"One to one: visions—recent photographs from China" at Chambers

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Eleanor Heartney

This exhibition of work by eight young Chinese photographers mixed staged and more or less documentary images. Organized by Feng Boyi, a young Beijing-based curator, the show offered an intriguing cross section of thematic and stylistic approaches to life in contemporary China. Almost as illuminating as what was included is the kind of imagery that was absent: there were no evocations of the beauty of the Chinese countryside familiar from traditional landscape art, no conventional portraits and no references to the once all-powerful family structure. Instead, the artists depict young people, crowds and moments of private fantasy.

Many have chosen the grid as an organizing principle. While serving to order information, grids of small images can also express the passage of time or the vastness of China's population. Bai Yilou has arranged hundreds of diminutive, passportlike photographs of Chinese citizens to create the silhouettes of the animal signs of the country's zodiac. Guan Shi presents a record of the past four years of his life through sets of tiny black-and-white photos of himself eating, sleeping, meeting friends or just lounging about, one shot for each day of the year. Lin Jingjing's My 365 Days also appears to be a photo diary of sorts, though here each day is represented by a simple black-and-white image of a rice bowl, empty but for a few strands of hair. Meanwhile, Ma Han uses the grid in Play of Ants to suggest the course of a single day by presenting a set of aerial photographs of a Beijing intersection in which little buses, cars and individuals maneuver about like crawling insects.

Urban chaos is conveyed by Wen Ling's strips of images of quotidian life in Beijing. Striking in the midst of scenes of subway passengers, street people, medical workers and crowds is the recurring presence of uniformed members of the police or military, on duty among the city dwellers as both observers and enforcers. One wonders whether a discomfort at this state of constant surveillance lies behind Chi Peng's fantasies of rebellion and indolence. Two photographs by him present images of naked young men running down a street or an institutional corridor, pursued by red model airplanes. Others show a pair of young men, their faces weirdly painted, toying with liquid-filled beakers and sitting down to a repast of blue-painted goose.

The final works here deal with history of sorts. Xu Lei nostalgically evokes the disappearance of old China with a set of vintage photographs of Nanjing City, which he has photographed behind blue transparent curtains. Yi Deer does a Tseng Kwong Chi routine by positioning himself as a gold-painted Red Guard in various locations of significance in the history of the Cultural Revolution. On the evidence of this show, Chinese artists are embracing photography to explore the world both as they see it and as their imaginations remake it.