Editor of Taschen's PORTRAIT OF A COUNTRY
Tank on Tiananmen
Taschen’s China Portrait of a Country edited by Liu Heung Shing is a monumental (424p) and trilingual portraiture of mainland China through the lens of 88 Chinese photographers.
Divided in 6 chapters, the 1950’s, the 1960’s, the 70’s, the 80’s, the 90’s and the 2000’s; this segmentation avoids the standard classification of China’s modern history in terms of political episodes such as the People’s Communes, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, etc.
Taschen’s major achievement is a clever panoramic of the changing nature of photography in China, demonstrating precisely how this portrait of a country has been depicted from propaganda glorification of mainly the leadership and its political agenda to plain documentary recording of the people’s daily life and to eventually artistic and conceptual photographic representation of today’s fast changing society.
Inevitably the chapter on the 1970’s corresponding to the schizophrenic era of a country still deep in the turmoil of Cultural Revolution while attempting to open up (from Nixon’s visit to the arrest of the Gang of Four), is the longest of all, covering 64 pages, including some really stunning never published before pictures.
Second in importance, the 1960’s, was dealt with 56p. And the 50’s with 48p. The shortest chapter – the 1980’s – has only 32p long.
As Zheng Shengtian once declared (Zheng Shengtian was once an artist and teacher at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts – now the China Academy of Art – Hangzhou. Critical of the Red Guards for their violence and destruction of cultural artifacts in 1966, Mr. Zheng was detained in a cowshed, with other established artists and teachers.): “Even though this is a period many would prefer to forget, it is nevertheless one that produced a visual culture that continues to permeate contemporary Chinese art.”
Liu Heung Shing, ex-member the Pulitzer winner team of Associate Press photographers, has chosen the year of 2008, year of the Olympics, to publish this portrait of China through the eyes of Chinese photographers, for that he took 4 long years to assemble the largest part of the collection, and has had barely the time to sneak in at least one dramatic picture of the Sichuan earthquake to illustrate the 2000’s.
The photographic division is perhaps the soundest one, as we progressively move away from the black & white of the bleak 1950’s and the madness of the 1960’s (which was titled in the book “Great Leap Backward”), into the emergence of color photography to mark the 1970’s. And here one revelation pops up right in our face: Madame Mao’s contribution to Chinese contemporary art of today. Her yang ban xi, the 8 model operas, undoubtedly formed the founding visual influence of today’s contemporary art.
Another revelation is in Du Xiuxian’s (the veteran personal photographer of the political leadership) four fantastic portraits. Two of them show the human side of Madame Mao that has never been seen before, one portrait of 1974 of her holding the hand of Mao’s last mistress, both wearing a Western dress (designed by herself!) while 99% of the women in the country were restricted to the standard and unisex Mao uniform. One 1975 stunning portrait of her riding a white horse with her hair in a turban à la Simone de Beauvoir is such a clear contrast against the dark Mao uniform she wore in two other pictures: posing as the cultural Tsar at the Dazhai art exhibition and posing simply and totally relaxed looking straight into the camera, in her garden, on the morning of her arrest in 1976.
Du Xiuxian is the key revelation of this Taschen book: author of 25 pictures in total, just 2 short of the editor Liu Heung Shing’s 27. Not only he was always there to record the historical moments for China (such as the Mao-Nixon last toast six months before Mao died), he was especially capable in capturing poignant and human portraits of the powerful leaders at the top echelon. When we look at this fascinating color picture of 1973 showing Marshall Ye Jianying in his underwear and barefooted – “holding court”- on a Hainan beach, we can feel the sea breeze brushing back his rarified hair and the gentle sunset light against a blue sky and a blue sea. This very Marshall Ye was instrumental in the arrest of the Gang of Four that put an end to the decade of chaos caused by the Great Cultural Revolution. Du Xiuxian early on has also captured the two faces of Mao at a state dinner in 1959 in honor of his nemesis Nikita Khrushchev: at times stone-faced, tense and on his guard, at times broken into a hilarious laughter. Next to Du Xiuxian we discover another remarkable woman photographer Xiao Zhuang a veteran party photographer (contributing 16 photographs especially about young girl red guards); the book opens with a picture she took of her young child raising the little red book in a typical revolutionary gesture.
It is certainly not innocently that the editor has chosen for the book’s cover a photograph of Zhang Yaxin – one of the only 3 photographers authorized to cover the model operas. He has been a graduate of the Changchun Film Institute, the same school as Li Zhensheng the most important photographer of the Cultural Revolution (contributor of 17 pictures). We realize in retrospective the importance of this iconography in today’s artistic production in the so-called Chinese contemporary art.
