The new generation of photo artists from China

In Bavaria, with its comparatively strict coronavirus pandemic rules, museums were the first cultural institutions allowed to reopen from mid-May onwards.

The Alexander Tutsek Foundation is now showing "About Us," an exhibition of contemporary photography from China, with works by internationally renowned artists such as Chen Wei, Ren Hang and Yang Fudong, as well as names that are still largely unknown outside China, such as Gao Mingxi and Liang Xiu.

Seventy photographs from the last 20 years by 14 Chinese artists are presented in the show — works reacting to the radical changes in Chinese society.

The themes of this new generation of artists revolve around self-perception, subjective experiences, and daily life. They look at memory and history, melancholy and resistance, dreams and visions, the body and individuality — and the common denominator for all of them is the search for their own identity. How can one anchor oneself in a country that is changing as rapidly as China?

Self-dramatization with a touch of depression and coolness

The photos depict both wishful thinking and fears, isolation and a lust for life, curiosity and depression; they testify to both the coolness and the confusion of their creators. Eva-Maria Fahrner-Tutsek, president of the foundation, collected the pictures over many years and curated the exhibition. The art historian Aysegül Cihangir, who worked with her, emphasizes the non-documentary self-dramatization that can be observed in many of the pictures. "People are staged, sometimes in nature, sometimes in urban locations, then in interior spaces, and then there are also individual portraits taken in studio."

The complex worlds of feeling and experience of a younger generation are reflected almost physically in the photographs of the artist and poet Ren Hang, who provoked his fellow compatriots with his nudes. He was already an internationally established artist when he took his own life in Beijing in 2017 at the age of 29. The Italian Centro Pecci near Florence is also currently devoting an exhibition to him. His thoroughly composed pictures of mostly naked people in acrobatic and contorted poses were often censored. They show rebellious young people who, with their bodies and their sexuality, refuse to conform to the norms and constraints of control in Chinese society.

Documenting memories

Other artists speak more quietly about social change, such as Zhang Xiao, who tries to capture personal memories and thus document disappearing cultural heritage. But whether in documentary black-and-white aesthetics or as a dramatic staging in color, the life experiences of the artists themselves speak out from all of these images.

The exhibition at the Alexander Tutsek Foundation in Munich is on show through January 29, 2021.