Hirshhorn’s urgent and edgy survey of contemporary Chinese photography

The colour image depicts the artist’s hand, lacking its little finger and holding in its palm a small black-and-white photograph of his mom. Earlier than fleeing Beijing after the 1989 massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square, Sheng reduce off the now-missing finger and buried it in a flowerpot he left behind. The {photograph} thus combines many attributes widespread to the exhibition’s works: It’s each conceptual and private, was made within the spirit of protest, displays household in addition to nationwide historical past, and paperwork a bodily efficiency.

Though Sheng’s photograph stands alone right here, it’s the truth is a part of a collection. That’s additionally typical of this present, whose artists usually current repeated linked pictures. The large piece that greets guests as they step off the escalator is Music Dong’s “Stamping the River,” a set of 36 vertical photos wherein the artist repeatedly pressed a big wood seal into Tibet’s Lhasa River to no impact. All that endures are the pictures documenting the motion — and the sense of futility.

“A Window Instantly Opens” comprises work made between 1993 and 2022 however takes its impetus from the primary of these three many years. That’s the interval of the short-lived East Village, an artist’s colony that occupied an space of low-cost migrant-worker housing on the outskirts of Beijing. A number of years later got here the transient run of New Picture, {a magazine} whose editorial assertion in favor of conceptual images is the supply of the present’s title. One of many publication’s founders was Rong Rong, whose photographs of East Village performances fill a big expanse of wall.

The present comes completely from the holdings of New York collector Larry Warsh, and 141 of the items have been promised to the Hirshhorn as a present.

Sheng will not be the one artist to incorporate household snapshots in his work. Zhang Huan photographed himself with photos of family in his open mouth and his face lined in foam. (Very similar to Music Dong’s river gestures, the froth represents ephemerality.) Music Yongping’s “My Dad and mom (Passage 1-8)” traces the couple from vigorous youth through the Cultural Revolution to present solely as funerary portraits. Wang Jinsong reaches past his personal clan for “Commonplace Household,” an array of 200 small and really related photographs. That every contains a couple and a single offspring is an implicit critique of China’s one-child coverage.

A number of photos make use of artists’ our bodies as canvases, initially a Western avant-garde thought however with gildings rooted in Chinese language tradition. Zhang writes Chinese language characters on his face till, over the course of 9 photographs, his pores and skin turns into completely black. In a set of 4 photos, Huang Yan shows the standard Chinese language panorama his spouse painted on his arms and torso. Cang Xin reveals solely his tongue in a 54-picture collection wherein he tastes his roots by licking objects associated to Chinese language tradition.

Nudity, a problem to China’s prescribed propriety, options in lots of of those photographs. Cang’s “To Add One Meter to an Nameless Mountain” will increase the height’s top with a stack of susceptible bare our bodies. Sixteen black-and-white photos chart Ma Liuming’s progress as he walks the Nice Wall within the nude. There’s additionally considerable naked pores and skin within the Twenty first-century work of Wang Qingsong, who makes use of laptop software program to sew photographic pictures collectively in horizontal compositions. These emulate conventional Chinese language scroll work, however with many poses derived from famous European masterworks.

There are just a few non-photographic entries by Lin Tianmiao, however they’re all linked to photographs. Her three-dimensional cloth items observe the outlines of images, and her twine-wrapped bicycles seem each as objects and as props in scroll-like photograph montages in a format akin to Wang Qingsong’s photos.

Contemplating how lots of the artists produce multiples in sequence, it’s shocking that the present consists of solely two movies. One is a canine-themed efficiency piece with workplace staff in dogface make-up; the opposite is a computer-generated sci-fi cycle impressed by Buddhist notions of reincarnation.

Many of the present’s contributors preserve the standard thought of a single {photograph} as a second of reality, even when that second is staged quite than serendipitous. However reality is problematic in a totalitarian nation that guidelines by propaganda and indoctrination in addition to drive. So these artists use subjectivity and theatricality to pry open a window by means of which viewers can glimpse, nonetheless fleetingly, tales that contradict the official narrative.

A Window Instantly Opens: Modern Pictures in China

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Backyard, Independence Avenue and Seventh Road SW. hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Via Jan. 7, 2024.