Liu Heung Sheng (or HS as he is widely known) is a Pulitzer-prize winner who came to photography by a circuitous route, but one which has helped him produce the new book China: Portrait of a Country (Taschen), a remarkable study of the rich but virtually unknown history of Chinese photography since 1949. We have become all too used to seeing China as it appeared to the visitor from Europe or America. Now this remarkable book shows us what it looked like from inside.

Heung Sheng Liu’s own journey started in Hong Kong in 1951, where his father was foreign editor for a Beijing-supported newspaper. HS was sent back to the mainland by his parents as an infant, to attend school there. He quickly learned that in China, an all-powerful elite, in a pattern that has its roots deep in the past, over which all political regimes are layered, dominates everything. "My classmates, predominantly the progeny of officers in the People’s Liberation Army, regarded me as the offspring of the 'black Five Elements' (defined as landlords, wealthy peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements and rightists)." He took part in the Destroy Four Pests Campaign with his schoolmates, and their homework consisted of diligently turning in matchboxes full of flies or mosquitoes, and even the occasional sparrow. Yet HS was rarely awarded more than a “C” for political behavior – his classmates always did better.

HS witnessed the hysteria of the Great Leap Forward and the extensive malnutrition that it created, recalling that his local playmates "all had swollen arms and legs from a lack of basic nutrition." Fortunately he escaped the worst of the famine because his father managed to get him back to Hong Kong in 1960 – but it is thought that as many as 30 million Chinese perished between then and 1962. "It was very traumatic experience for me even if it only lasted about five years. I was always being bullied or made an outcast."
 
Learning English and the local Cantonese dialect helped HS to do work in his father’s office, translating stories from the AP and Reuters wire services. His father also thought HS should learn to draw and paint and sent him to weekend classes. "I liked it but I realized I was not a good painter, so it was a relief to take up the camera. At that time, though, I was far more interested in history and international relations."

HS went to the US in 1970, to study political science at Hunter College. During his final year he took a course on photography taught by Gjon Mili, the legendary photographer for Life magazine, and the maker of some wonderful short films. "He took me under his wing and invited me to be an intern at Life. We were up there on the 28th floor of the Time-Life building in New York, where the contact sheets and prints were kept, and he encouraged me to look at all the work. Mili was friends with Cartier-Bresson, and I just loved all his work, and that of the other Life people who had been to China, like Carl Mydans, Dimitri Kessel, and Marc Riboud."

HS was in the right place at the right time to follow the "normalization" of relations between the US and China that followed Mao’s death in 1976, and he became the first Chinese foreign correspondent to go to Beijing for Time magazine in 1979. Later, when he joined AP as a staffer in 1981, he returned to Beijing and continued what he now recognizes as "a long journey to photograph China after Mao." HS has worked all over the world, but it was to China that he always wanted to return, and he has made it his home since 1997. His work since then has combined his own photographic survey of China and its people with detailed research on, and the rediscovery of, the work of the many photographers whose pictures tell the story of China in the last 60 years, a period when the country went from being an impoverished and largely rural society, to one of great cities and high technology, the great global economic power of the twenty-first century.



The collection of photographs assembled for this big book of almost 450 pages cover the period from the Communist takeover in 1949 up until now, including scenes of the recent earthquake in Sichuan. Taschen’s multi-lingual text sections eat into the picture pages a little but to good effect. There are good introductions by HS himself, by Karen Smith (on changing styles in Chinese photography) and James Kynge, who provides a good essay on the history of China in the period covered by the book that helps to place the pictures in their context.

Pride of place goes, however, to the work of the 88 photographers whose pictures are most effectively reproduced in the book. They go back to the young woman photographer Hou Bao, whose iconic 1954 photograph of Mao standing beneath willow trees is an image that is in direct line of descent from the visual style of traditional Chinese ink paintings. Indeed, HS makes the point that 4000 years of Taoist principles concerning the balance between man and nature underpin the Chinese visual aesthetic. Thus portraits and landscape photography have long been dominant genres for Chinese photographers.

For the many Chinese who have been more recently introduced to the work of the great European photographers who visited the country from the 1950s, such as Cartier-Bresson or Riboud, their focus on the realities of everyday life struck an odd note. They saw the work as highly stylized and charming, but it also surprised them because of the choice of subject matter. As HS says, "For many Chinese photographers brought up to regard landscape photography as the most worthy pursuit, daily life appeared too trivial a subject for their cameras."

Nonetheless the lyrical and humanist treatment of certain subjects (most often related to peasants working the land, for example) was evidently possible in a China that was under the hand of a leader who saw the arts in resolute socialist-realist terms. Mao and later his wife Qang Ji decreed that all culture should be at the service of the Chinese Communist Party, and the censors would only encourage the representation of social achievements: but this policy merely reiterates a Chinese proverb that says that "scandal and ugliness in the family should not be broadcast outside the home." This is well demonstrated by Liu Heung Shing’s 1976 photograph of two Chinese teenagers who are members of the Young Pioneers performing in a skit to denounce the newly disgraced Madam Mao in Shanghai. Following the death of Chairman Mao in October 1976, the so-called "Gang of Four" headed by Madam Mao were arrested.



The history of Chinese photography in the last 60 years has to take account of its political vicissitudes, as well as the economic and social changes that have followed, and changed, in turn, the very landscape of China itself. The selection of work shown does this job very well, because HS used his "contextual understanding of the Chinese people to discover works that may have been buried by Chinese editors fearful of straying too far from the official Party line." It involved locating many people across the provinces and cities of China who had clung on to dusty negatives in old shoeboxes under their beds. HS went to their homes to reassure them in many cases that they had nothing to fear in releasing their pictures.

Yet fear dies hard, and for good reason. De Xiuxian, who took the historic "first handshake" picture of Zhou Enlai and Richard Nixon in 1972, had previously been accused of ‘spying’ on Zhou by his colleagues at the New China News Agency, and exiled to Xianjiang where he almost met his death in the Sino-Soviet border incidents of 1969. There is a wonderful shot by De Xiuxian, taken in 1973, of Marshal Ye Jianying holding court on the beach at a seaside resort in Hainan province. (Ye played a key role in arresting the "Gang of Four," which effectively ended the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.)

The great delight of this book lies in the broad weave of both color and monochrome images that HS has found through painstaking and lengthy research, to recount the long and complex story of Chinese photography over the period from the founding of the present state. Since the mid 1990s and a certain easing of cultural restrictions on artistic expression, the camera and photography in all its forms, especially digital, has blossomed with the large number of classically trained fine artists jumping into the medium with great enthusiasm. HS has not ignored this trend, but his careful and revealing picture edit always errs on the side of documentary, of connecting the photography of China with the lived experience of its people. As he says, the fascination with the digital culture of the pixel allows the Chinese as much as anyone else to detach the image from any corporeal reality. In Zhang Peng’s 2007 image, part of the trend towards art photography that gathered momentum in the early 2000s, incongruity is all the rage: a child is dressed in the ornate costume of a Beijing opera performer, beneath an oversized head piece. Youth, traditions, luxury, wealth and decadence are all taken as common themes for conceptual photography.

But as HS points out there are a myriad of cultures and a vast landmass that remain to be explored by photographers more interested in the daily life of real people, such as Qin Wen’s 2005 photograph of Chinese workers plying their trade in the upper reaches of the Yangtse River, pulling a boat upstream. A job they do naked to protect the few clothes they possess.

There is a Chinese proverb that "the unforgotten past is a guide for the future," and in this beautifully presented book, Liu Heng Sheung has amply demonstrated its truth.