Starting A New Conversation on Photography in China: An Interview with Liu Heung Shing and Karen Smith

Kiki Xue, Beijing Opera, 2015 © Kiki Xue, Courtesy the artist

Interview by Lingfei Ren

Copy Editor: George Russell

Shanghai Center of Photography (SCôP) is the first non-profit art institution dedicated to photography in China, and Shanghai’s premiere museum for the photographic medium. SCôP was founded in 2015 by Liu Heung Shing, a Pulitzer-prize winning photographer and former chief photographer of Time Magazine. Karen Smith, the artistic director, is a curator and art critic specialized in contemporary art in China, and is also the Executive Director of OCAT Xi'an.

The following has been condensed from a longer conversation.

LINGFEI: Karen, how did you begin studying art in China and what sparked your interest specifically in curation?

KAREN: Before I came to mainland China in 1992, I had already been working for three years in Hong Kong. During my time there, I became interested in what I was exposed to of art coming out of mainland China. At that time, there was little information about that art, or the artists making it beyond China’s borders. I wanted to come and research, which I did, from 1992. I spent the first several years meeting a large number of artists through visiting exhibitions and doing studio visits. At that moment there was a lot going on, but it was always often somewhat spontaneous in nature, and happening within very small circles. But what was happening was so exciting to me that I really felt the rest of the world should know about it. Being British, the first place I tried to find partners for doing exhibitions was in the UK. The first was in 1998. But with the rapid developments taking place across society in China, and the real change that was driving the scene, by around the early 2000s, it became much more interesting to make exhibitions in China, where we could see that there was a new audience, and how their experience of art exhibitions was helping to feed that interest. In the 1990s, the audience was largely comprised of only the artists themselves and their friends, but by the early 2000s there was a new generation of viewers. Perhaps because there were also new spaces becoming available for art, some of them very temporary but some of them more permanent.

Shanghai Center of Photography Building © Shen Zhonghai, Courtesy Shanghai Center of Photography

LINGFEI: Given that it was founded in 2015, Shanghai Center of Photography is a relatively young institution, and is China’s first non-profit Photography Museum. HS, how did you come up with this idea and have it established? Was it a challenge to build?

HEUNG SHING: I have to say, like a lot of things in life, it came as an accident. When I first came to mainland China, it was back to 1976, just after Mao died. In 1978, I began living in Beijing. At that time there were a lot of arts groups, like the April Photo Society. That’s how my photography career for Time Magazine began. To fast forward, after going to many countries on behalf of the Associated Press, I came back to China in 1997. Shanghai was a place I traveled to a lot from Beijing, where I knew quite a few friends and contacts. In 2014, I met the governor of Xuhui District, who had started to build an arts corridor at West Bund—a string of art institutions near each other, which is very similar to New York’s Museum Mile. He offered me the use of this building, which was designed by Mark Lee, a then LA-based architect, who is now the Chair of the Department of Architecture and Professor at Harvard. In 2013, he and several other architects had been invited by the Shanghai Government to design showcase pavilions as commissions for the inaugural Shanghai Architecture Design Biennial. This building was one of those works. In my meeting with the governor, he first invited me to join with other artists, like Ding Yi, to have a studios here. But he didn’t know how I work—I don’t need a studio, I don’t need a building to do what I do. When I was listening to him and looking at the building, my thoughts were immediately transported to New York, where I went to school. I used to visit the International Center of Photography (ICP), in its earliest location in the 1970s, which was on 94th Street, at the corner of Fifth Avenue, to see exhibitions even before I studied photography and became an assistant to Gjon Mili at Life Magazine. I thought photography can do wonderful things, to speak through its powerful imagery, which had a lasting impression on me over the years. There is a similar energy between Shanghai and New York, in terms of internationality and diversity, the idea of ICP just came to my mind. The best way to talk about and understand photography is to show photographs. So the idea became clear—that was to do the Shanghai Center of Photography.

Installation view: Shi Guowei: The Drawn Out Moment, Shanghai Center of Photography, Shanghai, on view February 6-May 30, 2021 © Shanghai Center of Photography

LINGFEI: Thank you for founding this non-profit museum for photography. It is touching and remarkable. So, having implemented this idea, what is your major mission at SCôP? What do you want to contribute? 

HEUNG SHING: My vision was to start a new conversation on photography in China. Why does China need a new conversation on photography? For a long while, photography had been seen as an instrument to convey information about what the government did, to showcase what the leaders in the party had done. It was far away from photography as a personal expression of ideas, a visual language, until China was opened up by Deng in the late 1980s. Before 1949, we had photographers like Lang Jingshan, who very much came from the painterly aesthetics of Chinese ink painting. But the idea of using photography, its language and potential, to tell a story, to present a coherent narrative, based on the photographer’s intentions, was something extremely new, and remains so even today. Yet Chinese people are interested in photography and Chinese photographers. They leapfrog from one understanding to another. But to really get that part of China, is something much less obvious for people in New York, London, and Paris. As we do exhibitions and so on, I feel increasingly that the need is more and more pronounced as we go about planning out our exhibitions.

