Contemporary photo show to reveal trends

Featuring photography, installation and video workscreated by 52 artists, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum will hold a show called "Contemporary Photography in China 2009-2014" starting September 5.

The show comes after the museum's experience holding major fine arts shows during the past several years.

The photography exhibition intends to present a big picture of the development of contemporary photography in China.

Organized by Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum and CAFA Art Museum in collaboration with PHOTO SHANGHAI, this exhibition consists of three sections: boundary/drift, landscape/everydayness and society/body. The aim is to highlight prominent trends in China's photography scene and to present a grand and yet detailed picture of it, reviewing its path from 2009 to 2014.

"Certainly, the three sections alone cannot give a holistic picture of the development of contemporary photography in China," said Wang Huangsheng, chief curator of the exhibition. "The artists also cover several subjects, making it hard to be categorized into one single section."

In the boundary/drift section, while most artists emphasize experimenting with the ontology language of photography, some try to represent and reflect upon the reality through new media.

In the landscape/everydayness section, by probing into and reflecting upon spatial landscape artists confront the diversity of reality and imbalance of different historical periods with great candidness in the form of photography. In the meantime they conduct a kind of subjective "viewing" experiment with the contemporary landscape.

Body as a keyword of contemporary photography appears in a variety of forms in the society/body section. A special unit called "civic journalism" is launched within the third section. A review is made concerning news pictures popular in social media since 2009. On one hand, they are represented as a means of news production; and on the other hand, a dialogue is constructed between the pictures and the practice of journalism presented in this section, according to the organizer.

Some of the big names in contemporary photography in China appear at the exhibition including Yang Fudong, Wang Qingsong and Lu Guang.

Date:Sep 5 - October 15, 2014

Time:Tue-Sun, 10am-6pm