Xing Danwen

Kiang Gallery, Atlanta
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Other examples exhibited:
New York, International Center of Photography and Asia Society; Chicago, Smart Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art; Seattle Art Museum; London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, 2004-2006, no. 30, p. 80, illustrated
Chicago, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art; Eugene, University of Oregon Museum of Art; Hanover, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, 1999, plate 4, p. 48, illustrated

Laminated under clear acrylic with aluminum backing, the work is in very good condition.
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Xing Danwen is a dominant figure in the history of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Chinese photography: she is one of the photographers who became established through their role documenting the seminal works of China's important early performance artists; she honed her technique and understanding of the medium while earning her MFA at New York's School of Visual Arts; and having returned to China, her innovative works frequently appear in major international exhibitions.

Originally Xing Danwen had studied painting, earning a B.A. from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1992. She took up the camera in 1989; thus, her early development as a photographer occurred in tandem with rigorous training in painting: the compositions and lighting of her early photographs, as well as her awareness of the form of the human body, reflect this training, but expressed with an edgy style. This approach melded perfectly with the nature of the performances of the East Village artists: she produced some of the iconic images of the time, notably of key performances by Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan, Zhu Ming and others.

Overlapping with the period during which Xing Danwen photographed major artists and moments of the avant-garde art movement is Born with The Cultural Revolution (Lot 92), a set of three images of a pregnant woman posed with photographs of Mao Zedong. The striking compositions juxtapose the woman, the unborn child, and Mao to suggest Mao's changing role—as a dominant force in the woman's life during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976); later as subject of the Mao Craze, when portraits such as those displayed in the images became collectibles; and finally with lessened influence over the fate of the baby. As Wu Hung noted in the catalogue he wrote to accompany the exhibition, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (1999, Smart Museum, Chicago), in the third image "Mao's portrait is now placed next to her swollen belly. The woman's individual identity disappears, and her role is reduced to bridging the past and the future. Perhaps here lies the hope offered by the photograph." This is one of the very few major photographic works from the era to ponder such generational questions or to depict a female point of view.

Returning to Beijing upon completion of a master's degree in New York, Xing Danwen traveled to Guangdong Province in 2002, to document the recycling of imported electronic waste. Her disCONNEXION (Lot 93) series of close-up photographs of homogeneous piles of e-waste exhibit a compelling beauty, balanced by the shock of understanding the materials' history. Seventy percent of the world's electronic waste is processed for recycling in Guangdong, an activity that supports a hundred thousand people. The primitive methods employed, however, pollute the environment and create lasting health problems. disCONNEXION captures the nature of high-tech consumerism, an obsessive acquisitiveness blind to the implications of rapid obsolescence.

Examining affluence and globalization from another perspective, Xing Danwen created the Urban Fiction (Lot 94) series. For this she photographs the maquettes (i.e., architectural models) displayed in Chinese real estate developments' salesrooms, and then digitally inserts human drama into the empty sets. She is interested in how the fantasy lifestyle promised by the maquettes correlates with reality. She imagines and acts out plots to fill the living spaces, photographing herself in various guises ranging from despairing office worker to murderer. Having begun her career photographing others performing, she has now become an actor in her own works, using photography to explore the slippage between fantasy and reality—with herself in disguise, and the model structures standing in for the real.

-Britta Erickson