Zhang Yaxin, A scene from Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, 1971, 44x80cm, archival inkjet print © Zhang Yaxin, Courtesy Shanghai Center of Photography

KAREN: There has been a dramatic transition in the understanding and use of photography, which you can see very clearly if you ever have a chance to see more of the Grain to Pixel: A Story of Photography in China exhibition that we did. This maps the transformation from photography being something that was initially brought in by foreign people, and a tool for looking at and documenting China. Almost just as Chinese people started using the camera to look at themselves, it became a tool of propaganda. Since the founding of new China, photography has been used to, as HS just explained, to show the achievements of the party and the ideology. Then, from the 1980s, as he mentioned, there were new movements in photography. It took a little bit of time to evolve a freer use of the photographic language. That's partly because it was so tied to being part of the official ideology for so long. But fast-forward to 2015 when we started the center in Shanghai, one of the reasons why I was interested in working with photography is because, with contemporary art, there has long been an issue where people say, oh, it's art, I don't understand it. But people are very comfortable with photography, because in the recent years, from the swift evolution of the original digital cameras to cheaper and accessible models, today everybody has a smartphone. Everybody is using photography, but of course, what people are using today as digital photography is really a passive engagement with image-making, because they no longer know how a camera works or about the specificity of photography, which is made by light passing through a lens at a certain speed, which has a very particular way of seeing the world. A lens doesn't see in the way that our eyes see. We tend to think a camera is somehow an extension of the photographer's eye, but we have two eyes and a camera only has one lens. So the whole way of seeing is very different. Today people pick up a camera, a smartphone to take snaps all the time, but understanding what photography is something we've been trying to convey, which is why in our program we flip from historic research to contemporary solo shows, from local photographers to international photographers, from documentary to studio photography, from fashion to art, because everybody has a different way of using photography, and all these languages contribute to a different ways in which photographers create images.

Maleonn, Journey to the West, 2008, 135x90cm (3), archival inkjet print © Maleonn, Courtesy Shanghai Center of Photography

LINGFEI: In the ongoing exhibition by Shi Guowei, he is doing film photography. He firstly shoots black and white film, then uses ink to color the scanned photographs. 

HEUNG SHING: He paints over it rather than colors it. He paints over dot by dot, whereas color, you know, you can sometimes do a whole brush, but he never does that.

LINGFEI: So instead of shooting color film, he chooses to shoot black and white and then so that he can apply the specific color he wants to the photographs.

KAREN: Yes. The point for Shi Guowei is really that we look at the photograph—we think that the photograph is the truth about the world, the truth about reality, but so much of what we see is colored by emotion. One of the ways he explores that is to go to places where he finds something natural scene that moves him. He shoots it in black and white, and then back in the studio, once he's printed out the photograph, he starts to paint it. What comes out is very different from the memory. Even though he tries to paint from memory, those memories are tinted, and then further altered by however he's feeling on the particular day he is painting. So this practice really examines human intervention. The camera as a machine can record something true of reality, but at every step, these things are confounded by the fact that because we're human, we're not perfect, we intrude upon what we see. And so we have a "rose-tinted" way of seeing something, just as we might tend to see the dark side of something.

In China where there was not a great access to sophisticated technology very early on, early Chinese printers were magicians in the darkroom, and in the way they applied color to early portraits. In the 1950s and 60s, they became magicians of the composite picture. Think about all of those images of Mao that were all shot in black and white. And yet when you remember them, you think of them as being color pictures, because they were on the cover of Zhongguo Jianshe (China Reconstructs) or some other pictorial magazine. They were all hand colored by amazing craftsmen of the times. This is something that people in China understand very deeply. So when they look at this idea of color and the distortion of image, it resonates. Thus, Shi Guowei’s approach is a subtle means of reminding people that nothing is ever quite as you see it. There's always another story. There's always another interpretation. There's always another view. 

Installation view: Shi Guowei: The Drawn Out Moment, Shanghai Center of Photography, Shanghai, on view February 6-May 30, 2021 © Shanghai Center of Photography

HEUNG SHING: [Expanding on that point of photographic practice being informed by history] there is such a thing as photography from different cultural awarenesses. It makes photography different. For example, the photographers that came out of China, and the people in the East, even if you give them the same camera, the results are culturally unique. If you compare French and American photojournalism, they're very different, and also different from German photojournalism. Look at Life Magazine. Early photographers like Alfred Eisenstaedt, Nina Leen, all came from Europe, yet fifty years later there is this thing we call an American sensibility, or a French or British sensibility. I think that also underlies why we want to show different kinds of photography—to open up what our visitors see and present all different kinds of expression.

