Humanism in China: A Contemporary Record of Photography

Hu Wugong Migrant Wheat Farmers, 1998 Black and white photograph Guangdong Museum of Art

In 2003, the curatorial staff in the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou finished gathering together the first major museum collection ever assembled in China of documentary photographs, produced by China's own photographers. Soliciting 100,000 photographs from all over the country, they selected the best 600. Representing a wide spectrum of human subject matter, taken in the years 1951 through 2003 by 248 photographers, this then became the first Chinese traveling photography exhibition, entitled "Humanism in China," with the first exhibition catalogue of its kind. China Institute is pleased and fortunate to organize the American tour of this collection, from which we have selected our favorite 100 photographs. These photographs are of a very high aesthetic order, displaying 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.

This exhibition is organized by the Guangdong Museum of Art and curated by Wang Huangsheng, An Ge, and Hu Wugong. China Institute Gallery, with Jerome Silbergeld, has reorganized this exhibition for travel in the United States.