A 601-photograph exhibition entitled "Humanism in China: Documentary Photography in Contemporary China" is under way at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC).

"It is the first time for so many photographs so true to the reality of the lives of ordinary Chinese to be exhibited at a national gallery," said Feng Yuan, newly appointed curator of the museum.

"It is the first time that humans, instead of contemporary affairs and politics, have been made the indisputable focus of Chinese documentary photography," notes Yan Wendou, a renowned photographer.

"It is the first time that major Chinese art institutions have collected works by Chinese photographers," said Wang Huangsheng, director of the Guangdong Museum of Art, which launched the concept for the collection two years ago.

"It is the debut showing of more than 500 documentary photos that have never been published by major Chinese media outlets," said photographer An Ge.

Over the past two years, Wang, An, and Hu Wugong, all photographers for Xi'an's Sanqin Metropolitan News, have visited more than 1,000 amateur and professional photographers around the country. From the 100,000 photographs the three collected, they chose 601 for the exhibition, which is divided into four parts: "Life," "Relations," "Desires" and "Time."

The photos document the lives, desires and struggles of ordinary Chinese over the past 50 years. The exhibition created a stir when it opened at the Guangdong Museum of Art and then at the Shanghai Museum of Art earlier this year.

Nine of the photos, considered "too cruel and sensitive," are not included in the Beijing exhibition, said director Feng.

One of the photographs is of young men and women dancing Zhongzi Wu, a group dance, to show their loyalty to Chairman Mao during the "cultural revolution" (1966–19766). The eyes of the youths glitter with passion and determination.

Another shows a young woman prisoner who is about to be executed carefully combing her long hair.

"The photographs totally enthralled me. They are so close to the lives of ordinary people like me. I was shocked by the changes in society and in my own life over the past 50 years, and kept saying to myself, 'Ah-ha! I used to be like that,'" said Wang Yuguo, a visitor at the exhibition. Wang was born in 1949.

A government official in the 1960s is shown pulling a cart filled with honeycomb briquettes, which had just been issued to him by his work unit.

Workers in a Beijing textile factory are shown breast-feeding their babies during a break in the 1970s.

Another photo documents the lives of residents in a small village in central China's Henan Province that has since been struck by AIDS.

A lighter moment is offered by a photograph depicting three plump-faced children sleepily yawning while riding home on a donkey. It was shot on the loess plateau in northwest China's Shaanxi Province in 1987.

Curators of the exhibition intentionally avoided photos that the public already knows well, but they did include representative works of some of the country's best documentary photographers.

"Bicycles" by Wang Wenlan, a photographer with Beijing's China Daily, captures the flowing river of bicycles in the nation's capital.

Lu Yanxia, art editor at Beijing Daily, said "I attend more than 10 openings of exhibitions each week at this time of the year, but I have never seen one like this. Everyone here has been touched by what they have seen."

The show captures the essence of documentary photography, but it is also a reminder that there have been too few exhibitions in which "Chinese photographers record ordinary Chinese lives and the ups and downs of Chinese society," said curator An. "Chinese photography has never before presented a systematic record of the lives of ordinary Chinese. With photography, before the 1980s men were only decorations of the era in which they lived or stage props in the drama of politics.

Photographer Yan noted that from the 1980s, Chinese documentary photography gradually turned to capturing a true record of society, but with no clear orientation.

"We searched everywhere for a photograph showing the disaster in the country in 1962, when thousands of people starved to death in Henan, and for one recording the tragic Sanmenxia flood in Henan in the 1960s, but we found none," said curator Hu.

But he said they were lucky to be able to show to the public for the first time photographs of common people in the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in Hebei Province and in the Zhumadian flood in Henan Province in 1981.

The three curators all believe that the very best documentary photos recording Chinese history are still tucked away gathering dust in the homes of ordinary Chinese people.

"It wrenches the heart to think of the neglect and loss," said An.

The exhibition at NAMOC will run until July 10.

(China Daily June 23, 2004)