2017.3.16 – 2017.5.13
Curators: Tang Xin, Su Wenxiang, Li Jia
Artistic Director: Tang Xin
How we see matters what we are. This is especially true in the domain of political image and political portraiture. Before the advent of digital era, camera has been viewed as a sophisticated machine operated with expertise and an agent of a semi-divine, visualized regime determining the shape of our quotidian life. Camera captures human image. It records, archives, perpetuates, even sanctifies. Political figures are rigorous supervising the publish and dissemination of their portrait, while we normal citizens are spreading our selfies around the world via Internet — today few of us will reject the invitation from a stranger to take a picture together, as if we are expecting our portraits to be taken away.
This exhibition is a part of a continuous research & exhibition program focusing on Chinese photography. Based on an enrichment of photographic archives provided by Taikang art collection, this exhibition will examine several selected cases includes a newfound portraiture archive in a photo studio in Yunnan province in 1980s, a 1950s workbook of People’s Fine Art Press, which contains hundreds of portraits of Chinese leaders of that time without any prettifying or modifying, and a series of portrait of Chairman Mao ranging from the early Yan’an Year to the climax of the Great Cultural Revolution…etc. It will explore the sophisticated engagement between archive and oblivion, politics and a gazing, man and the changeable currents driven by the monsoons of human affair…
