Art Review: China in transition

Recent news of tainted Chinese products and unsafe toys has tarnished the entrepreneurial reputation of a country that has experienced extraordinary economic growth and social turmoil in the past 30 years. At the same time, tales of monster dams, international oil deals, skyscrapers and pop stars suggest that China's modernization will continue inexorably regardless of outsider opinion.

"Documenting China," an exhibit of 57 images by seven contemporary Chinese photographers, suggests how the country's rapid transformation is playing out in the lives of ordinary people. On view at the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum through Nov. 25, the exhibition is too small and incomplete to do more than hint at the country's extraordinary upheaval. There are, for example, no images related to the Three Gorges Dam that has captivated -- and alarmed -- so many Westerners with its imposition of modern life on ancient villages and rugged landscapes.

What "China" offers instead is an insider's view of the nation's transformation. Living in major cities in eastern China, from Daqing in the north to Hong Kong in the south, the photographers document farm labor just after the death of Communist leader Mao Zedong in 1976; heavy industry, new architecture, peasants immigrating to cities, new urbanites and nostalgia among the intelligentsia.

Chinese statisticians report that nearly 90 million workers moved from country to city by 2001. That's roughly equivalent to one third of the population of the United States. "Documenting China" offers a fragmentary albeit fascinating portrait of people caught up in that historic migration. The show was curated by Gu Zheng, an associate professor of journalism at Fudan University in Shanghai, and Mark Bessire, director of the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, where it debuted in 2004.

Tradition and modernity

At roughly 4 feet square, the color photos of Jiang Jian are the show's dramatic centerpiece, six life-sized images of peasant families in their living quarters. A stainless steel Thermos sits atop an ancient wooden chest; portraits of Mao vie for attention with busty pinup girls and sports cars; a photo of Chinese singer/film star Andy Lau hangs on a crumbling adobe wall bristling with flecks of straw, while lumps of tofu float in a ceramic urn beside a boy wearing loafers and a double-breasted suit.

Just how primitive peasant life was in Maoist times is apparent in the black-and-white photos that Liu Xiaodi took in 1978 and '79. Oxen or men were still yoked to single-furrow wooden plows; tethered cormorants dived for fish from rowboats; girls harvested rice by hand outside villages with minimal or no electricity. Conditions seem little changed from what they might have been 1,000 years earlier, and there is nothing picturesque about them.

Farmers at least labored in comparatively fresh air and sunshine. By contrast, the industrial workers documented by Zhou Hai in his "Heaviness of Industry" series struggle in hellish circumstances. Their cracked, bare feet caked in mud or clad in flimsy canvas shoes, they haul bags of concrete or grapple with steel beams and pipes spitting foul muck. Exhausted, they stare numbly at the camera, lips swollen, eyes dulled and skin blackened with grime. Industrial horrors are not unique to China, of course, but conditions are so grim and primitive in these photos -- taken between 1997 and 2001 -- that it is often difficult even to guess what the workers were doing.

Zhang Xinmin focuses on China's overcrowded cities, where, as in late 19th-century New York, immigrants huddle dozens to a room in squalid tenements, do mind-numbing factory work and send children to sell trinkets in the streets. Even the new housing that Luo Yongjin records in a midland city is monumentally depressing: windowless brick boxes or strange prisonlike structures overhanging narrow alleys.

But modernity and westernization have found footholds, too, as seen in the photos by Zhou Ming of young Chinese patronizing pizza shops, gaping at Shanghai's skyscrapers, dancing in the streets. Perhaps it's not surprising that some "Shanghailanders," as Lu Yuanmin dubs them, have apparently opted out, clinging to a sepia-toned existence in book-lined flats whose rattan furniture and tea trays seem relics of a cinematic pre-World War II era.

Contemporary China is evolving so quickly that many of these photos already seem dated, burnished with the patina of a fast-receding past.

mabbe@startribune.com • 612-673-4431