Changing face of China on display at City Arts Centre

THE CLOSEST most of us get to Chinese culture is the local takeaway or the new year firecrackers and dragons in Britain's Chinatowns. But, of course, there's much, much more to China than that. It's a huge land and it's changing fast, with a flight from the countryside to the already swollen cities, rapid industrialisation and a new emphasis on tradional Confucian values and ways of thought after the upheavals of the last few decades.

China is forging new economic ties all over the world, more and more goods we buy are made in China, it's hosting the Olympics and opening up a little to the outside world, even in times of tragedy like the recent earthquake.

Yet our image of this eastern giant is still hazy.

An exhibition this summer called China: A Photographic Portrait should help visitors focus more clearly.

It documents the changing face of China over the last 50 years, as seen by 250 Chinese photographers. Taken between 1951 and 2003, the photographs are divided into four distinct themes - existence, relationships, desire and time - to portray the impact radical social upheaval has had on the individual in recent generations.

The exhibition of 600 images, selected from more than 100,000 works by over 1,000 photographers, comes from the Guangdong Museum of Art, in Guangzhou, and has been on tour in Europe. Its only venue in the UK is in Edinburgh.

It is said to be the first time a Chinese museum has taken so much effort to collect photography as a fine art to be preserved and researched and it has been brought to the capital by the Confucius Institute for Scotland in the University of Edinburgh.

Natascha Gentz, director of the Confucius Institute, has said: "The broad range of authentic images of China - revealed for the first and, possibly, only time in the UK - reflects and reinforces our institute's aim of promoting a greater understanding of the diversity and complexity of this huge, rapidly-evolving country."

DENIS INCH
denis@whooshbooks.com

China: A Photographic Portrait, City Art Centre, Market Street, Edinburgh, July 5 - September 14.