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Artist Talk: Contemporary Photography in China
April 18, 2024 | 9:00 am–10:30 am
FREE
In a special online talk, five of the most groundbreaking artists working in China over the past three decades—Lin Tianmiao, Rong Rong, Song Dong, Xing Danwen, and Zhang Peili—will join Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden assistant curator Betsy Johnson and University of Michigan postdoctoral research fellow Meng Zhao in conversation.
This program is inspired by the Hirshhorn’s recent exhibition A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China, which brought together photography by twenty-five of the most innovative artists working in China over the past thirty years. During this time of swift cultural transformation, Chinese artists embraced the immediacy of photography to document the changes around them as well as their own thoughts and actions as they shifted their focus away from the collective to prioritize self-expression. This program will bring together key figures in the development of experimental photography in China to look back at these decades and discuss how they came to understand photography as a conceptual art form and the impact of this understanding on their communities and artistic practices.
This program was initiated by The Triune Brain collective and is presented in partnership with the University of Michigan Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.
Interpreting provided by Eriksen Translations.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Lin Tianmiao (b. Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, 1961) was trained in the traditional arts from a young age by her father, an accomplished painter, and later spent eight years assisting in the studio of her husband, video artist Wang Gongxin, and working as a textile designer in New York before returning to Beijing in the mid-1990s to pursue her own artistic career. Today she is best known for large-scale installations, sculpture, photography, and video artworks that are rooted in a practice she calls “thread winding,” which is based on her mother’s use of raw thread in household tasks. Lin has had solo exhibitions in China, Europe, and the US, including Systems, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2018); 1.62M: Lin Tianmiao, HOW Art Museum, Wenzhou, China (2015); and Bound Unbound, Asia Society Museum, New York City (2013). Her work was included in Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which traveled to the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. Lin’s work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; National Gallery of Australia, Parkes; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; M+, Hong Kong; and Singapore Art Museum.
Rong Rong (b. Zhangzhou, Fujian, China, 1968) moved to Beijing to pursue a career as an artist in the early ’90s, soon making his way to its famed East Village and integrating himself into the community by documenting its activities in photographs. His images offer an intimate view into artists’ performances and installations—often fleeting and ephemeral—bestowing upon them a monumentality that has facilitated their incorporation into the historical record. Additionally, at a time when darkrooms were scarce, Rong Rong was able to print not only his own works, but also those of his peers. His significance to the development of photography in China was further cemented by his publication, with Liu Zheng, of New Photo magazine from 1996 to 1998 and his 2006 establishment, with his wife, inri, of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, China’s first contemporary art space dedicated to photography.
Song Dong (b. Beijing, China, 1966) explores themes of memory, self-expression, impermanence, and the transience of human endeavors. Introduced to painting and calligraphy at a young age, he was influenced by the ’85 Art New Wave Movement, which proposed a radical shift toward expressive and experimental innovations, and he soon turned to video and performance. In 1994, he debuted Another Class, Do You Want to Play with Me?, a performance-based installation featuring numerous faucets and pipes overhead, piles of test papers strewn on the floor, wordless books, and empty blackboards as a critique of the educational system. Next he began the daily Water Writing Diary (1995–present), recording each day with fleeting text written in water on a rock. His exhibitions have included Projects 90, Museum of Modern Art, New York City (2009); A Blot on the Landscape, Pace Beijing (2010); and Song Dong: Life Is Art, Art Is Life, Groninger Museum, Netherlands, and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (2015–2016).
Xing Danwen (b. Xi’an, Shaanxi, China, 1967) taught herself photography after studying oil painting at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. Early work documented communities such as Tibetan villagers, Chinese coal miners, and the performance artists living in Beijing’s East Village. Fiction, truth, and illusion play important roles in her works (spanning mixed media and installation as well as photography and video), which observe, challenge, and question elements of Chinese society, focusing on themes such as wellness, generation gaps, conflicts between globalization and traditions, and environmental problems created by development. Xing has exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; International Center of Photography, New York City; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Saatchi Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing. She also exhibited at the First Yokohama Triennale and the Sydney Biennale 2004.
