Who Gets to Picture China: Contemporary Chinese Photography
Who getsto pictureChina?
Nine artists, one archive, and the question underneath every image of a country: who made it, who circulates it, and who gets to decide what it means.
I have been writing about Chinese art on these pages since 2011, when I covered Middle East, Middle Kingdom, a group show of seven Chinese artists. Then came Shi Wei's Skinny Girl paintings, Xu De Qi's smiling Chinese girls and Yu Chen's Red Babies. Reading those posts again, I can see what I was looking at. I can also see what I wasn't.
A country is never seen whole. It is assembled from photographs, films, advertising, news, family albums, state imagery and the pictures that travel furthest beyond its borders. Over time those pictures harden into an idea of a place: what it looks like, who belongs there, what its people want.
China has been put through this process on an extraordinary scale. It has been photographed as an exotic destination, a political abstraction, a factory, a market and a superpower. Each image reveals something. None of them tells the whole story.
This is not an attempt to define Chinese photography. No single picture could. It is an argument that the right to represent a culture is never neutral, and that the artists who interrupt the familiar images are doing something more consequential than making new ones.
The camera was never neutral1840s → 1990s, in four sentences
Photography arrived in China in the nineteenth century with foreign visitors and commercial studios, and by the end of that century Chinese photographers were running studios of their own. In the 1930s, Jin Shisheng was recording daily life in the fast-growing cities, work I first met through Bonian Space when I previewed PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai. After 1949 the camera became an instrument of the state, building a visual language in which the individual stood inside a national story. In the 1990s, in Beijing's East Village, Rong Rong, Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming turned the body into both subject and medium.
The problem was never simply that some images were staged. Every photograph is a decision about what to include, what to leave out and where to put the viewer. The real question is who makes those decisions, and for whom.
The camera stayed a witness. It also became a place to argue.
Four ways to be seenThe names you already know, and the strategy each one stands for
If you know one thing about contemporary Chinese photography, it is probably one of these four artists. I've left their famous pictures out on purpose. You've seen them. What matters here is the move each one makes against the expected image.
Liu began Hiding in the City in 2005, after his Beijing studio was demolished. He paints himself into walls, streets and supermarket shelves until you have to hunt for him.
The contradiction is the point: his invisibility only works if someone is watching. Sometimes we don't fail to see because something is hidden. We fail because we've learned where not to look.
Chen Man's covers for Vision magazine in the 2000s were openly artificial, digitally built and full of Chinese references delivered in the grammar of global fashion.
They raise the question I keep coming back to: why is authenticity demanded most loudly of artists from cultures outsiders believe they already understand?
Ma grew up in Ürümqi and studied photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her book Üruklyn fuses the two cities into one word.
"Nobody associates Xinjiang with fashion, youth culture, or creativity," she told WePresent. "I wanted to change that." She isn't adding a picture to the catalogue of Xinjiang. She's questioning the catalogue.
In Whose Utopia (2006), factory workers perform the dreams their jobs leave no room for. In RMB City, built in Second Life, she made a whole Chinese city for avatars.
Her work feels more urgent every year. We can invent an avatar. We can't invent the conditions of our lives. And the image is getting easier to make and harder to trust.
DreamThe distance between a life and the one imagined
Fan photographs people with their dreams. He shoots in black and white, then colours each print by hand, so the fantasy is literally painted onto the evidence.
Look at her: goggles pushed up, hand on hip, rubber ring at her feet. She's standing on cracked, dry earth, and behind her is a sea full of sailboats that obviously isn't there. The picture doesn't pretend the dream came true. It lets her have it anyway.
That's a quieter answer to the question of who gets to picture China. Sometimes it's the person in the frame, telling the photographer what to add.
PerformMasculinity, staged and taken apart
Wang's self-portrait series Go Get 'Em Boy takes its cues from Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman and points them at a subject that rarely gets the treatment: Asian men.
His images don't argue with that ranking by shouting. They're domestic and deadpan: a sofa, a game controller, bodies that refuse to perform the toughness the frame expects. You don't need a public square to challenge a public norm. This year the series is in Gen Z: Shaping a New Gaze, organised by Photo Elysée and shown at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt.
WanderThe city as an interior landscape
China's urban boom is usually photographed through its biggest evidence: skylines, cranes, new infrastructure. Yang Yong, based in Shenzhen, went the other way. On Edge, first shown at m97 Gallery in Shanghai, was made over three years across Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing, among young women who had moved to the big cities.
