Lost in Translation? Interpreting contemporary Chinese photography

Abstract

Contemporary art by Chinese artists was, before the financial crash of 2008, one of the fastest growing areas of the art market. In the period 2000 to 2012 a substantial number of exhibitions and texts were dedicated to the art of those working with lens-based media. In this way “Contemporary Chinese Photography” has emerged as a subset of contemporary art from China. Despite the fact that much of what has been written in the last forty years about the politics of representation would suggest that it is unsound to have a category of art production determined by the makers’ ethnicity, there is a great deal of actual and symbolic investment in this particular branch of contemporary art. A dominant idea at work in much of the secondary literature that seeks to introduce Westerners to the subject is that in viewing these works we are learning something about modern China and its inhabitants. This article argues that if this art appears legible to us, then one reason for this is because it has been made so by its art world interpreters and, in the process, become market-friendly.