Mu Guiying the woman general – Guangzhou 2005

While researching Stephen Shore, Jeff Wall and Robert Adams; those artists who had tried to challenge the esthetics of their time, and who had played with a new form of amateur-aesthetics or a form of landscape photography that would be far removed from Ansell Adams’, I found out that behind their vision of mostly banal suburbia, and apparently ordinary street scene where nothing seems to happen, but a vision that had revolutionized main stream documentary photography, there were intangible tension and artistic emotion that one would find in reading novels about transformational journeys or watching initiatic “road movies”. If we think that Jeff Wall’s conceptual attempt “The Landscape Manual” – a criticism of the objectivity of documentary photography, was written and published in 1969, we realize that most Chinese landscape photography – because of the thousand-year maceration in traditional culture, starting with Lang Jingshan’s earliest works (Chin-San Long 1892-1995), including the so-called contemporary artists today, is viscerally infused with the very Chinese forms of Mountain and Water (Shan Shui : Chinese traditional landscape painting). 

The exorcist: A Nuo Dancer - Guangdong 2009

Xu Peiwu’s new series of Alpa Diary is inhabited by a different kind of Shan Shui: mainly from his personal training as a water color painter and from his own sensitive and susceptible soul. His landscape stands out as both a continuation and an innovation compared to his tension-filled depiction of the Pearl River New Town, his earliest work that read like a war reportage. Peiwu said that between 2007 and 2009 he had gone through a difficult period of personal crisis, with mental anguish and spiritual quest. It was only when, in the fall of 2009, he took up a 2,500km journey, trekking from Guangdong to Guangxi across Yunnan and Guizhou, that he was able to recover some of his peace of mind, thanks to the “grace” he found in some of the sad and desolate landscape that became the main medicine of his own therapy. 

In Xu Peiwu’s “Alpa Diary”, the title being an homage to the camera he loves to use, although on the surface we are once again in the safe and familiar zone of documentary photography, which by definition can only record and describe reality that is visible and tangible, this essay we also called “Dragons, Horses, Spirits & Gods” constitutes an exploration of the unexplained meanings of life, of the invisible and the intangible, amidst the signs that appeared to him such as lilies dying in the drying pond, wild horses whispering in the woods, village people forming a slow-motion dragon dance, demigods revealed on the walls of hundred year-old haunted houses, spirits of carved stones on the beach looking out into the indistinct past… The whole series brings a new esthetic and a different vision to landscape photography. 

These are the new Shan Shui tableaux, which Peiwu has collected in a quest of over five years, that invite us to look deeper, and “to see” beyond the figurative and the apparent, we only need to follow the guiding lines and structures, and discover the carefully composed directional pathways. One of Peiwu’s earliest snapshots was this iconic image of a woman general in opera costume with her horse against rows of newly built luxury villas in the background. The coexistence of the profane with the sacred seems to be found everywhere if we know how to look for them. 

The dragin lizard

The series assembled this way was inspired by an idea we first discussed about during the 2005 Lianzhou Photo Festival, when we went photographing the Yao people in the country side. We chanced upon a noisy funeral of a King of the Yao’s, amidst non-stop thundering explosions from several kilometer-long lines of firecrackers. In the suffocating smoke and haze, an impressive crowd of Yao mourners dressed in their best costumes formed an eerily silent procession. This funeral parade just crossed our path barely five minutes after we attended a Yao wedding heavily laced with rice wine in a roadside village. The tragic followed the euphoric, Thanatos and Eros, by a flip of the coin. We felt however, that there was something beyond a simply National Geographic sort of coverage of ethnic tribal events… 

Guangzhou Panyu

The title “Dragons, Horses, Spirits and Gods” comes from a Chinese saying “Long Ma Jing Shen” meaning energy, dynamism, and high spirit. By breaking apart the four characters, we obtain the literal “Dragons, Horses, Spirits and Gods”; the plural in English allows widening the field of potentialities, as there are figurative “horses” and the secondary degree of “horses”. The concept serves as a pretext to decode a photographic work that would be at the same time pure essay of landscape photography or an exploration into the power of photography to carry and to reveal the immaterial and the metaphysical, without which life is meaningless. It also serves to solicit, as August Sander would have approved, our capacity to “see”, to “observe” and to “think”. Last but not least, this Alpa diary definitely contributes in its way to the foundation of a Chinese “Landscape Manual”. 

