Vendredi 03 Août 2012 15:13:22 par actuphoto dans Expositions

With 590 photographs taken by 250 different Chinese photographers, this exhibition, organized by the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, offers a wide-ranging panorama of life in modern China. At the same time, it constitutes a revealing stocktaking of Chinese documentary photography during the last 50 years. Subdivided into four thematic areas, entitled Existence, Relation, Desire and Time, these images are presented in dense constellations. Collectively, they provide a portrait of everyday life in both rural and urban China against the backdrop of dramatic social upheaval. Behind the highly visible glamour of the economic boom currently transforming China's metropolises, these photographers have sought to document the impact on individuals of China's rapidly advancing and accelerating modernization process. The curatorial team, consisting of a number of professional photographers, has made a selection from among 100,000 prints. Their choices stress the core concern of the exhibition, namely a critical confrontation with the relationship between collective and individual in Chinese society. Characterized by a documentary and journalistic approach, these images do not shrink from exploring sensitive subjects such as sexuality and violence. The Museum für Fotografie has taken over this exhibition unaltered and without adding its own commentary. In doing so, we hope that this "Chinese perspective of the Chinese people" will represent a first step toward increasing public awareness of cultural realities in this distant and still too unfamiliar land.