The city is present, but it doesn't explain her. She's absorbed in her own thoughts, shoes kicked off, somewhere between the life she left and the one she's making.
A 2013 write-up of the series said these women were "evolving" toward the model of a Western woman. I wouldn't write that sentence now. The women in his pictures don't look like they're evolving toward anything. They look like they're thinking.
DanceFreedom, growing underground
Since 2017, Peng has photographed China's queer clubs, drag nights and competitions in Shanghai, Xi'an, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Beijing and Suzhou. The series was a finalist for the 2025 Leica Oskar Barnack Award. Before that he photographed cosplay gatherings, where young people step into characters that fit them better than the roles they were given.
Look at the dressing table: two mirrors, two faces mid-transformation, and two blank mannequin heads waiting for wigs. It's an image about becoming, taken in a place built so people can be seen on their own terms.
Here's what interests me: Peng was born in 1961. This isn't self-portraiture. It's patient, repeated attention from someone outside the scene. One of his subjects is Eddy, a 74-year-old dance teacher and drag performer in Suzhou. Who gets to picture China? Sometimes the answer is whoever keeps showing up.
RecycleThe archive as raw material
Lei Lei doesn't take photographs. He collects them from flea markets, second-hand bookshops and old magazines, then cuts, animates and re-sequences them. In Hand-Colored Photography (2016), made with Thomas Sauvin, the two colourised nearly 1,200 anonymous Chinese snapshots to imagine a single life.
His video collage Weekend is named after Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film, which he admires. It won the Special Prize of the Jury at the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2019/2020, a jury presided over by Dayanita Singh, the photographer at the centre of our essay on Indian photography. Archives are never complete. Some pictures survive and most don't. Lei Lei works in that gap, and he doesn't pretend to fill it.
We've been picturing China tooFifteen years of our own archive, read again
If this essay asks who gets to picture China, it has to include us. Here is what Antakly Projects has published, and how it reads to me now.
Laid out together, the pattern is obvious. Our early China coverage leaned on painters, on names the market had already approved, and on men picturing women. Yu Chen was the exception. The photographers came later, and so did the artists picturing themselves.
I'm not saying this as a confession. It's evidence. Even a small independent publication takes part in deciding what a country looks like. The only honest response is to keep looking and to widen who is doing the looking.
The right to remain complicatedWhat these images refuse to do
Liu Bolin's disappearance, Chen Man's constructed glamour, Hailun Ma's Ürümqi, Cao Fei's avatars, Shunzan Fan's painted seas, Ziyu Wang's deadpan boys, Yang Yong's women, Peng Xiangjie's dressing rooms and Lei Lei's recycled strangers don't add up to one vision of China. They shouldn't have to.
The demand for one definitive image is part of the problem. It turns a complicated society into a visual brand that can be recognised, circulated and consumed. International visibility isn't the same as artistic independence: the global art and fashion industries reward the pictures that confirm what audiences already believe.
Being seen is only the beginning. The harder question is whether an artist is seen on their own terms. And in the end, the question of who gets to picture China is also a question about how we look at everyone else.
Who decides what China looks like? No one should get to decide alone.
Who are some important contemporary Chinese photographers?
The best-known names internationally include Liu Bolin, Chen Man, Cao Fei and Hailun Ma. Younger and less familiar voices worth knowing include Ziyu Wang, Peng Xiangjie, Shunzan Fan, Yang Yong and Lei Lei.
What is Liu Bolin's Hiding in the City?
A series Liu Bolin began in 2005 after his Beijing studio was demolished. He paints his body to merge with a wall, street or shop display and is photographed there, so the viewer has to search for him.
What is Lei Lei's Weekend?
A video collage built from found images Lei Lei collected from flea markets, second-hand bookshops and old magazines, named after Godard's 1967 film. It won the Special Prize of the Jury at the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2019/2020.
What is Ziyu Wang's Go Get 'Em Boy?
A self-portrait series made between 2021 and 2023, inspired by Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman, that takes on the stereotypes attached to Asian masculinity.
Who holds the camera, who gets the centre
Further looking: On Edge by Yang Yong, at HiddenRoom
Images: © Shunzan Fan · © Ziyu Wang · © Yang Yong · © Peng Xiangjie · © Lei Lei. Quotes: Hailun Ma via WePresent; Lei Lei via Doors; Ziyu Wang, artist statement. Essay: Leila Antakly.