Lotus pool in Lianzhou - Guangdong province

Jean Loh 

Curator 

May 2010 Shanghai 

Claude Hudelot Margo RenisioBob Pledge (denim shirt) and Ms Tang the ballerina photographed by Marc Riboud in 1971

Opening of Xu Peiwu show at Beaugeste Gallery

Loh, a Southern California photographer, documents her family in…

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

Tatjana's nieces

photography Tatjana Loh

The title, deliberately ambiguous, is actually my own “cri du cœur” about the people and history personal to me. One fine day in 2008 a beautiful brunette, Tatjana Loh, glowing with a California suntan, walked into our gallery. Immediately we hit it off by talking about photography. She eventually confessed that she was a photographer and we exchanged business cards. I saw that she had the same last name as mine: LOH (*1). So I asked: “Do you have anyone in your family tree from Shanghai?” She replied: “Yes, my father is from Shanghai. He migrated to the US in the 1940s.” “So!” I exclaimed: “You are my cousin from America! You have to show me your pictures some day!” Two years later I received a FedEx box from the US: Tatjana Loh, my cousin from America, did something nobody is doing anymore: she sent me twenty 40 x 50 gelatin silver prints, beautiful black and white photographs documenting her family. I was moved by the images and, based simply on what she sent me; I decided to show her work here to the Shanghai audience.
Her photo-essay, especially the portraiture of her father, resonates deeply with me–both my personal history and my relationship with my father, himself a son of Shanghai, born in the district of Baoshan in the town of Dachang, but who passed away in Torrance, California. Yet, most of all, Tatjana’s series of family portraits are an excellent occasion to meditate again on the practice of family photography, which has been characterized by the French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu in 1965 (*2), rightly or wrongly, as an “art moyen” (a “minor art” as practiced by the Middle Class).
I too was born into a displaced family. My father, who left Shanghai in 1939, had married my mother who came from a Fujian refugee family in French Indochina: both of my parents had been uprooted by the Japanese invasion. Very early on my mother decided that each year we would have our family portrait taken at a professional studio in French-Colonial Saigon. As the number of children grew, first my older sister, then me, then my two younger brothers and one younger sister, these family portraits, which were supposed to update my grandfather in Shanghai, served also as a formal registry of a firmly grounded family with improving material conditions (both my father and my mother started out with practically nothing). Alas, this registry that was supposed to describe a family firmly grounded, soon ended as the children grew up then left to pursue higher education far away in the US (the girls) and in France (the boys). When Saigon eventually fell to the Communists, my parents were displaced again, moving to Taiwan, then Thailand, until my father finally retired to California. In addition to these official annual portraits, my parents had a Rolleiflex and took their own pictures of the children in daily family life, birthday parties, school “kermesse” gatherings, piano lessons, New Year celebrations, visits to other families. Just as for families around the world, photos are a way of keeping memories grounded, keeping a family’s idea of itself in place. Families use photos to remind themselves that, “We were together, we were happy, we were young.”
Many years later I came to Shanghai and met my uncle (the younger brother of my father). I learned that all the family photographs that my grandfather had kept, dating back to when the ancestral home was still standing, before the Japanese bombings, including the pictures my parents sent from Saigon, (because of these photos, our Shanghai relatives had been labeled as “having spies abroad”)– all had been destroyed and burned during the Great Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards had gone from house to house searching and punishing families for harboring such a shameful capitalistic hobby: cherishing family photographs. That autodafé of photographs, a burning at the stake of these memories, at least in the Chinese revolutionary practice, lends some justification unfortunately to part of Bourdieu’s field of investigation classifying family pictures as a bourgeois middle class’ “art moyen”. That partly explains why I fell in love with Tatjana’s family photography.
If we examine Tatjana’s photographs with a kind of Jungian lens, one is struck by the interrelationship or the dialogue between the tender observation of the children at rest and play, shot mostly in landscape format, and the ironic and sometimes comical commentary of the father figure, usually presented in portrait format. More than anything else, Eugene Loh is the central figure of this so-called “family circus” (a label used, with an eye wink, by Tatjana herself to describe this body of work when it was previously exhibited in a gallery). The bigger-than-life old man stands tall in spite of – or perhaps thanks to – the daughter’s attempt to show him in all his human frailty: cold and shivering on the beach, searching in the dumpster for leftover coffee, helpless in the hands of nurses and doctors at the hospital, even looking like an extraterrestrial in a sort of oxygen tank in a preburial ritual. We see the frail gymnast hanging upside down on the bars in his torn swim trunks that he found in another dumpster. Is he really that pathetic or does he exude the same zest for life that we see in the photographs of his youth? In the old photo album of the 1950s indeed, Eugene Loh smiled with all his bright white teeth, Shanghai’s son at the peak of his glorious conquest of America: from earning three master’s degrees and a Ph.D. at the best universities, to escorting California girls in his glamorous Buick! A man who used the German that he learned in Shanghai to conquer the heart of another immigrant, Gisela Jacobsen, though later she would divorce him, and he went on to marry and divorce and marry again three times. All the photos are open to different interpretations.
Concerning pictures of one’s parents, Roland Barthes describes the evocative magic of photography, as he muses on a photo of his mother in his book, Camera Lucida (*3). He reflects on a photograph’s powerful effect on the spectator and how it can create a false illusion of “what is” (c’est), when, in fact, it merely represents “what was” (ça a été). It is a tragic realization that one cannot hold on to the lasting presence of our loved ones. This reminded me of Raymond Carver’s poem in which he ponders a “Photograph of My Father in his Twenty Second Year” (*4)
October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father’s embarrassed young man’s face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad beer.
In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
Wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.

