France Pepper, the director of arts and culture at China Institute, led our group through the show. I was unaware that  the educator John Dewey along with one of his students, Hu Shih, founded China Institute in 1926. On view through December 13th at the China Institute on 65th St. between Lexington and Park Avenues is a an exhibition of Chinese documentary photos by Chinese photographers organized by the Guangdong Museum of Fine Arts. The works on view display,  “an extraordinary range of human emotion and activity, urban and rural, public and private. They reflect the radical change China has gone through in the past half century and break through all the stereotypes of life in China that photography itself has sometimes been used to create.” The original exhibition of 600 photos (selected from over 100,000) traveled throughout China and Europe and this will be the only venue to show the works in the US. Due to a smaller gallery space, only 100 works are on view at the Institute. 

The Guangdong Museum of Art was the first institution in China to establish photography as a fine art. This led to an increased interest in photography and eventually a photo center called “Three Shadows” run by the artist Rong Rong and his wife was opened. The Metropolitan Museum is starting to collect chinese photography, most recently works by Hai Bo were acquired. This show celebrates those accomplishments in the medium of photography over the past few decades.

The title of this exhibition is “Humanism” which is for the Chinese a focus on human nature; the term for them does not have the negative connotation that it can in the West. The works on view are grouped visually, not chronologically so in that sense it is more difficult to get a sense of the development of photography in China. But it is grouped into logical sections: Time, Distance, Relationships, and Existence. The black and white photos require careful examination and are antithetical to the recent hype of new Chinese Contemporary art.

There is an image of a husband’s pilgrimage to Beijing holding his dead wife’s photo as she accompanies him in spirit; a photo of a shocked viewer in front of a photograph of a naked woman at an art exhibition; an image of Buddhist and Taoist monks meeting;

a visually beautiful image of a worker eating his lunch in a doorway outside a restaurant while all of the other white enamel bowls hang all around him; a stunning work in which a man lays on the ground with his head resting on a watermelon with his toddler son straddling his waist and napping on his chest–piles of the watermelons are visible in the background; and a photo of a snow-covered bus with a cracked window in the back as a child dressed in starkly contrasting bright colors waves goodbye to her soldier father. Not only compositionally striking, the works are heartfelt, emotionally charged and powerful.