over the past decade has been characterized by non-stop reinvention, abundant production, multifaceted experimentation, and cross-fertilization with other art forms. While “experimental photographers” find inspiration in performance, installation, and multi-media art, painters, performers, and installation artists routinely employ photography in their work, sometimes even reinventing themselves as full-time photographers. Photography now plays a central role in contemporary Chinese art because of its openness to new visual technology such as digital imaging, and because it most effectively challenges the conventional boundaries between fiction and reality, art and commerce, object and subject, thereby inspiring and permeating various kinds of art experiments in China.

Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography from the Haudenschild Collection, the exhibition that this catalogue documents, showcases some of the most recent developments in this experimental art. Most works on display were created in the past five years, while a considerable number date from 2000-2002. The exhibition thus has an acute focus on contemporaneity in a twofold sense – the contemporaneity of China as a rapidly changing society, and the contemporareity of photography as a constantly self-inventing art form. In terms of subject matter, these images demonstrate the artists’ overwhelming concern with their living environment and their own identity.

A striking aspect of Chinese cities in the 1990s and 2000s has been a never-ending destruction and construction. Old houses are coming down everyday to make room for new hotels and shopping malls. Thousands and thousands of people have been relocated from the inner city to the outskirts; in their place a new “urban generation” has begun to invent a globalized culture for itself. This situation is the context and the content of several works in this exhibition. For example, Weng Fen’s striking photographs of two southern cities, Shenzhen and Haikou show a young girl sitting on a wall and looking out; following her gaze we see a mirage-like cityscape emerging on the horizon. The wall thus separates not only space but also time; and the girl mediates not only “here” and “there” but also “now” and “then,” extending our view to an alluring future (nos. 00-00)). When we turn to Xiang Liqing’s Rock Never, however, we are abruptly brought back to the (intensified) reality of a “post-modern” Chinese city: the six large pictures in this series represent residential high-rises as paradoxical structures, characterized by their uniform, anonymous architectural style on the one hand, and by abundant signs of human activities on the other hand. The simulated repetition of both types of image brings these two aspects of a contemporary Chinese city into sharp conflict.

As Xiang’s pictures imply, the emerging city attracts experimental photographers not only with its buildings but also with its increasingly heterogeneous population. To Chen Shaoxiong, a member of the avant-garde Big Elephant Group in Guangzhou, a heterogeneous city resembles the stage of a plotless tableaux; what unites its characters is the place they share. This notion underlies his series of photographs in this exhibition, which are conceived and constructed like a series of puppet theaters within the real cityscape. Images in each photograph belong to two detached layers: in front of a large panoramic scene are cut-out miniatures — passersby, shoppers, and policemen amidst telephone booths, traffic lights, different kinds of vehicles, trees, and anything one finds along Guangzhou’s streets. These images are crowded in a tight space but do not interact. The mass they form is nevertheless a fragmentary one, without order, narrative, or a visual focus.

Representing urban spaces and population, Chen’s photos are linked with another popular subject in contemporary Chinese photography – images of a new “urban generation,” called dushi yidai in Chinese. Works belonging to this category include Yang Yong’s Cruel Youth Diary, Yang Fudong’s Don’t Worry I Will Be Better and The First Intellectual , Yang Zhengzhong’s Cycle Aerobics, and Zheng Guogu’s A World View Digital Image. Instead of portraying the lives of urban youths realistically, these images deliver constructed visual fictions. Each work consists of multiple frames, which invite us to read them as a narrative unfolding in time. Indeed, such interest in seriality and story-telling may be traced to contemporary Chinese experimental cinema, especially the “urban generation” films of the late 1990s and early 2000s. But the “stories” in the photographs remain non-specific or allegorical. What the artists hope to capture is a certain taste, style, and mood associated with this generation of people, and for this purpose they have created images that are often deliberately trivial and ambiguous. Yang Fudong’s Don’t Worry I Will Be Better, for example, represents a group of fashionable Shanghai yuppies, including a girl and several young men. The pictures resemble film stills, but the plot that connects them remains beyond the viewer’s comprehension. In a different and more comical style, another work of Yang’s in the exhibition, The First Intellectual (no. 00), comments on the vulnerability and insecurity of such yuppies — a byproduct of China’s social and economic reforms.

Images of the “urban generation” are further linked to the self-representations of experimental artists, who often identify with this generation. In fact, a strong interest in representing the self sets experimental photography apart from other branches of contemporary Chinese photography. For example, although documentary photographers also take pictures of people and urban scenes, they approach their subjects as belonging to an external, observed reality. Experimental photographers, on the other hand, find meaning only from their interaction with the surrounding world, and customarily make themselves the center of a photograph, as seen in many works in this exhibition: Hong Hao’s Mr. Hong Usually Waits, Shi Yong’s Tonight Moon and You Cannot Clone it, But You Can Buy It, Zhao Bandi’s Zhao Bandi and Panda, Feng Mengbo’s Shot 0074 Q and Shot 0075 Q, Cao Fei’s Beautiful Dog Brows, and Xu Zhen’s Sewer. Shi Yong represents himself as multiple, mass-produced robots; Zhao Bandi employs the style and format of a public poster for his self-portraits; Feng Mengbo turns himself into an action hero in the fictional world of a computer game; Hong Hao imagines himself as the master of an opulent, western-style mansion; Cao Fei transforms herself into a cat; Xu Zhen constructs an abstract picture with images of his body parts. Taken together, these images, the results of masquerade and self-manipulation, both reflect the crisis in the artists’ self-identity and their urgent quest for individuality in a rapidly commercializing society.

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Wu Hung is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at the University of Chicago. He has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art and visual culture and has curated several important exhibitions on Chinese experimental art, including The First Guangzhou Triennial. He is currently collaborating with the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography in New York on the forthcoming exhibition New Photography from China.