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Photographer/Writer Grace Lau gave a fascinating two-part presentation at Asia House on Tues 9th November, screening examples from her personal collection of nineteenth century Chinese photographs. An audience which included experts in various fields of Chinese studies were also delighted by images from an exhibition which is to tour China in 2009.
In the first half we were brought face to face with the nineteenth century western appetite for ‘oriental’ images of beheadings, beggars and criminals. Postcards of courtesans, opium smokers and kowtowing officials or bible-selling missionaries and autocrats striking casual poses alongside corpses abounded; hastily-added handwritten comments betrayed the arrogance of the Victorian senders. Inspired by the work of pioneer photographer John Thomson (b.1837) they formed the backbone of exhibitions and catalogues published by the well-known Dennis George Crow Company.
The second half made for less disturbing viewing. In 2005 Grace Lau set up a photographic project in Hasting on the English South coast. Here, using a 30 year old Hasselblad camera, colour negative film and natural light, she photographed the ‘eclectic and cosmopolitan’ passers-by. They proved very willing to co-operate, posing in front of a painted backdrop, using junk-shop Chinese antique furniture with a panda substitute for the cliché tiger-skin rug. The resulting photos were at once hilarious and profound, a portrait of modern ‘types’ in a bizarre and ironic context.
Some of us were lucky enough to have seen these at the Photofusion Gallery in London in 2007 and examples included in Tate Britain exhibition, ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain 1830s to the Present’ in the same year.
Asia House Programme Director Betty Yao MBE announced that she will be taking a six-month sabbatical from her duties to accompany the exhibition as it tours China in 2009
Following the presentation the audience were treated to a private view of the photographs, displayed in an adjacent room.
Grace Lau’s latest book, ‘Picturing the Chinese: Early Western Photographs and Postcards of China’ is published by Joint Publishing Hong Kong and distributed by Long River Press, USA.
Sheila Cornelius |
