Grain to Pixel: A Story of Photography in China

APT artist Danwen Xing is participating the exhibition “Grain to Pixel: A Story of Photography in China”.

“Grain” to “pixel” describes an arc of time stretching back almost one hundred years and that marks a period in which photography entered China as a phenomenon and was transformed. Ordinary people today consume a multitude of images daily. Photographic images have an exclusive monopoly on communicating creativity, artistic expression and the experiences of culture, but the embrace of photography in general is an extraordinary phenomenon in China.

Does this account for the diversity of content, style and technique of which photography’s transformation in China is comprised? “Grain to Pixel: A Story of Photography in China” is a survey of works from 70 Chinese photographers that maps the pulse of its creative energy in China: A fashionable Chinese woman cycling pass Tiananmen exalts the new energy of a resurging People’s Republic; a melancholy portrait of a young couple waiting by a pier captures the melancholy of departure, the anxiety at moving to an unfamiliar city to start a new life; vintage photographs from John Thompson, Lang Jingshan and Zhuang Xueben provide hints of the earliest foreign and homegrown visions of life in China; patriots like Wu Yinxian, Sha Fei, Jiang Shaowu and Weng Naiqiang gave the PRC some of its most memorable propaganda; social documentary from the 1980s onwards from photographers like Lv Nan, Zhang Hai’er, Han Lei and Li Qiang tackled new situations encountered by a society rocked by economic change; Wang Qingsong to Chen Man to Maleonn illustrate how art and internationalization, China’s new age of connectedness to the global village is driving photography in myriad contemporary directions.