The Hirshhorn Receives Gift of 141 Avant-Garde Chinese Photographs from Collector Larry Warsh
March 6, 2024
The Hirshhorn Receives Gift of 141 Avant-Garde Chinese Photographs from Collector Larry Warsh
Acquisition Showcased in Recent Exhibition, Public Programs, and 240-Page Catalogue, “A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China”
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden announced that it has formally acquired a gift from collector Larry Warsh of photographs made by leading Chinese artists between 1993 and 2006. Warsh’s gift comprises 141 artworks by 20 contemporary artists, including Cui Xiuwen, Rong Rong, Song Dong, Zhang Huan and Zhang Peili, who employed photography to instantly record their responses to new ideas of identity, sexuality, and consumerism against the rapidly changing social, cultural, and urban Chinese landscape for audiences in and outside the country.
“We are grateful to Larry Warsh for making us a key repository of avant-garde Chinese photography after 1993,” said Melissa Chiu, Hirshhorn director. “The breadth of his gift of experimental photography is unprecedented in the Hirshhorn’s almost 50-year history. The integration of these works into the global narrative of contemporary art enriches our collection and scholarly mission, inviting us to draw throughlines back to Joseph H. Hirshhorn’s foundational gift as well as other major gifts, including Barbara and Aaron Levine’s 2018 gift of more than 35 seminal works by Marcel Duchamp.”
The Hirshhorn showcased Warsh’s transformational gift in A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China (Nov. 4, 2022–Jan. 7, 2024). The full-floor presentation of 186 artworks made in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy (1978–1981) and the Tiananmen Square crackdown (1989) evidenced how emerging Chinese artists have embraced the immediacy of print and digital photography, recording performance and video art during an unprecedented cultural shift away from the prioritization of the collective to a revived focus on the self.
Among the significant artworks are Song Dong’s 36-image Stamping the Water (Performance in the Lhasa River, Tibet, 1996), a document of the artist’s action; Rong Rong’s 1990s-era photographs of Beijing’s East Village, a short-lived but significant artistic community with a vibrant dissident performance art scene; and Zhang Huan’s Foam 6, Foam 7 and Foam 9 (1998), a series depicting the artist eating photographs of his family with foam on his face, a direct engagement with a portrait of a foam-covered Marcel Duchamp by twentieth-century master Man Ray that is also in the Hirshhorn collection.
Warsh’s gift also includes artworks by Cang Xin, Chen Shaoxiong, Gu Dexin, Hai Bo, Hong Hao, Hong Lei, Huang Yan, Qiu Zhijie, Sheng Qi, Song Yongping, Wang Jinsong, Wang Qingsong, Weng Fen, Zhang Dali and Zhuang Hui.
The exhibition was accompanied by an eponymous 240-page catalogue copublished by Yale University Press that includes contributions by Chiu, Assistant Curator Betsy Johnson, and scholars Claire Roberts, Orville Schell, Karen Smith and Taliesin Thomas as well as original texts by 18 of the artists in the exhibition, many published in English for the first time.
The exhibition and accompanying catalogue were enhanced by 35 Hirshhorn Eye videos. Each Hirshhorn Eye (Hi for short) video is a minute-long insight from an artist that can be accessed by the Hirshhorn’s award-winning smart phone platform. Hi videos for A Window Suddenly Opens are also featured on the Museum’s YouTube channel and exhibition page. To access the videos, users open Hi.si.edu and scan images in the catalogue marked with a Hi logo to come eye to eye with the many of the featured artists who recorded their reflections from their studios in China. The catalogue features Hi videos by 11 artists whose work is included in Warsh’s gift. The inclusion of dynamic digital videos in materials for in-person and virtual audiences underlines the Hirshhorn’s mission to amplify artists’ voices and create an unmatched record of perhaps the most energetic era in contemporary Chinese art.
About the Hirshhorn Collection
The Hirshhorn’s permanent collection includes pieces by leading artists from the late 19th century to the present day and comprises paintings, sculptures, photographs, mixed-media installations, works on paper and new-media works. The Hirshhorn has one of the most comprehensive collections of modern sculpture in the world, with many examples on view indoors and in the Sculpture Garden.
An active acquisitions program continually adds work to the Hirshhorn collection in all media, with an emphasis on new work and the work of artists exhibiting at and collaborating with the Museum. Artists such as Ai Weiwei, Mark Bradford, David Hammons, Mona Hatoum, Robert Irwin, Yoko Ono, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Susan Philipsz, Adrian Piper, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread are represented by major works. Global modernism is also a collecting focus, and recent additions include works by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Park Seo-bo. African American artists recently entering the collection include Charles Gaines, Jennie C. Jones and Senga Nengudi.
About the Hirshhorn
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is the national museum of modern and contemporary art and a leading voice for 21st-century art and culture. Part of the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn is located prominently on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Its holdings encompass one of the most important collections of postwar American and European art in the world. The Hirshhorn presents diverse exhibitions and offers an array of public programs on the art of our time—free to all. Presently, the Hirshhorn Museum is open Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m. For more information, visit hirshhorn.si.edu. Follow the Museum on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
Image credit: Installation view of A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China (Nov. 4, 2022-Jan. 7, 2024) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Photo: Ron Blunt.
