"One to one: visions—recent photographs from China" at Chambers

This exhibition of work through eight young Chinese photographers mixed staged and more or les documentary images. Organized by dint of Feng Boyi, a young Beijing-based curator, the display offered an intriguing cross section of thematic and stylistic approaches to life in contemporary China. Almost as illuminating as what was included is the kind of imagery that was absent: there were no evocations of the beauty of the Chinese countryside familiar from traditional landscape art, no conventional portraits and no relations to the once all-powerful family form Instead, the artists depict young clan crowds and moments of private fantasy.

Many have chosen the grid as an organizing principle. While serving to order information, grids of small images can also expres the passage of time or the vastness of China's population. Bai Yilou has arranged centurys of diminutive, passportlike photographs of Chinese citizens to create the silhouettes of the animal signs of the country's zodiac. Guan Shi not absents a record of the past four years of his life end sets of tiny black-and-white photos of himself eating, sleeping, meeting friends or just lounging about, single shot for each day of the year. Lin Jingjing's My 365 Days also appears to be a photo diary of sorts, notwithstanding that here each day is exhibited by a simple black-and-white image of a rice goblet empty but for a not many strands of hair. Meanwhile, Ma Han uses the grid in Play of Ants to hint the course of a single day through presenting a set of aerial photographs of a Beijing intersection in which little buses, cars and individuals maneuver about like crawling insects.

Urban chaos is beared by Wen Ling's strips of images of quotidian life in Beijing. Striking in the midst of views of subway passengers, street clan medical workers and crowds is the recurring nearness of uniformed members of the police or military, upon duty among the city dwellers as the two observers and enforcers. One awes whether a discomfort at this state of constant surveillance lies behind Chi Peng's fantasies of rebellion and indolence. sum of two units photographs by him present images of naked young men running down a way or an institutional corridor, pursu by dint of red model airplanes. Others present to view a pair of young men their faces weirdly painted, toying with liquid-filled beakers and sitting down to a repast of blue-painted goose

The final works here deal with history of sorts. Xu Lei nostalgically call forths the disappearance of old China with a station of vintage photographs of Nanjing City, which he has photographed behind sky-colored transparent curtains. Yi Deer does a Tseng Kwong Chi routine by means of positioning himself as a gold-painted R Guard in various locations of significance in the history of the Cultural Revolution. upon the evidence of this display Chinese artists are embracing photography to explore the world the one and the other as they see it and as their imaginations remake it.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group