Pictures and Perspectives: The Contemporary Photography of Wang Qingsong, Muchen and Shao Yinong

Pictures and Perspectives: The Contemporary Photography of Wang Qingsong, Muchen and Shao Yinong

By Sam Beard

Published: December 2, 2020 | Source: Guan Kan: Thinking with Contemporary Chinese Art

After the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, a wave of independent and avant-garde exhibitions rocked Beijing’s art circles. Photography became an important medium for the expression and documentation of personal histories in China, and often a means for oblique social criticism. The contemporary photography of Wang Qingsong (b. 1966), Muchen (b. 1970) and Shao Yinong (b. 1961) is imbued with this history. This essay traces the evolution of Chinese photography and critical discourse in the late 1970s to interpret the contemporary work of these artists.

By 1977, the Beijing Spring was sweeping across China’s political landscape. The Beijing Spring was a brief period of liberalisation which resulted after the death of Mao Zedong and the purging of political faction the Gang of Four the previous year. This radical political shift concluded the Cultural Revolution and permitted Chinese citizens to openly criticise the Chinese Communist Party for the first time in years.

Wang Qingsong was among the up-and-coming practitioners of the Political Pop movement. Graduating the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1993, Wang’s focus was primarily in oil painting. However, he too would undergo a reinvention. Moving away from painting, Wang began working with photography in the late-1990s.

Wang’s first exhibition of photographic work, Glorious Life: The Photographs of Wang Qingsong, was held at Wan Fung Gallery, Beijing, in 2000. This body of work featured many of the techniques and stylistic traits that have reoccurred throughout Wang’s oeuvre. Night revels of Lao Li (2000) is a fine example of Wang’s staged large-format photography and use of metaphor.

Night revels of Lao Li references the well-known Tang dynasty scroll, Night revels of Han Xizai by Gu Hongzhong. Wang Qingsong considers his re-enactment “a portrait of the current position of intellectuals in Chinese society”, referencing the powerlessness of intellectuals and their resultant escape into self-fulfilling and contained worlds created for themselves.

In his most recent work, The Bloodstained Shirt (2018), Wang appropriates Wang Shikuo’s well-known 1959 drawing of the same name. Wang would choose Highland Park, Michigan, to restage the image of the peasants triumphantly reclaiming their land after rising up against their merciless landlord.

Bibliography

Baecker, A 2018, Socialist Art From China, Remade in Michigan. CityLab.

Cohen, A 2010, ‘Li Xianting: off the page’, ART AsiaPacific, vol. 71, pp. 84–91.

Collings, M 2007, ‘The naked and the dead: Wang Qingsong fakes the truth in China’, Modern Painters, pp. 84–91.

Couillard, E (ed) 2019, ‘UMMA interview with Wang Qingsong’, LRCCS Blog.