Visual Arts

HOUSTON – Every year many North Texans (collectors, dealers, artists) troop to international art fairs in Miami, New York City and Basel, Switzerland, to stay current with the trends. Closer to home, Houston plays host to another event of international scope, the biennial FotoFest, now in its 12th installment.

FotoFest

Wu Jialin's Yibin, Sichuan Province, taken in 1989

It attracts hundreds of photographers, dealers, curators and publishers, and offers the public six weeks of programming that includes lectures, panel discussions, films and exhibitions in more than 100 venues in Houston, Galveston, Clear Lake and The Woodlands.

Attending FotoFest as an out-of-towner is a daunting proposition. You can easily fill a weekend with exhibition viewing and still miss more than half of what is available. A single day will be both exhilarating and frustrating, because as you either head back to the airport or point your car north, you will know that you have barely scratched the surface of what is available.

The FotoFest organization has sponsored 10 curated exhibitions under the general title "Photography from China 1934-2008." During the past decade, there have been many exhibitions of contemporary Chinese photography worldwide, but FotoFest's may be the most wide-ranging. It focuses on momentous changes in Chinese photography and presents monographic exhibitions of some of the shooters who exemplify those transitions.

In the public spaces of the Allen Center, a complex of high-rises downtown, three exhibitions focus on compelling, though often overlooked, genres. In the 1930s, Zhuang Xueben documented the Yi people of western China, a minority so obscure they lived in what was considered "uninhabited land." As an ethnographer, he focused on portraits emphasizing native dress and customs, and the travel journals he published initiated scholarly interest in the area.

Courtesy Zhuang Wenjun

Zhuang Xueben's Tibetan Minority Girl in Jiareng Li County, Sichuan Province, 1934

When war broke out with Japan in the late '30s, Sha Fei began a campaign both to take his own photographs and to train other photojournalists to chronicle the resistance of people in northern China to the Japanese invaders. His work created an important and moving document of the time, but it also established many of the motifs that would be used later, during the Cultural Revolution, to produce the propaganda images that make up the third exhibition at the Allen Center. These photographs of happy workers and cheering crowds are brilliant and chilling images that demonstrate how similar techniques can produce either documents of moral courage or moral bankruptcy.

At the Winter Street Studios, a complex whose public spaces offer more than 10,000 square feet of galleries, FotoFest is presenting three major exhibitions of photographers who have developed, without institutional or commercial support, documentary projects that have grabbed the art world's attention.

Wu Jialin comes from the Yunnan Province of southwest China, and since the 1980s he has assembled a deeply felt and incisive chronicle of changes in the area. This exhibition of close to 100 prints establishes him as a master photographer. He is joined at Winter Street by Lu Nan and Li Lang, two younger photographers whose documentary work follows and expands his.

The remaining Chinese exhibitions fall under the rubric of "conceptual and staged" work and include large-scale, computer-manipulated color imagery. At its Vine Street headquarters, FotoFest is hosting photographers who took part in the four issues of New Photo Magazine that were hand-bound and issued in runs of 30 or 40 copies between 1994 and 1998.

Freed from most of the repressions of the Maoist period, many photographers in the '90s used parody and sexuality to express their new sense of freedom. But the exuberance of much of this work is counterbalanced by melancholy. Liu Zheng creates nude tableaux of scenes from Beijing operas, and Qui Zhijie poses himself and friends in mock versions of heroic Communist-era posters.

Charles Dee Mitchell is a Dallas freelance writer.

Plan your life

FotoFest continues through April 20 in Houston. Information: www.fotofest.org. Maps to all venues are available at FotoFest headquarters, 1113 Vine St., Houston.