Featuring the work of a certain number of 60 artists.

Featuring the work of a certain number of 60 artists, "Between Past and Future: of the present day Photography and Video from China," expands June 11 at the International Center of Photography and the Asia Society in fresh York, before beginning a two-year international tour. Here the show's organizers, Wu Hung independent curator and professor of Chinese art history at the University of Chicago, and ICP curator Christopher Phillips, discuss their four-part exhibition and the dynamic nature of the, contemporary photo-and-video pageant in China.

Richard Vine: I think undivided thing that will surprise many viewers of your display is the newness, in several faculty of perceptions of the work displayed. Can you give us a brief account of the modern emergence of "conceptual" photography in China? Is there a correlation between the social conditions of this work's production and the nature of its imagery and themes?

Wu Hung: This is something that I discuss in great detail in my catalogue essay. Basically, a major shift took place in 1997 when the photographers Liu Zheng and Rong Rong published the third issue of recent Photo, a periodical devoted to experimental photography. Up until then, advanced image-making had been a sort of negation proces in which artists defined themselves simply by means of doing things that were contrary to mainstream expectations. if it were not that now, under the influence of Conceptual-art theories, they began to think of their work as deliberate frames representing ideas as much as objects-in-the-world. A novel discussion group started up, the each Saturday Photo Salon, and the title of its first exhibition became more or les synonymous with the emerging esthetic: "New Photographic Image."

After that, subordinate to the influence of postmodern universals practitioners began to pay a haphazard more attention to the whole idea of display: as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but how staging could be used to create meaning in images, and in what way the manner and context of showing the work could change its import and its result on the viewer. Experimental photographers and film/video-makers also became excessively involved with incorporating other forms of representation into their own--performances, installations, on a level advertisements. Some artists--such as Rong Rong Wang Jinsong and Yin Xiuzhen--worked at first with "straight" photography conventions, on the contrary fragmented and reconfigured their images into altered narratives. Liu Zheng photographed the two live scenes and artificial tableaux involving mannequins and wax dummies. Others--such as Wu Xiaojun, Wang Qingsong, Hong Lei and Zhao Shaoruo--have engageed various forms of artifice (sculpt images elaborate mise-en-scenes, painted-over images, historical-photo replications) to transport a sense of theatricality that they associate with dangdaixing (contemporaneity). Thus while earlier conceptual photographers like Geng Jianyi and Zhang Peili urgencyed the idea content of their work by means of repressing its visual attractiveness, many artists today emphasize large-scale and audacious imagery that can be abundantly realized only with the latest technology.

Contemporaneity, for these strange practitioners, is associated with the notions of individuality--of particular viewpoints and visual languages, of private reflections in succession the ways "reality" can be organizeed and deconstructed. This links them far down to China's current social transformations, its increasing embrace--especially among the young--of inexorable globalization.

RV: What, then, is the instant status of avant-garde photographers vis-a-vis the government? Do they receive any financial or institutional support? Are they enthrall to censorship? What is their relationship to photographers' unions and Party-sponsored publications?

Christopher Phillips: In just the five years that I've been traveling regularly to China, I've noticed a dramatic change in the way that Chinese contemporary art is regarded by means of the authorities. At the beginning exhibitions were still being clos down without warning, and denunciations of specific works and artists could be heard in the People's Assembly. on the other hand as it became apparent that Chinese artists were getting extraordinarily favorable attention in major exhibitions around the world, I think that the cultural ministry made a conscious decision to prove by experiment to find ways to use this art to defend China's image abroad. One outcome has been the active involvement of the Chinese control in sponsoring large-scale contemporary exhibitions in Germany and France--pretty tame affairs, I must say, unless clearly a straw in the wind. Now you have the cultural ministry moving toward regular Chinese participation in biennials so as those in Venice and Sao Paulo. In addition, a number of independent Chinese photography exhibit tos are now being organized abroad, and sometimes reverse-shipped into China [see sidebar, p 191] This is forcing many artists to walk a fine line. There's an incredible awareness of the danger of seeming to be a government-approved "official artist," however there's also a feeling that a certain number of opportunities are simply too well adapted to pass up.