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Market for Contemporary Chinese Photography Developing
by Jon Burris, November 20, 2006
Over 60 photographic prints by Chinese artists will be incorporated into the total of 1500 lots being offered in the 2006 Asian fall auctions of 20th Century and contemporary art. This represents over twice the number of photographs offered at last spring's Chinese auctions. Further recognition is being given photography by Huachen Auctions who is staging the first sale devoted exclusively to Chinese photographs November 23rd in Beijing. The catalog for the sale illustrates136 prints by 74 artists covering a period in Chinese photographic history from the late 1950's to today. Internationally, Chinese photography has gained attention over the past three years via exhibitions such as "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China" but the sale of photographs at the fine art auctions in China, a measure of importance in the art collecting world, has been slow in arriving.
Undeniably, Chinese photographers are beginning to get the same recognition previously accorded artists in other mediums, primarily oil painting. In the October 22 issue of the Sunday New York Times, a full page article featured the work of Beijing-based photographer Shi Guorui who is currently an artist-in-residence in California at the invitation of the For-Site Foundation, an organization dedicated to art that investigates the concept of place. Mr. Guorui premiered his photographs made with a 'camera obscura' four years ago in
Beijing. Having abandoned traditional cameras ten years earlier he began to use 'pinhole' cameras that require no lens, no controls, and no film. With pinhole cameras, photographic paper is placed inside a black box with a very small hole punched in one side. When the photographer is ready to make a picture, he removes a piece of tape or pushes aside some sort of device used to cover the pinhole and he waits minutes for the light that enters to expose the paper. The result is a negative image that appears when the paper is processed traditionally in a darkroom.
Shi Guorui's current version of a pinhole camera is much closer to the original camera obscura - the earliest known camera invented - that is actually a darkened room with light entering a hole in one of the walls and projecting an image on the opposite wall. Mr. Guorui's first experiments involved constructing a camera obscura out of a watchtower located on the Great Wall of China. His photographs showed wide, sweeping views of the Wall and surrounding landscape. The positive response he received for this work led to a project photographing the urban landscape of Shanghai. These images gained Mr. Guorui international attention from museums and collectors of contemporary Chinese art.
As the art world takes notice of Chinese contemporary photography undoubtedly this market will expand, but certainly many of the artists and collectors will be paying attention to the upcoming auctions to determine just how strong the market might become.
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