The chapter of the 1980’s is practically entirely a one-man-show of Liu Heung Shin including the epoch marking portrait of 3 teddy boys of the Deng Xiaoping era looking cool in their black shades where Liu’s silhouette is reflected, and the taboo pictures of Tian An Men: bloodied students and tanks above a tunnel where a couple of lovers on bicycle took shelter. The sort of photos that is still totally banned in China today.
The last chapter, the 2000’s titled “China joins the world”, reads like a catalogue of Chinese contemporary photographers, with the best documentary photographers in China today featured here. Sometimes we are so sensitive to China’s contemporary art that we would think at first those naked men at the foot of a huge stone wall were into some sort of performance art, but no, they are actually those boat pullers on the banks of the Yangtze river working naked to protect the few clean cloths they have.
The lack of historical distance for a bird’s eye view of the first decade of the 21st century and the haste to publish the book during the Olympic year give this last chapter an impression of something unfinished. Yes the portrait of China is always a work in progress.
We could regret that some other excellent Chinese photographers are missing here; we could regret that Lu Guang’s World Press Photo award winning pictures on the AIDS villages were not featured in the last chapter; we could certainly regret that the book – trilingual as it appears – has no Chinese version. We could as well compare it with the Guangdong Art Museum’s “Humanism in China” (a compilation of over 600 pictures by more than 300 Chinese photographers and a first comprehensive photographic portrait of modern China), but the Taschen’s “China” is a great monumental book of photography featuring 88 Chinese photographers (no need Marc Riboud, no need Edward Burtynsky) with many unseen unpublished pictures, it is an unprecedented feat!
In conclusion, China today is best represented in this 1981 photo of Liu Heung Shin of a roller skater spreading his arms and one leg in the air right under the nose of a petrified statue of Mao staring into the impenetrable future: a still rigid regime allowing people to enjoy as much as they can the freedom that is being released inch by inch.
From the fashion point of view
Taschen’s China Portrait of a Country also offers an incredible panoramic of the fashion evolution from THE WAY WE WORE to the still developing identity of Chinese fashion today.
The first portrait of the book set the tone: the little boy dressed in full “Mao gear” raising the little red book, the very son of woman photographer Xiao Zhuang, marked the defining look of the Chinese people as a whole during the 3 decades following the founding of the People’s Republic.
What we call the “Mao suit” was said to be designed by China’s republic founding father Sun Yat Sen – some Chinese still called this costume the Zhongshan Zhuang, named after Sun. The basic structure is of closed stand-collar and center front buttons, with some variation in the pockets. Soon almost everyone – man or woman – was wearing the same Mao suit and black clothed shoes with rubber soles (bu xie).
From 1950 onwards, abolishing class inequalities and class-related status symbols, such as dresses and skirts and Western business suits, or even the early republic men’s scholar long robe (Chang Shan) and women’s Qipao, resulted in producing a uniformed genderless population dressed in grey, black, white, army green and navy blue authorized color scheme of puritan communism. Yet among the leadership one can’t help but notice the elegance of some of the Zhongshan zhuang adepts, including Mao (charming Dalai Lama and Panzhen Lama in 1951), Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai.
The revelation of this Taschen’s China is of Madame Mao who designed her own dress: a sober, minimalist, well tailored, quasi Prada purity suit, her white sandals and Nylon socks which pre-trended the general look of fashion-conscious women from the 1980’s can still be seen lasting until even today in some second-tiered cities.
The semi-military red guard uniform and the dramatic stage costumes of Yang Ban Xi and the red handkerchief of the young pioneers marked the world imaginary of China in the 1970’s and formed the basic ingredients of today’s so-called Chinese contemporary art.
We had to wait until the 1980’s the era qualified by Liu as “rock n roll and modernization” to see reappear casual clothing, blue jeans and Western suit, including the whole wedding gown saga. Most striking is the fact that peasants and workers alike have replaced the Mao suit with business suit and they wear it while working the field or on construction site indifferently. Wang Jinsong’s portrait of 200 one-child families taken in 1996 show a remarkably homogenous look of the trinity father + mother = child in a “Family of Men” panorama of clothing and hair style up to the eye-glasses they wear representing China on the “normalization” path towards globalization.
Strikingly it’s the group portrait of 5 Dong Bei Ren (men of the North East) by Wang Fuchun (2005), full frontal on icy seashore and Qin Wen’s (2005) naked boat pullers on the Yangtze that leave us with this question: the Chinese aren’t they deep down just like everybody else on this planet, when you take out the social status defining clothing, political colors and ideology: or are they a new species of human beings however from the oldest genealogy, that will move this country forward, as the latest images suggest, after the Olympics, the Taikonauts, toward a new identity in the world in the coming 60 years?
