FotoFest is featuring a new gallery of images by 37 Chinese contemporary and historical artists with texts from Photography from China, 1934-2008.
The galleries begin with works from Zhuang Xueben and Sha Fei, two previously unknown Chinese archives from the pre-Communist decades of the 1930s and 1940s.
The photojournalism that was developed during the anti-Japanese War in the 1930s and 1940s would become a cornerstone for the propaganda system of the “new China” in the 1950s and the basis of the Communist Party’s use of photography. Its apogee came during the Cultural Revolution – as depicted by three leading Chinese photographers of the Cultural Revolution, 1965-1976.
The end of the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao Zedong brought about changes in the Chinese Communist Party and made it possible for independent documentary photography to re-emerge in the 1980s. It continues to be a central part of Chinese photography, exemplified in the works of WU Jialin, LU Nan and LI Lan, three living Chinese photographers.
In the mid-1990s, the “east village” artist settlement in Beijing became a central point for the first wave of modernist avant-garde art that re-appeared and made itself known after Tiananmen Square and the three years of artistic paralysis that followed those events. The New Photo exhibit from Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing shows 17 Chinese artists who are central to this first stage of contemporary modernist work.
Since 1998, Chinese contemporary art has been a centerpiece of the global marketplace and Western museums outside China. The works of 12 multi-media contemporary artists from Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai are shown as part of Current Perspectives.
The FOTOFEST2008 Online galleries are currently up on the FotoFest website and may be accessed here.
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