Les Rencontres d'Arles Rencontres d'Arles: expositions, stages photo / exhibitions, photo workshops.

This exhibition is the third and final phase of a project begun in 2005: an analysis of the faking of photographs in Chinese propaganda as illustrated by a comparison of historical material from the 1950s through the 1970s. After five years spent sorting through the archives of hundreds of photo libraries and collections in China, the artist has come up with an impressive harvest of faked photographs and their original negatives. Through them he offers a clearer understanding of the political intentions of the censors of the time. These ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos are displayed almost clinically, one following the other in a way that points up the enormous task of the censor bent on spotting the odd man out in the image, on identifying the political or artistic detail that will best convey the ‘message’ or on wiping out a historical trace.

‘I began this line of research because I was wondering how to explore things that can’t readily be seen. I was wondering what must go on in somebody else’s mind—the censor’s mind. My project taught me something: that propaganda is far more complex than it appears, that it involves much more than just putting across a political point of view. The censors not only falsified documents, they also complied with the artistic necessities of their time. Unattractive faces became beautiful, short people became tall, narrow eyes were enlarged, scruffy country people melted into the crowd.’

Bérénice Angremy

Exhibition organized in association with Thinking Hands China.

Zhang Dali

Born in 1963 in Harbin. Lives and works in Beijing.

After studying painting and design at the Beijing Central Academy of Art and Design, Zhang Dali travelled to Italy, where he discovered graffiti art. Today recognised as China’s leading graffiti artist, Zhang started painting the walls of demolition sites in Beijing in the early 1990s. From 1995–98, he spraypainted over 2,000 profiles of his bald head on Beijing buildings, alongside the ‘chai’ characters painted by the city authorities to mark buildings scheduled for demolition; the images prompted a debate in the Beijing media in 1998. In early 2000 he addressed the topic of migration, producing a large series of fibreglass sculptures and paintings depicting AK-47s, in tribute to the millions of people who came from all over the world to demolish and rebuild the cities.He has recently continued his work on migrants, incorporating it in a phantasmagorical world inhabited by animals. His recent solo shows include Pervasion at the He Xiangning art museum (Shenzhen) and Second History at the Space SZ Gallery, Beijing. He has exhibited in many countries, notably at the International Center for Photography, New York; the Saatchi Gallery, London; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; MoMA, San Francisco; the CoBrA museum of modern art, Amsterdam; the Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; and the 2006 Gwanju Biennale, South Korea.

EXHIBITIONS