Shi Guowei, Mourning for Xiao Hei, 2020 © Shi Guowei, Courtesy the artist and Magician Space

LINGFEI: Let's go back to how you two collaborate, in regards to the exhibition calendar. I saw the past twenty-four exhibitions highlight both Eastern and Western influences. Karen, can you talk about your curatorial process? How do you negotiate the two influences? And how do you arrange the calendar?

KAREN: We do four exhibitions a year. That's about the optimum for our finances, so we plan, basically, four seasonal exhibitions a year, and we have two key points in the calendar, which are March and September-November. September is when we have the Shanghai Photo Fair. We normally try and have something significantly photographic. Then we try to have something a little bit more towards an artistic aesthetic towards November, which is the Shanghai contemporary art season. Within the four exhibitions, we try to have a mix of solo and group shows, and something from China as well as international, and that covers a little bit of history and the contemporary. Last year we started with the international group show Beyond Fashion, which really had a lot of great famous fashion photographers, but who were also just great photographers. Then we had Alec Soth's solo show. Soth’s work is rather unique... Is it journalism? Is it personal? Is it art? He covers many different spheres—very interesting kind of subject that he covers. Then we did the fortieth anniversary of the Leica Loba Award, so forty years of photojournalism. We have taken a look at women in the field, for example, the two British women photographers Anna Fox and Karen Knorr, who again work contemporary documentary photographers. It's about maintaining a balancing, and never repeating ourselves. We're always trying to find a topic or a theme that was somehow resonate with the local audience and something that always moves us into a new area.

Anna Fox, Angel, from series Resort 2, 2009-2011 © Anna Fox, Courtesy James Hyman Photography, London

LINGFEI: Beyond Fashion is also a traveling exhibition, right?

KAREN: Yes, that is a touring exhibition that came from Europe and the US. We also started from the very beginning, with Grain to Pixel, to try to tour our own exhibitions. We took that to Australia and to Belgium. More recently, we've started taking others of our exhibitions to institutions in China. We have partnerships with some of the other photography museums, which include, Xie Zilong Photography Museum in Changsha, Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum, and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre. It's very helpful, although we're all different sizes. Chengdu and Changsha are much more flexible because they can have multiple exhibitions going on at the same time. It's just been very good for us to have this partnership because then it means we can bring in better exhibitions from abroad and share the costs.

Feng Li, Untitled, 2018 © Feng Li, Courtesy the artist

LINGFEI: When you, for example, do a touring exhibition and introduce Chinese artists to an international audience, how do you approach them?

KAREN: I think that's why Grain to Pixel was quite successful—because it covered a historic period and it was very comprehensive. It was one of my favorite exhibitions. We had such an extraordinary range of works in it and it probably can be revived at some point in the future because it's just got so much going for it. We found, after that, that if you are trying to take an exhibition abroad, a lot of institutions and curators have their own views about what they want to see from China, which is already, in some cases, deciding what China is rather than being open to seeing something new. It can be tricky to navigate perceptions, but we're always willing to collaborate were we can to take more of China's great photography and art abroad.

Chen Man, Miss Wan Studies Hard, 2011, 50x74cm, archival inkjet print © Chen Man, Courtesy Shanghai Center of Photography

LINGFEI: There are actually many young Chinese photographers getting international recognition because they won international awards. They're represented by galleries all over the world. Their works are in the major museums in America, in Europe. How do you see this? Why do those artists' work get attention from outside of China?

KAREN: It happened with the art in the 1990s—people, when they look from outside of China, often gravitate towards something that they feel they can understand: to see something in the work that looks like the China they expect to find, something that's recognizably, China, Chinese, that matches whatever is the most prevalent topic. Identity politics being one that has become prevalent in recent years. This exchange is good, but sometimes it just closes the door to other people who maybe are doing something equally interesting and perhaps more creative in an individual sense, rather than following a mainstream direction or trend. Because it's not trendy, or on message, they get overlooked.

HEUNG SHING: If you have the patience or time to look around the entire exhibitions on Chinese photography overseas, in different countries of Europe and North America, you basically will find one or two exhibitions a year, if not every two years, while so much is going on in China day-to-day. That explains what Karen just said. Sometimes the body of work has to fit a certain imagination of what China should look like or something that fits the flavor of the month, when China is a country of continental size and diversity of people. Under normal circumstances, you can't keep up with what's coming out of China, let alone Chinese photography when it's going into a museum just once every five years. That leaves a lot of room for imagination, for exploring. Curators sometimes receive good proposals and so on. How decisions are made—it's very, very mixed. We try to do our bit in Shanghai.

This interview was conducted in February 2021, and is in conjunction with the current Issue No.25 Curation.