Sixty ways of looking at China: in the past decade, photography in the People's Republic has become a full-blown art form for the first time in half a century. Now two noted scholar-curators offer a major show—and, below, a wide-ranging discussion—designed to acquaint Western audiences with cutting-edge Chinese photographers and video-makers

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Richard Vine

RV: There is a rather troubled history, isn't there, regarding documentation of Chinese performance works from the late 1980s and early '90s, particularly those occurring in Beijing's ramshackle artist's community known as the East Village. Once images by Rong Rong and others began to be broadly distributed, practical and philosophical questions arose. What is the work of art--the performance of the photograph of the performance? Who owns the right of sale, diffusion and reproduction? ... Does this ambiguity continue today, in a China notorious for widespread disregard of copyright and intellectual property concepts?

WH: My sense is that the troubled history of East Village images has indeed become history: the artists involved are now older and more mature, and they are now selling pictures that they claim as their work based on different definitions of authorship. In an ideal scenario, these images resulted from group effort, imbued with ideas of not only performance artists and photographers but also other group members. (I have tried to reconstruct this history in "Rong Rong's East Village," an essay that accompanies the recent boxed edition of the artist's period shots.) But the current method seems to work well. Artists often own different negatives from the same performances and sen the resulting pictures through different venues.

Partly because of this historical lesson, today's performance artists and photographers maintain cautious relations when they work together. Performance artists, in particular, often pay a photographer to document his of her projects, and own the rights to the photographic images.

RV: Your show is divided into four thematic sections. Can you characterize each and tell our readers the selection criteria for the various categories?

CP: We tried, of course, to select artworks that can be seen as engaging and compelling works in their own right, and not just as illustrations of some theme. I think it's important to know that these four thematic divisions were not chosen arbitrarily, but grew directly out of our visits with a whole range of artists. The first time that Wu Hung and I met to discuss possible ways of organizing an exhibition, we each brought a list of the main subjects and themes that we'd noticed in the works of the various Chinese artists we'd been seeing. We were a little startled to discover that our lists were almost identical. But it gave us a degree of confidence that we were somehow on the right track.

WH: Generally, "History and Memory" (at the Asia Society) and "People and Place" (at the ICP) are the artists' representations of China--a very old civilization as well as an emerging global power. The other two--"Performing the Self" (ICP) and "Reimagining the Body" (Asia Society)--are their representations of themselves. As Christopher has said, we didn't plan these four themes first and then find images to substantiate them. Rather, we reviewed many images, and these themes naturally emerged as common focuses of contemporary Chinese photography. Our job then became to select the best images among many.