Whispering Wind
Recent Chinese Photography
June 22 - October 7, 2007

This exhibition, organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, includes works by 21 contemporary artists from China, several of whom live in the West. The photographers are internationally celebrated for images that examine contrasts between traditionalism and globalism, the real and unreal, nature and urban life, and the personal and social that have come into sharp focus since the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Among the exhibiting artists are Zhang Huan, Rong Rong, Maleonn, Wang Gongxin and Lin Tianmiao, Yin Xiuzhen, and Sheng Qi, whose photographs link performance art with Chinese narrative traditions, showing the impact of rigid social and political structures on the individual. Xing Danwen, Zhang Dali, Li Shan, Meng Jin, Miao Xiaochun, Sze Tsung Leong, Wang Fen, Yuan Shun and Li Tianyuan depict the emotional affects of current programs of modernization, which have required the sacrifice of much of China’s cultural heritage. More romanticized landscapes by Hong Lei, Hai Bo, Chen Changfen, Do Do Jin Ming, and Yin Xiuzhen suggest millennia-old painting styles, emphasizing the haunting beauty of China’s artistic and literary traditions, in which humanity is wholly integrated with nature.

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The image of ruins, as seen in this work and many others in the exhibition, has particular meaning for experimental Chinese artists. According to Wu Hung, “ruins are always fragmentary and their incompleteness registers the gap between past and present…[but they also] connect the present with the past, and this connection evokes recollection.”5 Urban ruins are anthropomorphized in Meng Jin’s video Illumination. The work shows the darkened interior of an abandoned factory that is cluttered with various objects. A flashing light synchronized to the sound of breathing moves around the room, intermittently illuminating the objects like a blinking eye. The rhythmic breathing and sporadic vision of the unseen observer of this mysterious space create, says the artist, a “claustrophobic tension between this dark interior and us.”6 Meng Jin equates the ruined factory with the inchoate recesses of the mind.

Mark Scala
Chief Curator
Frist Center for the Visual Arts