Photography’s ability to transport us to where we may never physically venture is nowhere more apparent than in this exhibit of nearly 600 documentary photographs by some 250 different Chinese photographers currently on display in Munich.
Through the numerous images, the curators set out to examine the themes of existence, relationship, desire and time. The very title of the exhibit provokes questions. What does humanism mean to the Chinese? Does the Chinese conception of humanity allow for human beings to be considered as individuals? Until recently, in this culture focused on collectivity, individualism was a dirty word. The exhibit’s choice of pictures conveys a clear message: Far more numerous than scenes of political education or ceremony are pictures of ordinary people living their lives in the foreground of forgotten Mao Zedong portraits.
What first struck me, gazing at the photographs, is just the incredible number of individuals that make up China. I may have known theoretically that the Chinese population represents a fifth of the world’s, but seeing the heads and heads of all those people hits the hard fact home. The first collection of ten photographs conveys the sheer mass of people moving about China by bike, motorcycle-taxi, cart or train. Wang Wentan’s “Cycling to Work” is particularly striking. The people on bikes going in one direction merge into those riding in the other like in a Escher drawing, the black-and-white photography emphasizing the uniformity of black heads and white shirts.
Although “Humanism in China” aims to show us an increasingly modernizing China, another section of photographs, depicting people at work, reminds us of just how much of China is rural. We see dozens of laborers collecting crabs, digging for clams, ploughing land, working in salt, coal mining, fishing, farming, harvesting. More urban scenes of work involve factory workers, rubbish collectors, people working with toxins, farmers lining up to give blood for money, long queues for unemployment. Although equally as many photographs depict scenes of leisure, you cannot walk away from this exhibit without a sense that the Chinese are a damn hard working people. Another platitude made real by seeing it.
My favorite section is the one entitled “Desire.” Here we get a taste of modernized China: kids dancing in clubs and rocking out; shirtless male models catwalking in gold lamé pants behind traditional masks, spontaneous break-dancing, shareholders shadow boxing in the stock exchange market. A strange mix of old and new customs merging, as seen through hundreds of different points of view. Is it my favorite part because it most resembles my own culture? Or simply because it’s fun? Questions I ask myself when travelling to different parts of the world, and “Humanism in China” is a good way to see some of this culture when you can’t be there in person. The exhibt displays the layers of complexity in today’s transforming China, and allows you to piece it together yourself.
“Humanism in China” is on at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich until October 28, 2007. It will later move on to Dresden and Berlin.
This article was published Saturday, August 25, 2007.
