China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic at the Asia Society (October 8, 1999-January 2, 2000)

by Jonathan Goodman

Now that the People's Republic of China has celebrated its fiftieth birthday, perhaps some sense can start to be made about the sweeping cultural and economic changes which have characterized five decades of Communist power. For this author, who visited China for two months last spring and summer, the romance of Mao appears to have been taken over by the romance of money. The question is whether the substitution of one god for another, after so many years of economic idealism undercut by harsh practice, will lead to the dissolution of China as both tradition-bound empire and ideological backwater. The kind of modernity found today in Beijing makes it clear that the change overtaking the city is permanent; and the photographs in the Asia Society's robust exhibition, China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic make a strong case for the notion that the reversals and turnabouts in Mao's China comprise old changes which quickly have become the new changes transforming city streets in days if not overnight.

Most any viewer attending the exhibition would bring to it assumptions about modern China's political history--that is to say, his or her readings would be based on support for or condemnation of the nation's experiment with communism. Interestingly, the 160 images by 33 photographers from Asia, Europe, and America do not necessarily advance a point of view, preferring instead to let the documentation speak for itself. There are many Chinas in this exhibition--as many as the photographers taking pictures. This means that the journalism practiced in the images moves quickly from historical reportage to lyric witnessing to more complex works incorporating both in the same moment. The point is that China's development arises from a depth of culture which imposes itself on even the simplest of pictures, lending them a profundity and resonance which calls the past to mind even as they look ahead. In this sense, the images neither stand still nor bridge difference, but rather exist outside journalistic context. The emotions and forms running through the photographs place them beyond categories, into a realm which acknowledges the lyric in real time.

Of course, the danger of this interpretation is its romanticism; one must remember that these images are humanized interpretations rather than truths writ large. While the show is filled with striking pictures, there is one work that asserts itself immediately as unforgettable: the American diplomat Owen Lattimores 1937 photo of an a young, unplump Mao and a confident Zhou Enlai in Yan�an. Their clear gaze and evident stamina look to the future in ways which only the passage of decades and the transformation of China could make the world understand. At the same time, one brings to the image the understanding that the revolution would become something else, something which would deny the initial genius of the impulse, its egalitarian drive ultimately played out, denied by global economies. Nonetheless, the image remains in one's mind as an epitomization of ideas and forces which would render China's feudal society obsolete.

The photographers in this exhibition include native-born Chinese, Chinese Americans, and foreign-born photographers. Many works have not been shown before in America, giving the images the additional power of newness. The great Hungarian-born photojournalist Robert Capa is represented with several pieces, including a shot of a squad of very young female cadets belonging to the Nationalist Army. The photo, taken in Hankou in 1938, shows the soldiers, merely girls, stretching in formation and extending their heads back. However humorous the image May be, it also looks ahead, to the conflict between Nationalist and Communist forces. And a photo taken on October 1, 1949, by Meng Zhao Rui, a senior journalist and research fellow with the Pictorial Press of the Chinese People�s Liberation Army, in which ranks of soldiers file past a picture of Mao and communist leadership watching from the Imperial Palace in the Forbidden City, takes on extraordinary significance--not only because of the permanent changes which would ensue, but also because we know that Meng was there, then; and we were not.

Many of the newer images on exhibition also concern the documentation of social change. The Chinese photographer Liu Heung Shing, born in Hong Kong, raised in Fuzhou, and educated in New York City, has worked for major news organizations such as Associated Press and Time. His group of images, dating from the early 1980s, document a China beginning to acknowledge modernity; there is an memorable 1983 portrait of three Beijing toughs, dressed identically in caps, mirrored sunglasses, open white shirts, and zippered jackets. Their menacing confidence is enhanced by emotionless expressions and sunglasses which reflect Liu and a crowd of passersby behind him. In a more lyric note, in 1981 the photographer shot a small group of female high school students studying at night in Tiananmen Square. Reading their books under the dim lights of the square, the girls emanate both poise and purpose, even in so open and public a space as Tiananmen Square. And in a 1980 photo of a marriage caravan in Shanghai, in which the groom and his friends pose on bicycles as they make their way to the bride to deliver gifts, one can see how traditions still hold fast in the culture.

Americans see a slightly different China. The California-based photographer Macduff Everton takes color shots of both old and new scenes. His 1998 shot of an elaborate, small bridge on a walkway at the Summer Palace in Beijing is a study in tans and browns: willow trees frame the bridge, whose red posts and double-peaked roof stand out in contrast the earth colors dominating the composition. Both nature and manmade structures are reflected in the water, while a light mist lends atmosphere to the background of the image. Then, in a 1995 shot of Shenzhen, a special economic zone in Guangdong Province, we see a very contemporary, very economically driven China; in the middle of a depressingly anonymous open square, framed on the left side and in the distance by department stores and high rises, an advertisement for Coca Cola sits, while in the foreground shoppers make their way up a wide concrete stairs. One young woman wears a sweatshirt with a soccer-playing Mickey Mouse on the front; the Americanization of Chinese culture appears to be well under way.

While the American future has now become present tense in many parts of China, an artist such as Lois Conner gives us a more traditional, poetic vision of the country. An American, Conner has been traveling to China since 1984, most often visiting Guilin, whose mountains have drawn artists and writers for two thousand years. Her black-and-white images often resemble paintings; there is a remarkable 1985 photograph of Yue Liang Shan in Guangshi Province, in which the vista spreads from a hilly outcrop to meticulously cultivated, flooded fields in the middle distance, with strange, thimblelike mountains beyond. Mists surround the peaks, and one has the sense that this view has been part of local inhabitants� awareness for a very long time. In another early photograph, of Xi Hu in Zhejiang Province in 1984, two ladders rest against a tree on the edge of a lake. Amazingly, no person is visible in the scene; the image stays with one as a telling moment of repose in a country saturated with people.

Sebastio Salgado's recent, romantic black-and-white treatments of workers and urban scenes return to an idea of China predominant in the images taken during and soon after 1949. Known for his evocative images of the poor, Salgado has trained his eye on industrial spaces such as the engine factory of the Hudong Shipyard in Shanghai. This 1998 photo shows how the complicated machinery dwarves the hard-hatted men walking toward an immense door. In a 1998 image of a street scene in the center of Shanghai, we see an old man, prostrate, with a begging bowl before him on a pedestrian overpass. The middle-class shoppers passing him by show little concern, and in the background one notices an ad for German beer and, beyond, towering modern buildings. Like many of the best images in this strong show, the photo succeeds by juxtaposing weakness with strength, old things with new. The aging beggar reminds us of the old China, which the recent office towers have been unable to eradicate; he represents the impoverished China which led to revolution and which is perhaps not so distant from memory as many would like to believe. The image of the mendicant is real, and it should give the viewer pause, especially at a time when money making American style is seen as a quick fix for a country with large problems.

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