Yang Yongliang was born in 1980 in Shanghai and lives between this city and New York.

Trained in calligraphy and traditional ink painting at an early age, Yang Yongliang graduated from China Academy of Art in Shanghai in visual communication. Yang set out to link classical and contemporary art from the beginning of his career.

He combines photography and new media techniques to build seemingly natural landscapes, reminiscent of traditional Shanshui painting (“mountain and water” landscapes), which in reality describe the effects of urban development in China.

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Sui Taca was born in 1984 in Qingdao and lives between this city and New York. He studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing) and the Rochester Institute of Technology (United States).

In his twenties, Sui Taca spent a whole year studying the Book of Odes (Shijing), the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry.

Sui’s works follow the elliptical nature of the poems: his images seem suspended in a strange expectation. The Odes series was acquired and exhibited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2014. His latest series, Steles, Revealed and Grotto Heavens, also revisit Chinese civilization.

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Luo Dan was born in 1968 in Chongqing and lives in Chengdu. Luo Dan is a renowned portrait and documentary photographer. He graduated from the Sichuan Fine Art Academy. After working as a press photographer for years, he resigned and embarked on a Jeep, driving across China and photographing the country from East to West, from Shanghai to Lhasa, along Route 318, using a medium format camera (China Route 318, 2006). In 2008, he hit the road once again, this time driving from North to South (North and South series).

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Michael Cherney was born in 1969 in New York and lives in Beijing. Michael Cherney, also known by the Chinese name of Qiu Mai (“Autumn wheat”), has lived in Beijing since 1991. A self-taught photographer and calligrapher, his work is part of the Chinese aesthetic tradition.

His photographs are the first to enter the collection of the Asian art department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and are part of the collections of numerous museums such as the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, Cleveland Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, Harvard University Art Museum…

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Edward Burtynsky was born in 1955 in St. Catharines (Canada) and lives in Toronto. He is an internationally recognized photographer who, for over thirty-five years, has devoted himself to depicting industrial landscapes and the transformations of nature by humans around the world.

His explorations of the human-altered landscape took him to China in the 2000s, where he created several photographic series highlighting the human and environmental consequences of modernization.

His large format photos combine a documentary and creative approach, transforming landscapes into places of paradox where calm and uncertainty create a sense of the sublime. Without condemning or glorifying the industry, his images allow the public to understand the origin of the consumer goods that we use daily and the scale of the landscape transformations born of our pursuit of progress — “[looking] at the industrial landscape as a way of defining who we are and our relationship to the planet. “

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Zhuang Hui was born in 1963 in Yumen, Gansu province and lives in Beijing. He is a conceptual artist who mainly expresses himself through performance, photography and installation. He was raised by a father who was an itinerant studio photographer in Gansu. A selftaught man, he learned oil painting from his neighbour after high school, besides his job as a factory worker. Zhuang Hui began to frequent avant-garde circles in the early 1990s, at the time when he created his first (highly political) performances.

He became known in the late 1990s thanks to his long horizontal portraits of groups of workers, students and citizens. Highly recognized in China, Zhuang Hui has also participated in group exhibitions at the Yuz Art Museum (Jakarta), Smart Museum of Art (Chicago), Pinacoteca Nazionale (Bologna), and the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art. Most of his works, although they take a variety of forms and media, stage interventions in real places and events and question the role of the individual in society.

Chen reveals the brutal realism but also the poetic grace of a new China in the making. Her uniquely staged performances explore the feelings and capacity to adapt of human beings living in a society in upheaval, as well as the conflict between traditional and contemporary culture. Are these transformations synonymous with opportunity or loss? This is one of the questions raised by Chen.

She expresses herself through performance, dance, installation, photography, video and sculpture. Whichever medium she uses, her works take place in the post-industrial landscapes of Sichuan, and take their source in her own story – that of a Chinese woman whose home city was destroyed by the Three Gorges Dam project.

The idea of “home” is at the heart of his work. Originally from the Three Gorges region, Mu established in Chongqing. In Going Home (2004-today), he documents the radical transformations endured by the area’s inhabitants on his trips back home. In Ash (2009-2017), again shot in the Three Gorges, he observes nature and the traces left by time and history. For Behind the Wall (2013-2018), he followed the Great Wall for tens of thousands of kilometres and visited villages in the North, portraying his native country through its most powerful symbol.

In 2019, Mu Ge initiated the Bow Wave educational project with photographers Feng Li and Zhang Kechun.

Mu Ge on Photography of China
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Liu Ke was born in 1977 in Chengdu and lives in Chengdu. He works as a duo with his partner, Huang Huang. In 2019, they won the Three Shadows Photography Award, one of China’s most prestigious photographic awards, for their Mirror series.

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Jia Zhangke creates films rooted in the reality of contemporary China, playing with the border between fiction and documentary. Trained at the Beijing Film Academy, he belongs to the sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers called “underground”.

If his camera is always close to the characters, space is also a full-fledged character in his films: the city (The Pickpocket, Unknown pleasures, I Wish I Knew), the Three Gorges dam (Dong, Still Life), or a world recreated in miniature (The World). In 2013, A Touch of Sin earned him the award for Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.

For the Coastline series(2009-2013), Zhang Xiao explored the Chinese seaboard. His series met public and critical recognition both in China and abroad, and won Zhang Xiao numerous awards: Hou Dengke Documentary Photography Award (2009), Bourse du Talent (2010) and HSBC Prize for Photography (2011).

He addresses the human and social consequences of Chinese modernity while combining a documentary approach with an aesthetic research.

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Chen Ronghui began his career as a photographer in 2011 after studying journalism. His work focuses on the role of the individual and environmental issues in China. In Petrochemical China (2013) and Christmas Factory (2015), he explores the consequences of urbanization and industrialization in the Yangzi Delta and the Zhejiang region.

In Freezing Land (2016-2019), he creates landscapes and portraits of the youth in Dongbei, China’s ‘rust belt’. He has received several awards such as the World Press Photo Award, Three Shadows Photography Award, Hou Dengke Documentary Photography Award. He has been nominated for the Prix Pictet and the C / O Berlin Talent Award. He is currently studying at Yale University in the United States.

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Zhang Kechun captures the landscapes of contemporary China. He became known through his series The Yellow River, produced between 2010 and 2015. He is the winner of the National Geographic Picks Global Prize (2008) and the Rencontres d’Arles Disocvery Award (2014).

He has participated in numerous exhibitions in China (CAFAM, Beijing Photo Biennale) and abroad (Photoquai, Rencontres d’Arles). His works are included in the collections of institutions such as the German National Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Central Academy of Fine Arts of China, the Williams Museum and the Schneider Foundation.

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