Following the opening of Day After Day: RongRong and the Beijing East Village, join us in the Project Space for a discussion between RongRong and Christopher Phillips, casting light on RongRong's seminal Beijing East Village series and the convulsive time period in which it is situated.
Free and open to the public with pre-registration. To RSVP, click here or email contact@walthercollection.com.
RongRong was born in Fujian Province, China, in 1968. He is a contemporary photographer and the co-founder of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing. Early in his career, RongRong helped found the Beijing East Village, which has attained an almost mythic status in the history of contemporary Chinese experimental art. In this tumbledown village, RongRong and a group of struggling artists such as Zhang Huan, Curse, Duan Yingmei, and Ma Liuming created a series of highly challenging works—mainly performances and photographs—that sent an instant shockwave throughout the community of experimental Chinese artists.
RongRong’s best-known works include the East Village and Ruins series, as well as several subsequent collaborations with his Japanese wife and photographic partner, inri, since 2000: In Fujisan, Liulitun, and Tsumari Story. Their work explores the beauty of the human body in nature and the urban environment, as well as the development of their family. His photographs are in the collections of MoMA, the Getty Museum, the Myriam and Guy Ullens Foundation, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Mori Art Museum, and several distinguished private foundations.
Christopher Phillips is an independent curator and critic. From 2000 to 2016 he worked as a curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. He has organized many exhibitions that explore modernist photography of the early 20th century as well as contemporary Asian photography and media art. These exhibitions include "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China" (2004, co-curated with Wu Hung); "Atta Kim: On-Air" (2006); "Shanghai Kaleidoscope" (2008); "Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan" (with Noriko Fuku, 2008); “Wang Qingsong: When Worlds Collide” (2011); “Han Youngsoo: Photographs of Seoul 1956-63” (2016); and “Life and Dreams: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Media Art” (2018). His books include The New Vision: Photographs from the Ford Motor Company Collection (with Maria Morris Hambourg, 1989), Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940 (1989), Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (with Wu Hung, 2004), and Life and Dreams: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Media Art (with Wu Hung, 2018). He is a board member of Asia Art Archive-America, a member of the editorial board of the Trans-Asia Photography Review, and serves on the international advisory committee of the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing.