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DATE: November 4, 2010 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

GETTY MUSEUM PRESENTS ART FROM BEIJING

Photography from the New China

At the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center

December 7, 2010 — April 24, 2011

LOS ANGELES—On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, at the Getty Center, December 7, 2010 —

April 24, 2011, Photography from the New China will display a selection of Chinese photographs

produced since the 1990s, when People's Republic leader Deng Xiaoping introduced the current

period of Opening and Reform. Photography from the New China will be shown concurrently with

Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road, an exhibition featuring nineteenth-century

views of China and other parts of East Asia, creating a powerful contrast with the contemporary

works.

“This exhibition highlights the Getty Museum’s recently acquired photographs by some of the

young artists emerging from the reinvented society that is present-day China,” says Judith Keller,

senior curator of photographs and curator of the exhibition. “The photographs on display provide a

contemporary view of Chinese art and culture.”

New Women, 2000. Wang Qingsong (Chinese, born 1966). Chromogenic print. © Wang Qingsong, The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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This exhibition looks closely at recent acquisitions of photographs by Hai Bo, Liu Zheng, Song

Yongping, Rong Rong, and Wang Qingsong, which feature dominant styles in recent Chinese

photography, including performance for the camera, the incorporation of family photographs, and an

emphasis on the body. Supplemented by private collection loans of work by Huang Yan, Qiu Zhijie,

and Zhang Huan, the exhibition also explores such themes as pre-revolutionary Chinese literati art,

vestiges of the Cultural Revolution, and the newly rampant consumerism.

In the past 20 years, China's economy has made huge strides. The rapid transition, an

amazingly compressed transformation in the lives of millions, has meant great progress in the way art

is taught, made, and talked about in China's flourishing urban centers. This exhibition presents the

work of eight Chinese artists using photography to respond to their changing world.*

*Artists’ names below are listed in last name, first name order.

Hai Bo

For his series They, Hai Bo created diptychs dealing with the passage of time. Devoted to the

reconstruction of the past, Hai Bo’s photographs are dominated by themes of memory and change.

The catalyst for this series was a photograph that Bo found with the inscription “For the Future

1973.5.20.” Hai Bo searched out each subject included in the photographs to restage the originals.

The diptychs juxtapose the past with the present, allowing the viewer to consider how the

transformations that have occurred in China over the past decades have affected those who lived

through them. Differences are captured in the pairings; youth is replaced by age, some of the sitters

are absent, having died, and details such as clothing and hairstyles have shifted.

Born in 1962 in the province of Jilin in northeastern China, Hai Bo initially studied

printmaking, graduating in 1984 from the Fine Art Institute of Jilin.

Huang Yan

In Huang Yan’s series Chinese Landscape—Tattoo, the tradition of Chinese landscape painting is

subverted by using the body as a canvas. Although covering the body with a tranquil landscape

composition, this technique provokes tension by imitating the revered art of ink painting on silk with

a full torso tattoo. Each frame in the series is slightly different as the model’s pose shifts, changing the

painted composition and the relationship of figure to landscape. Huang Yan brings together the past

and the present with this series, creating a dialogue between contemporary art practices and

traditional Chinese forms of expression.

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Huang Yan was born in 1966 in the Northeastern province of Jilin. In 1987 he graduated from

Changchun Normal University, where he studied art. After graduating, he promptly moved to Beijing

to pursue his artistic career. He currently operates a studio and gallery, Must Be Contemporary Art, in

Beijing’s Factory 798.

Liu Zheng

Liu Zheng’s series Three Realms (Heaven, Earth, and Hell) opposes the Chinese state’s

repressive sexual mores by displaying nudity in his elaborately staged photographs. Historically, the

nude is not depicted in Chinese art to the extent that it is in Western art, and during the Cultural

Revolution it was forbidden. Contemporary photographers, performance artists, and others have

defied this taboo by including nudity in their practices to challenge authority and what is deemed

acceptable. Zheng’s photographs reference turn-of-the-last-century prints through their sepia toning

and scratches to the negative around the edge of the image. By overturning imagery from earlier

stage and film productions, Zheng creates an alternative way of looking at the past.

As a child, Liu Zheng (born 1969) would copy the work of China’s old master painters, but

after high school, at his parents’ urging, he enrolled in the Beijing Institute of Technology. He learned

to make photographs while a student in the Engineering and Optics Department and began his career

as a photojournalist working for the Beijing newspaper Workers’ Daily. With his contemporary Rong

Rong (whose photographs are also featured in the exhibition), he started a private journal titled New

Photography, exploring contemporary photographic issues. Liu Zheng lives and works in Beijing.

Qiu Zhijie

In the series Standard Pose, Qiu Zhijie explores the historical significance of the posturing

found in the poster art and operas of the Cultural Revolution. Featuring such slogans as “Learn from

the workers” or “Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat,” the posters celebrated Communist

ideology through operatic style “frozen poses” and by using familiar props, such as flags, Mao

Zedong’s Little Red Book, guns, and lanterns to indoctrinate the masses. Mao's wife, Jiang Qing,

created the program of revolutionary operas that set plays, such as The Legend of the Red Lantern, to

music. Here, the figures, dressed in contemporary Western clothing, reenact those poses. Without

the party attributes and rhetoric, the heroic poses represent the unfulfilled promises of the past.

Qiu Zhijie was born in 1969 in the Fujian province. In 1992 he graduated from the China

National Academy of Fine Arts, located in Hangzhou. He studied printmaking, but in 1993 he turned

to photography due to the lack of opportunities to exhibit his work. Qiu Zhijie is an active art critic.

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He currently teaches in China’s first new media arts program at the China National Academy of Fine

Arts, and maintains a busy studio in Beijing.

Rong Rong

Rong Rong documented the artists and the experimental performances they created while

living in a neighborhood of Beijing that was later known as the Beijing East Village. After moving

away from recording other artists’ works, he developed his own performances for the camera,

producing a three-part body of work called Wedding Gown. Photographed in an abandoned village 40

miles from Beijing, this allegorical series uses the wedding dress as a metaphor for innocence and

femininity. The hand-colored photographs evoke nostalgia for the past, while the figures enact a

dreamlike narrative of death, cleansing, and potential rebirth. Rong Rong, the nude figure, moves

through the site as if searching for something that cannot be found, only to be engulfed by the

vibrant, hand-painted flames.

Rong Rong was born in 1968 in Zhangzhou, in the Fujian province. He studied painting at the

Fujian Industrial Art Institute in 1986, after which he worked in a portrait studio taking passport

photos and wedding pictures. In 1993, with little more than a 35mm camera and the desire to

become a photographer, he moved with his sister, an aspiring painter, to the Beijing East Village. In

2007 Rong Rong and his Japanese wife and fellow artist, Inri, opened Three Shadows Photography

Art Centre, a complex that includes an exhibition space, a workshop with darkrooms, and an

educational center with a library.

Song Yongping

In his series My Parents, Song Yonping documented the daily lives of his parents while

dutifully taking care of them. At the same time, Song Yongping staged full-length portraits of his

parents, sometimes including himself in the frame. These images utilize a confrontational approach to

portraiture, combining performance with elements of everyday familial life. Song Yongping, while

tending to his parents’ needs, was given the opportunity to honor them by sharing his art making

with them. In recording the eventual loss of his parents, he created a lasting testament to their lives.

The project concluded in 2001 with the death of both of his parents.

Song Yongping was born in 1961 in Taiyuan, in the Shanxi Province. Trained as a painter at

the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, he graduated in 1983. In the 1990s he emerged as an avant-garde

painter and was a member of a group called New Pictures of the Floating World, which created

images critical of China’s newly materialistic urban culture.

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Wang Qingsong

While inspired by motifs found in classical Chinese art as well as in Western art history, Wang

Qingsong creates large-scale photographs that explore the rapid changes occurring in China. His

photographs, like the paintings of the influential Political Pop group, comment on such topics as

rampant consumerism, migration, globalization, and the influence of the West on Chinese culture.

Capturing the contradictions of contemporary Chinese life, Wang Qingsong’s staged compositions

offer a critical consideration of the gulf between the traditional and the modern in China.

Born in the Heilongjiang Province in 1966, Wang Qingsong initially studied painting at the

Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. Influenced by traditional scroll painting as well as documentary and

staged photography, he began making photographs in 1996. Wang Qingsong is internationally

recognized for his mural-size pictures. He lives and works in Beijing.

Zhang Huan

Zhang Huan first came to the attention of the art world in the early 1990s with his powerful

and controversial performances, such as 12 Square Meters, documented by Rong Rong, and 65

Kilograms. Following the practice of international performance artists of the 1970s and 1980s, Zhang

Huan places himself in situations in which his corporality is tested. Through his work the body

becomes a metaphor for larger social, political, and personal issues. The photographs document

either actual public performances or those staged solely for the camera, such as Metal Case,

represented by Rong Rong’s photographs in the exhibition.

Born in 1965, Zhang Huan studied painting as a graduate student at Beijing’s Central Fine Arts

Academy. After graduation in 1993, he, with other artists like Rong Rong, founded the Beijing East

Village. Emerging from the East Village in the 1990s, Zhang Huan became one of the most recognized

Chinese artists. His work has evolved from solo impromptu performances to international

commissions involving sizable casts. In 1998 Zhang Huan moved to the United States. After

exhibiting internationally for more than 15 years, he returned to China in 2006 and opened Zhang

Huan Studio in Shanghai.

Photography from the New China is curated by Judith Keller, senior curator, with the assistance of

Alana West, former intern in the Department of Photographs.

Note to editors: Images available upon request.

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MEDIA CONTACT: Desiree Zenowich Getty Communications (310) 440-7304 dzenowich@getty.edu

The J. Paul Getty Trust is an international cultural and philanthropic institution devoted to the visual arts that features the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Foundation. The J. Paul Getty Trust and Getty programs serve a varied audience from two locations: the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in Malibu.

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