This spring, the museum will publicly display 43 of those works, all made between 1993 and 2006, for the first time. “Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China,” on view Feb. 27 to July 27, will explore how a generation of avant-garde Chinese artists used large-scale photography and ephemeral performance art to visualize changing urban and social landscapes, capturing and criticizing Westernization and the disappearance of genuine Chinese history and culture. The photographs employ a diverse range of photographic methods unique to this moment in Chinese history.
This gift constitutes a major expansion of the Kemper Art Museum’s holdings of contemporary Chinese art,” said Sabine Eckmann, the William T. Kemper Director and chief curator at the Kemper Art Museum. “It substantially expands the representation of global voices within the museum’s permanent collection and contributes to Washington University’s study of Asian art and culture. We are extremely grateful to Larry for this generous gift.”
Warsh began collecting Chinese photography more than two decades ago, during a trip to Beijing. “These artists were grappling with some of the most critical issues of their time, and yet their work remains little seen, both in China and in the West. It is important for me to help shine a light on this critical transitional moment in the history of Chinese art.”
The gift complements the Kemper Art Museum’s 2022 acquisition of world-renowned artist Ai Weiwei’s “Illumination” (2019), which was made possible by the William T. Kemper Foundation to further the musem’s goal to curate a more globally distinct collection. Though Ai is not featured in “Looking Back Toward the Future,” several of the 14 artists — including Rong Rong, Zhang Huan and Cang Xin — were associated with the East Village Beijing. The short-lived creative enclave took inspiration and its ironic nickname from Ai’s time living in Manhattan, N.Y.’s East Village, then a notable center for contemporary art.
Eckmann, who curated “Looking Back Toward the Future,” noted that, in the years following the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, the violent suppression by government forces and the forced closure of the Beijing National Gallery’s “Avant-Garde” exhibition — all of which took place in 1989 — much of this work was considered provocative.
The exhibition is divided into three interrelated thematic sections: “The Presence of the Past,” “East and West” and “Performance and the Body.” Together, they explore how, for the first time in the history of Chinese photography, avant-garde artists engaged with the medium’s conceptual and expressive potentials to chronicle, critique and reflect on China’s global transformation and its increasingly powerful market economy.
The Presence of the Past’
“The Presence of the Past,” which opens the exhibition, visualizes artists’ often ambiguous efforts to evoke and memorialize China’s distinctive cultural heritage amid rapid erasures of the nation’s histories and the rise of a globalized, ultramodern built environment. They also turned to the camera as a tool to record changes in the lived experiences of individuals and families.
Zhang Dali’s photographs of Beijing juxtapose demolition sites, which he marked with graffiti, against contemporary and traditional towers. Wang Jinsong’s “Standard Family” (1996) examines the generational echoes of population control while his “100 Signs of Demolition” series (1999) collects spray-painted examples of the Chinese character 拆(chāi, or “demolish”), used to mark buildings for destruction.
