Sixty ways of looking at China: in the past decade, photography in the People's Republic has become a full-blown art form for the first time in half a century. Now two noted scholar-curators offer a major show—and, below, a wide-ranging discussion—designed to acquaint Western audiences with cutting-edge Chinese photographers and video-makers

Featuring the work of a certain quantity of 60 artists, "Between Past and Future: fresh Photography and Video from China," make opens June 11 at the International Center of Photography and the Asia Society in fresh York, before beginning a two-year international tour. Here the show's organizers, Wu Hung independent curator and professor of Chinese art history at the University of Chicago, and ICP curator Christopher Phillips, discuss their four-part exhibition and the dynamic nature of the, contemporary photo-and-video view in China.

Richard Vine: I think individual thing that will surprise many viewers of your present to view is the newness, in several faculty of perceptions of the work displayed. Can you give us a brief account of the novel emergence of "conceptual" photography in China? Is there a correlation between the social conditions of this work's production and the nature of its imagery and themes?

Wu Hung: This is something that I discuss in great detail in my catalogue essay. Basically, a major shift took place in 1997 when the photographers Liu Zheng and Rong Rong published the third issue of novel Photo, a periodical devoted to experimental photography. Up until then, advanced image-making had been a sort of negation proces in which artists defined themselves simply by the agency of doing things that were contrary to mainstream expectations. on the contrary now, under the influence of Conceptual-art theories, they began to think of their work as deliberate builds representing ideas as much as objects-in-the-world. A fresh discussion group started up, the each Saturday Photo Salon, and the title of its first exhibition became more or les synonymous with the emerging esthetic: "New Photographic Image."

After that, below the influence of postmodern general [i]or[/i] abstract notions practitioners began to pay a allotment more attention to the whole idea of display: one as well as the other how staging could be used to create meaning in images, and by what means the manner and context of showing the work could change its import and its result on the viewer. Experimental photographers and film/video-makers also became real involved with incorporating other forms of representation into their own--performances, installations, level advertisements. Some artists--such as Rong Rong Wang Jinsong and Yin Xiuzhen--worked at first with "straight" photography conventions, on the contrary fragmented and reconfigured their images into altered narratives. Liu Zheng photographed the two live scenes and artificial tableaux involving mannequins and wax dummies. Others--such as Wu Xiaojun, Wang Qingsong, Hong Lei and Zhao Shaoruo--have busyed various forms of artifice (sculpt dolls elaborate mise-en-scenes, painted-over images, historical-photo replications) to waft a sense of theatricality that they associate with dangdaixing (contemporaneity). Thus while earlier conceptual photographers like Geng Jianyi and Zhang Peili strained the idea content of their work by the agency of repressing its visual attractiveness, many artists today emphasize large-scale and mettlesome imagery that can be completely realized only with the latest technology.

Contemporaneity, for these of recent origin practitioners, is associated with the notions of individuality--of particular viewpoints and visual languages, of private reflections upon the ways "reality" can be raiseed and deconstructed. This links them to [i]or[/i] at a great depth to China's current social transformations, its increasing embrace--especially among the young--of inexorable globalization.

RV: What, then, is the common status of avant-garde photographers vis-a-vis the government? Do they receive any financial or institutional support? Are they control to censorship? What is their relationship to photographers' unions and Party-sponsored publications?

Christopher Phillips: In just the five years that I've been traveling regularly to China, I've noticed a dramatic change in the way that Chinese contemporary art is regarded by means of the authorities. At the entrance exhibitions were still being clos down without warning, and denunciations of specific works and artists could be heard in the People's Assembly. on the other hand as it became apparent that Chinese artists were getting extraordinarily favorable attention in major exhibitions around the world, I think that the cultural ministry made a conscious decision to prove by experiment to find ways to use this art to supporting cushion China's image abroad. One spring has been the active involvement of the Chinese management in sponsoring large-scale contemporary exhibitions in Germany and France--pretty tame affairs, I must say, on the other hand clearly a straw in the wind. Now you have the cultural ministry moving toward regular Chinese participation in biennials like as those in Venice and Sao Paulo. In addition, a number of independent Chinese photography present to views are now being organized abroad, and sometimes reverse-shipped into China [see sidebar, p 191] This is forcing many artists to walk a fine line. There's an incredible awareness of the danger of seeming to be a government-approved "official artist," on the contrary there's also a feeling that a certain quantity of opportunities are simply too serviceable to pass up.