Like so much else in recent China, the great boom in Chinese contemporary art has happened too fast for complete analysis. There are fixed points, however, on the way to understanding. One of them is that in China, as everywhere else, photo-graphy has been a central element of contemporary art.

Political expressions that could not have been made in words were made visible in photography. The harshly suppressed mass mourning for Premier Zhou Enlai (he died in 1976), which became known as the April Fifth Movement, was given its main expression through photography. It became the first time since Mao that anything identifiable as political opposition had made itself felt.

That in turn spawned the fundamental series of exhibitions of the early 1980s, Nature, Society and Man. These, while not photographically very radical (nor even particularly daring) by western standards, were a quantum leap in personal photography in China.