But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can’t hold my liquor either,
and don’t even know the places to fish?
Perhaps it is too commonplace to say that Tatjana’s photographic biopic is actually a love poem to her father. I would offer that these photos show that the camera can become a sort of umbilical cord that reconnects us with our progenitors, and that it helps calm our own existential fears when we grow old enough to realize our mortality; we are compelled to photograph our aging parents as a way of holding onto them. This is for the weakest of us all, we, who still cannot accept our breaking away from the divided cell. Our father or our mother, the animus and the anima, are the two faces of this coin branded in the middle of our belly, this universal “scar” we share with all human beings. Photography of one’s old father has become almost a genre; Annie Leibovitz (*5) touchingly photographed her dying father (also the last days of her companion Susan Sontag). Richard Avedon (*6), who questioned truth in photography, also photographed his dying father, though with more cool. Referring to the fact that “all cameras lie”, Avedon has said that in real life “family members scream, argue, and cry”, and yet he had never seen a photo album with people in such moods. But in Tatjana’s album there is no posing, children are crying and laughing, and father Eugene is certain to attract attention from people with his eccentricity. If these images are a love poem, we can see indeed a lot of physical contact in this human menagerie, hand touching hand, caressing, caring, ear cleaning, nails cutting, eating together, sleeping together, it is a highly tactile family, rich in gesture and body language. Using a linguistic twist we are very far from the “Immediate Family” of Sally Mann (*7), a great woman photographer from Virginia, USA, with her elaborate esthetics and haunting portraits of her naked children. Tatjana’s sensitive portrait of her nephews and nieces appears to be a revenge on the lack of love from her own father yet her anger towards her father hardly disguises a certain fascination with the charismatic and seductive persona of Eugene Loh. American photographer Philip Toledano (*8), in his deeply moving portraiture “Days with My Father”, wanted to explain to the viewer: “Now you have to realize my dad was very handsome when he was young. When people talk about ‘film star handsome’ well, that was my dad.” But there is no need for any subjective glorification about Tatjana’s father: we can see for ourselves that Eugene Loh was really ‘film star handsome’ when he was young. At the same time the power of photography lies in its cruel but truthful documentation of the aging process and its damages. And it is the courage and love of Tatjana in seizing the ordinary and the not so ordinary moments of this Amer-Asian family as it is–and as it has become, with a natural and intimate lens. At the same time Tatjana has provided us with a marvelous and entertaining occasion to appreciate the best practice of the American school of photography of the 1970’s (*9) in terms of lighting and composition – or the apparent absence of composition, through irreverent “snapshots” as inspired by Garry Winogrand (*10) and Ken Graves (*11) who were among the first to “steal” from the style of amateur snapshots to compose a serious body of photographic work.
Our existential anguish in the end finds some relief and solace in the innocence and tenderness of childhood, delicately and magnificently displayed through the “almost candid” camera work of Tatjana’s and in this profusion of Southern Californian light; we are bathing in a refreshing and cathartic exposure.
Jean Loh
Curator – Shanghai June 2010
(*1) The Wade-Giles system of Chinese romanization before Hanyu Pinyin was widely in use, but for places and names the French Postal Map system based on Ecole Française de l’Orient was adopted incorporating local dialect. So the character “continent” in Mandarin pronounced LU in hanyu pinyin in Shanghainese becomes LOH. Hence in old French maps of Shanghai “Lujiazui” was spelled “Lohkazi” and “Xujiahui” = “Zikawei”.

(*2) Pierre Bourdieu: Un Art Moyen, essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, Les Editions de Minuit 1965
(*3) Roland Barthes: La Chambre Claire – Le Seuil 1980
(*4) Raymond Carver: The Collected Poems – 1983
(*5) Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005 – Random House 2009
(*6) Richard Avedon: American Masters – Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light (DVD 1996)
(*7) Philip Toledano: www.dayswithmyfather.com
(*8) Sally Mann: Immediate Family – Aperture 2005
(*9) Anne Biroleau : 70’ La Photographie Américaine, Bibliothèque Nationale de France – 2008
(*10) Garry Winogrand: Figments from the Real World – MOMA 1988
(*11) Ken Graves: American Snapshots, Scrimshaw Press 1977

Editor of Taschen's PORTRAIT OF A COUNTRY

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?

