Places & Spaces: Art in Global Context

Art Focus Program in 2 Parts

Saturday, 22nd April 2023

1:45 pm Registration

2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Part 2 – Personal: A New Form of Documentary Photography

April is PhotoFairs Month in Shanghai. To coincide, we turn our gaze to the art of photography with an intriguing two-part Art Focus series that will investigate the changing role of photography in society.

For Part 2, RAS Art Focus will be held on-site at the Shanghai Center of Photography (SCoP) convened by Art Historian Julie Chun with guest speaker Chen Ronghui, one of the represented artists. As the only museum in Shanghai dedicated solely to photography, the current exhibition "Personal: A New Form of Documentary Photography" highlights the visually charged works by five Chinese photographers who span diverse geographies and timelines to capture their personal vision of an ever-shifting society that continues to remain in-flux.

Ranging from street photography of Shanghai under constant construction captured by Xu Haifeng in the 1990s and early 2000s to young artists such as Zhang Boyuan and Ma Hailun who returned to their hometown of Xinjiang after having studied and lived abroad, the vibrant images captured in black and white as well as those in saturated color speak boldly of China's phenomenal growth in both the rural and urban regions with uncompromising visual clarity. Four of the five artists (Ma Hailun, Chen Ronghui, Zhang Boyuan and Pixy Liao) received their artistic training abroad and two artists (Xu Haifeng and Chen Ronghui) were heavily involved with photojournalism. This exhibition offers more than meets the eye by contesting the notion of photography as documentation. Please join us as we traverse through the complex maze of the ever-evolving role of photography in China as a tool, as a medium, as an art form, and as documentation.

For more information about SCoP (Shanghai Center of Photography), please visit: https://www.scop-sh.org/​