Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British Collections is an exhibition currently held at the JW Marriot in Beijing; it was organized in collaboration with the British Embassy in Beijing. This event unveils photographs dating back to the 1870s, which have never been shown to the Chinese audience.
These pictures offer a glimpse of expatriates’ experience of China through the representations of daily life, social activities, urban landscape, Chinese elite, Chinese beautiful women, as well as China’s hinterlands among others. Inevitably such photographs are more than mere personal souvenirs, they ultimately reveal how Chinese society was experiencing a transitional phase at that time, how it was facing socio-cultural upheavals, and (re)discovering its own cultural heritage while confronting the Western world.
It is almost a miracle that we are able to rediscover Chinese past through the photographic medium. Indeed twentieth-century China was extremely destructive and most of the images were destroyed especially during the Cultural Revolution in the 1966s. Nevertheless this deficiency of visual history in China attracted the attention of the international scholarly community over the past two decades, which has been keen to search for images of China taken during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The rich collection of photographs displayed in the exhibition Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British Collections were discovered in private albums of more than ten thousands British families who lived in China at that time; in general people either bought, commissioned or took the photographs themselves, they have now become significant historical items. “These wonderful images from British collections provide a unique visual record of the longstanding shared history between the UK and China. They are a reminder of the strength and depth of our relationship, one which is increasingly important to both countries as China continues its development,” says Sebastian Wood CMG the British Ambassador to China.
This project of gradually archiving rare photographs from private collections to make them available to a wider audience was initiated by Professor Robert Bickers from the University of Bristol. In fact all the photographs currently displayed are fully available on the online database “Historical Photographs of China”.
In that sense, Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British Collections allow both the photograph enthusiast and the researcher to recreate China’s past through the lens of Westerners who were eager to understand a culture alien from their own. This exhibition ultimately evokes the fundamental role of photography in the cultural, political and historical relationships.
Marine Cabos
Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British Collections
From March 22th to April 7th, 2013
JW Marriott à Pékin
83 Jian Guo Road
Chaoyang District
Beijing 100025
China
