The colour image depicts the artist’s hand, lacking its little finger and holding in its palm a small black-and-white photograph of his mom. Earlier than fleeing Beijing after the 1989 bloodbath of protesters in Tiananmen Sq., Sheng reduce off the now-missing finger and buried it in a flowerpot he left behind. The {photograph} thus combines many attributes widespread to the exhibition’s works: It’s each conceptual and private, was made within the spirit of protest, displays household in addition to nationwide historical past, and paperwork a bodily efficiency.
Though Sheng’s photograph stands alone right here, it’s in truth a part of a sequence. That’s additionally typical of this present, whose artists typically current repeated linked photos. The large piece that greets guests as they step off the escalator is Tune Dong’s “Stamping the River,” a set of 36 vertical photos through which the artist repeatedly pressed a big wood seal into Tibet’s Lhasa River to no impact. All that endures are the pictures documenting the motion — and the sense of futility.
“A Window Instantly Opens” accommodates work made between 1993 and 2022 however takes its impetus from the primary of these three many years. That’s the interval of the short-lived East Village, an artist’s colony that occupied an space of low cost migrant-worker housing on the outskirts of Beijing. Just a few years later got here the temporary run of New Picture, {a magazine} whose editorial assertion in favor of conceptual pictures is the supply of the present’s title. One of many publication’s founders was Rong Rong, whose photographs of East Village performances fill a big expanse of wall.
The present comes fully from the holdings of New York collector Larry Warsh, and 141 of the items have been promised to the Hirshhorn as a present.
Sheng is just not the one artist to incorporate household snapshots in his work. Zhang Huan photographed himself with photos of kinfolk in his open mouth and his face coated in foam. (Very like Tune Dong’s river gestures, the froth represents ephemerality.) Tune Yongping’s “My Dad and mom (Passage 1-8)” traces the couple from vigorous youth throughout the Cultural Revolution to current solely as funerary portraits. Wang Jinsong reaches past his personal clan for “Commonplace Household,” an array of 200 small and really related photographs. That every incorporates a couple and a single offspring is an implicit critique of China’s one-child coverage.
A number of photos make use of artists’ our bodies as canvases, initially a Western avant-garde concept however with elaborations rooted in Chinese language tradition. Zhang writes Chinese language characters on his face till, over the course of 9 photographs, his pores and skin turns into fully black. In a set of 4 photos, Huang Yan shows the normal Chinese language panorama his spouse painted on his arms and torso. Cang Xin reveals solely his tongue in a 54-picture sequence through which he tastes his roots by licking objects associated to Chinese language tradition.
Nudity, a problem to China’s prescribed propriety, options in lots of of those photographs. Cang’s “To Add One Meter to an Nameless Mountain” will increase the height’s top with a stack of susceptible bare our bodies. Sixteen black-and-white photos chart Ma Liuming’s progress as he walks the Nice Wall within the nude. There’s additionally considerable naked pores and skin within the Twenty first-century work of Wang Qingsong, who makes use of laptop software program to sew photographic photos collectively in horizontal compositions. These emulate conventional Chinese language scroll work, however with many poses derived from famous European masterworks.
There are just a few non-photographic entries by Lin Tianmiao, however they’re all related to photographs. Her three-dimensional cloth items observe the outlines of images, and her twine-wrapped bicycles seem each as objects and as props in scroll-like photograph montages in a format akin to Wang Qingsong’s photos.
Contemplating how most of the artists produce multiples in sequence, it’s stunning that the present consists of solely two movies. One is a canine-themed efficiency piece with workplace employees in dogface make-up; the opposite is a computer-generated sci-fi cycle impressed by Buddhist notions of reincarnation.
A lot of the present’s individuals keep the normal concept of a single {photograph} as a second of reality, even when that second is staged fairly than serendipitous. However reality is problematic in a totalitarian nation that guidelines by propaganda and indoctrination in addition to drive. So these artists use subjectivity and theatricality to pry open a window via which viewers can glimpse, nonetheless fleetingly, tales that contradict the official narrative.
A Window Instantly Opens: Modern Images in China
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Backyard, Independence Avenue and Seventh Avenue SW. hirshhorn.si.edu.
Dates: By Jan. 7, 2024.