“Day After Day RongRong and the Beijing East Village” Exhibition

The Walther Collection Project Space

[Image: RongRong "1994 No. 20 (Zhang Huan, "12 Square Meters")" (1994) Courtesy the artist and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing.]

This event has ended.

The Walther Collection, with Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing presents Day After Day: RongRong and the Beijing East Village. The exhibition features RongRong’s seminal photographs from 1993–1998, together with excerpts from the artist’s diary, portraying the Beijing East Village—an artistic community poignantly described as “a meteor” in the history of contemporary Chinese art.

In his emotive black and white photographs, RongRong captured the quotidian yet eruptive life of the short-lived Beijing East Village, as many of his fellow artists pushed their bodies to the brink to create radical and subversive performances. Both as a principal photographer and essential collaborator, RongRong faithfully documented what remain some of the most powerful and important performance works of Chinese contemporary art, by artists such as Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Ai Weiwei. Interwoven throughout the exhibition, RongRong’s contemporaneous writings from the period provide insights into the performances as they were being conceptualized and carried out, and offer additional reflections both mundane and profound: adjusting to a new life in Beijing, deep anxiety about police backlash, and wavering faith in what photography can achieve in turbulent times.

Day After Day coincides with the planned summer publication of RongRong’s Diary: Beijing East Village by The Walther Collection and Steidl.