Meichuan Lu Shanghai

Professor Lin Lu, famous critic,said of Lu Yuanmin who was born under the sign of the tiger, that he is as kind and gentle as a lamb. What we actually see in his Lomo series are the claws of a hungry wolf, the eyes of a lynx on the prowl, and the mocking irony of an alley cat that is watching us from above, yet with a touch of tenderness.
To paraphrase Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans, we can say: “the humor, the sadness and joy, the EVERYTHING-ness, the Shanghai-ness, it’s all in these pictures”.
Lomo Yuanmin, it is so Yuanmin.

Jean Loh
Curator
September 2009

(*) Lu Yuanmin was awarded the Shafei Prize in 2008, the most authoritative photography awards in China.

30 photos in black & white
Gelatin Silver prints 20cm x 30cm
Unique vintage edition on Xiamen photographic paper dated 1993 no longer in production

Exhibition from Septembre 19th to November 20th 2009
Galerie beaugeste_photo
210 Taikang Lu – immeuble 5 espace 519
Shanghai 200025 / Tel (021) 6466-9012
info@beaugeste-gallery.com

An exhibition of Claudine Doury - curated by Jean Loh

An exhibition of the Dali Photo Festival

An Exhibition at Dali Festival curated by J.Loh

An exhibition at Dali Festival curated by J. Loh

An exhibition at Dali Festival curated by J.Loh

An exhibition at the Dali Festival curated by J. Loh

Among the international exhibitions at the First Edition of the Dali Photo Festival, I chose to present the following works besides their absolutely certain photographic value because especially of their “transporting” themes that will bring the Yunnan spectators to a wildly exotic and enriching trip around the world:

In the first pavilion:
French woman photographer Claudine Doury from Agence VU’ – winner of World Press Photo, Leica Award and French most prestigious Prix Niepce, presents her sensible and delicate treatment of the teenagers at a summer camp in Russia – ARTEK – documented in three successive visits 1994, 1999 and 2003, almost like a diary written there with Natasha & Sergei, Sasha, Igor and Tania, etc… With her tender, intimate and soft tone color, she narrates the daily activities, the play and rest and socializing of the universal teenage experience through anxiety and excitement without ever falling into voyeurism.

South African Brent Stirton from Getty Images, invited by TOPS International, will show a spectacular portrait of the last tribes of the Omo Valley in West Ethiopia, from the body-painted and Kalashnikov-equiped Karo herdsmen to the bizarre plate-lipped Mursi women, most certainly rarely seen in China. 5-time winners of the World Press Photo and a United Nation Award recipient for his works on environment and HIV, Brent’s concern here is simply to question the “sustainable preservation” of a traditional, ecological way of life in the wild, part of a project on worldwide disappearing cultures in the midst of globalization.

In the second pavilion
Frenchmen Francis Latreille, also a World Press Photo winner and a knight of the French National Order of Merit, is basically passionate about the effect of global warming on our planet. He is presenting here on invitation of TOPS Interntaional, his outstanding reportage on board of the sailboat TARA that let itself trapped on a giant piece of ice to then drift with the moving ice for 2,500Km over 506 days in the Arctic Ocean. Francis has captured the beauty of ice-formed waves and the Arctic long winter nights, the camaraderie of the crew on board, while alerting us on the imminent danger of climate change.

Belgian photographer Eric Mannaerts, on invitation from the Dali Festival, will bring his 20-year Morrocan Journey to the Yunnan audience. A series of classic black & white photographic tribute to Cartier-Bresson and Bernard Plossu, Eric also depicts his nostalgia for this enchanting country as he went in search of the traces of the Beat Generation writers on the beach of Tangier, or let himself mesmerize by the trance-inducive gnouas music.

In the third pavilion
Thai photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom from Bangkok, and represented by VU’ la galerie, will present his surprising and iconic Pink Man, an off-beat comic character dressed in pink pushing his pink supermarket caddie, in an out-of-the-context environment, be it in the heavenly Bali Island or right in the center of a European city. A harsh critic of the excesses of today’s consumerist society with a touch of Thai humor, Manit is actually deeply concerned by peace and communication between the peoples in the world.

Peace is also at the heart of French Vietnamese photographer Alain Buu, who risked his life in Afghanistan to bring back this incredibly beautiful rendition of Joseph Kessel’s novel The Horsemen. Tired of the image of a country torn by endless years of conflict Alain mounted a horse and went searching for the celebrated buzkashi, the traditional horse racing game close to polo, played by nervous and aggressive horses mounted by ragged yet noble horsemen. What we have is an enchanting illustration of Kessel’s book about a wounded chapendoz (horsemen) on his long journey home, in the midst of the unimaginably quiet and peaceful beauty of the Afghan landscape.