Zhang Peili (b. Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, 1957), known as the “father of video art” in China, was an active member of the ’85 Art New Wave Movement, a group of intellectuals who sought to reconnect to the lineage of Modernism in China that had been interrupted by political suppression from the 1940s through the 1970s. His work—often focusing on time, repetitive action, and absurdity—has been widely exhibited internationally. His earliest works were shown with the Pond Society group of artists in the 1980s; China/Avant-Garde, Beijing (1989); the Venice Biennale, Italy; the first Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Japan; and the 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (all 1999). He has had solo and group shows in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Gwangju, Osaka, Tokyo, New York, Moscow, London, and Paris, including Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, Guggenheim Museum, New York City (2017); and a major solo exhibition at Ren Space, Shanghai (2019). In 2003, he cofounded the new media department at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, and in 2012, he became director of OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai, a leading center for new media and video art.
Betsy Johnson joined the Hirshhorn’s staff in January 2016 and was appointed assistant curator in March 2018, with responsibilities for overseeing the Museum’s photography collection. For the Hirshhorn, she has organized Tony Lewis: Anthology 2014–2016 (2018); The Evidence Room (2019); Feel the Sun in Your Mouth: Recent Acquisitions (2019–2020); Ai Weiwei: Trace (Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, 2021); Toyin Ojih Odutola: A Countervailing Theory (2021–2022); One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection (2022–2023); Rirkrit Tiravanija: (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green) (Wrightwood 659, Chicago, 2022); A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China (2022–2024); Jessica Diamond: Wheel Of Life (2023–2024); and, most recently, Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960 (2024–2025), which she co-curated with Marina Isgro. Her publications include Tony Lewis: Anthology 2014–2016 (Mousse Publishing, 2022) and A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China (Yale University Press, 2023), as well as contributions to Marcel Duchamp: The Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection (DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2019) and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: The Collection (DelMonico Books, 2022). She holds a BA in integrative arts (1998) and an MA in art history (2004) from Pennsylvania State University and is ABD in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland.
Meng Zhao is an art historian specializing in premodern China and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Her current book project, Roaming, Gazing, Halting: Attentive Subject in Landscape, investigates the related ways in which major Chinese landscapists from the end of the eleventh century to the thirteenth century turned their attention to the portrayal of perceiving subjects and responded to the mental, emotional, and physical dimensions of a multilayered human-nature relation. Meng’s research has received support from the Mellon Curatorial Writing Fellowship, Princeton University Library Research Grants, and various awards and fellowships bestowed by the University of Chicago. Her work has been presented at conferences and institutions including the CAA, the AAS, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Meng earned both her BA and first MA from Fudan University in Chinese literature and Chinese philology, respectively. She expanded her expertise with a second MA in the history of art and archaeology of East Asia from SOAS University of London. In 2022, she received her PhD in art history from the University of Chicago.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China was the Hirshhorn’s first survey of photography by leading multigenerational Chinese artists working over the past thirty years. The exhibition showcased 186 artworks by 25 artists, the majority of which form part of a landmark promised gift to the Hirshhorn from pioneering collector of Chinese art Larry Warsh.
A Window Suddenly Opens chronicled how, over three decades, Chinese artists embraced the immediacy of photography during an unprecedented cultural shift away from the collective to a revived focus on the self. The exhibition’s title was drawn from a 1997 publication, a near manifesto, by Rong Rong and Liu Zheng that announced a shift in Chinese photography away from realism toward a conceptual art practice.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China was accompanied by a major publication documenting the transformative past three decades in Chinese photography. Alongside prescient works by Cao Fei, Lin Tianmiao, Rong Rong, Song Dong, Wang Qingsong, Zhang Huan, Zhang Peili, and many other artists, essays and interviews by scholars and curators Melissa Chiu, Betsy Johnson, Claire Roberts, Orville Schell, Karen Smith, and Taliesin Thomas explore the history of experimental photography in China and the artistic transformations of the digital age. The book also features texts written between 1994 and 2014 by Chinese artists, some published for the first time here in English, which offer essential insights into the artists’ ideas and experiences as they forged new creative paths.
Published by Yale University Press in association with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
