Liu Heungshing at beaugeste gallery
Conversation with Liu Heung Shing (24 October 2008)
Jean Loh (J): About the origin of this monument of a book…
Liu Heungshing (L): I started the project as soon as Beijing won the selection for 2008 Olympics exactly in 2003. As the Olympics will accentuate the whole world’s attention on China, and as a journalist I wanted people to have a better understanding of China, instead of a vision either too dark or too optimistic. My idea is to tell the story through the daily life of the 6 decades.
(J): The striking perception we have is that the first 3 decades of China are about political struggle and that the portrait of a country s indeed a portrait of its leadership and not so much of its people:
A: My parents brought me to mainland China when I was 5 or 6 yo, and I felt like all Chinese people did, our daily was so politicized: it was the era of “zhengzhi guashuai” （政治挂帅）”politics in command”. The pictures of the leadership were everywhere; everybody had to study the party’s directives. Politics had infiltrated our daily life; those were the only images you saw in school in the newspapers. I am very glad to have found pictures of the 1950’s of land reform, landlords being “struggled” and students working in the farms with the farmers. Mao was seen everywhere because Mao was absolutely in people’s skin. In today’s context as in the book, you will no longer read the pictures the same way as when you are confronted with the propaganda setting – although the photographer who took them was on an assignment.
(L): These 3 decades of political upheaval were almost like a pandemic a disease that had to happen after laying latent in the sick body of China during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. It erupted after the liberation like a fever…
A: Exactly. When you look at Mao’s ideology superficially it looked like the Bolshevik idea or Leninist idea. Actually Mao has interpreted communism in his own Chinese way: he was concerned with what Khrushchev has done to Stalin, and was afraid that his comrades in arms would do the same thing to him after the failure of Great Leap Forward so he spent the next 15 years trying to almost prevent the history from happening by literally getting rid of all those who rose together with him.
(J): Yet photographically speaking, we have to wait until the 1980’s to see the “real” normal daily life and the “real” Chinese people. In a way this China is more common, more banal, less interesting.
A: Yes. Yes. Yes. Somehow it’s the chaos and the terror that captured everybody’s imagination of China at least outside of China, inside the people has reacted with silence.
(L): I must say I am amazed by the discovery of Du Xiuxian’s intimate portraits of the powerful political elite that have never been seen before…
(J): He also took this picture of Marshall Ye Jianying who has been rehabilitated sitting on the beach, his pajama rolled up to his belly.
(L): He looked like a big baby totally relaxed and when you realized that was the guy who stopped the Gang of Four…!
(J): He arrested them! And this picture of Jiang Qing looking up at the photographer – in the evening that picture was taken she was arrested. She was looking still so serene so calm that morning! Don’t you think it’s extraordinary that she’s the actual founder of China’s contemporary art with her yang ban xi (model operas)?
(L): And all these cynical contemporary art works surrounding us today…
(J): Wasn’t she also herself a powerful woman photographer, after Empress Dowager Cixi who was the first powerful woman photographer in Chinese history of photography?
(L): Yes, in fact Jiang Qing had imported 3 Hasselblads and she gave one to Zhang Yaxin to photograph the yang ban xi and she herself of courses used the Hasselblad. I have a picture – which finally I did not put in the book – of her photographing with a big long tripod.
(J): All photography lovers would be curious to see one day when it’s possible to see Madam Mao’s pictures coming out of the archives… What was the reason why Taschen published this book in three languages but not in Chinese?
(L): Well you know because of 1989, it’s still a no-no in China… Anyway I am working on a publication in traditional Chinese characters right now, as Taschen will publish another version in Italian Portuguese and Spanish. My agent is talking to other Chinese publishers outside of China, as to Taiwan I feel the Taiwanese publishers somehow rather reluctant when dealing with subjects about mainland China, they are more and more withdrawn into their own island of Taiwan, instead of looking at what they can sell in Hong Kong or Singapore or other Chinese speaking communities.. It’s very odd. There are increasing Chinese tourists traveling to Taiwan, in Hong Kong already there are people asking me where I can buy this book, but I can only direct them to English language bookstores, in the city or at the airport.
(J): We always notice a great number of Chinese tourists at the airport bookstore browsing books on China, isn’t there a great thirst?
(L): Yes they are fascinated by all the gossip books on political leaders, but there is a great thirst, and I very much would love to see the Chinese version come out. In fact the editor and myself we wanted this book originally to be targeted to the Chinese audience.
(J): Back to photography I must confess my admiration for your works especially for the decade of the 1980’s which is very much a chapter of Liu Heung Shing’s China photography…
(L): Well they simply weren’t around and there weren’t that much Chinese photographers at that time, as the veterans had been thrust left and right (dispersed in the country) and the young generation had hardly caught on yet.
(J): If there were they were actually more into propaganda photography or into “salon” photography or barely learning documentary photography, so it was like “paradise” for you then…
(L): It was a god sent moment for me…
(J): I especially love this picture of the young man roller-skating under the statue of Mao with his arms spread-out, a symbol of new found liberty but at the same time under the surveillance of the authority…
(L): Actually Mao was facing one direction and the young man was skating towards another direction.
(J): It’s really a great picture, it reminds me of another picture of Marc Riboud of a Mao statue raising one arm with the smokes coming out of a factory’s chimneys blowing toward the same direction…
(L): Funny you should mention Marc Riboud, when I was intern in Life Magazine I worked with Gjon Mili who made this famous picture of Picasso painting with light. He was a very good fried of Cartier-Bresson, he told me to go and look at all the contact sheets of all the Life Magazine photographers who had photographed China. At that time, Cartier-Bresson before 1949, Marc Riboud in the 1950’s, also Carl Mydans and Dimitri Kessel, so I went through at all their contact sheets, that was before I was assigned to China… Marc Riboud’s book “San Mian Hongqi” (Three Banners of China *) was like a bible for me. But when I came back to China after some time and much later in 2000, after more books had been published on China, including my own images in Aperture’s book and in Jonathan Spencer’s “Century of China”, one of the things I found out – that in all those books, when photography is done in the West: somehow you have sinologists or China scholars on the one hand and photo researchers on the other hand; who don’t necessarily understand China but they obviously understand the visual language, while at the same time they were very much handicapped in terms of having access to the archives. You should know when you deal with Xinhua, you don’t go very far. As a result, when I look at these books on China, I say to myself: this is not the China I recognize! On the other hand when Chinese photographers publish their book on China I also don’t think that this is the China I recognize. So it’s a double irony.
When Riboud came to China he was here with Pompidou or other politicians, for a few days, in different decades, when China was most politicized, and even though Riboud’s pictures showed the tension, it was actually very hard to explain the tension or to get close to that tension. And in the 1980’s when Chinese photographers started to try to do something new they kind of stick around and lost direction until much later, as they would always exercise some sort of self censorship. When I talked to Wang Wenlan or other photographers of that era they always have to do something like “ca bian qiu*” (work around the edge of political taboos) they did not realize that photography did not carry any political risk any longer, but they were so self indoctrinated in the way of seeing that they overlooked a lot of small details in daily life which in fact could enrich the content of Chinese documentary photography.
(J): So how do you select the Chinese photographers for this book?
(L): As the editor of this book I try to observe the 2 criteria: number one is it has to be photographically esthetically a good photograph, secondly through this photograph it would help put together this narrative of New China. We have so many pictures that certainly in the end that Taschen could not include, there are some regrets; some really beautiful pictures could not finally be part of the book.
(J): How many pictures are in the book?
(L): There are about 400 hundred pictures in this book and 110 of them will be shown in an exhibition next December 4 at Beijing Today Museum. You are invited to come.
(J): I’d love to come. Thank you very much.
(*) Note by JL: Marc Riboud “Three banners of China – 中国的三面红旗”（1966）
(*) 擦边球
Tags: beau geste, beaugeste, China, Jean Loh, Jiang Qing, Liu Heungshing, Mao, Marc Riboud, photography, Taschen
