First Exhibition of Nude Photos Reveals a Lot About China

Risque business has always been risky business in China, where the ruling Communist Party has long championed radical economic ideals but puritanical morals.

So it is that a traveling art show here is breaking taboos because of its devotion to a single subject: the naked human form.

And the government has hardly blinked.

Since its debut two months ago, the country’s first exhibition of nude photographs has drawn thousands of visitors eager for a glimpse of art history in the making and, no doubt, a little skin.

Mapplethorpe it’s not: None of the 117 photographs could be classified as particularly seamy or steamy, at least by Western standards.

But in China, the show is avant-garde enough to have compelled state media to note that society--now exposed to more new ideas and information than ever--has somehow managed to stay intact despite the display of provocative pictures.

“Far from being shocked, Chinese audiences have calmly received the country’s first nude photo show,” the official New China News Agency reported, evidently having feared the possibility of mass turmoil.

Legal Issues Analyzed

The pioneering exhibition is the work of a Chinese photographer who spent a year and a half putting the show together, including considerable time used trying to anticipate any legal and political hassles it might cause. A team of lawyers helped the photographer, She Shan, close loopholes and avoid pitfalls that might have doomed his project before he began.

That his efforts have been well received thus far illustrates the small ways in which this nation is gradually opening up and its citizenry is tugging at constraints that bound it in the not-too-distant past.

Just a dozen years ago, such a show could easily have earned organizers official criticism and punishment--if anyone even dared mount an exhibitionist exhibition in the first place. Throughout its 52-year reign, art and literature have remained strong bastions of control by the government, which is intent on propping up its authority and rooting out pernicious “Western bourgeois” thought.

But rules and enforcement have loosened somewhat, the official stranglehold on the arts weakened by China’s increasing embrace of global media, the Internet and foreign ideas.

Of the many thousands of visitors to the photo exhibition so far--granted, a self-selecting crowd--virtually none has raised any objections.

“China’s opening up and reform have gradually put it in step with the rest of the world. Its art should get in step too,” said Xu Jianmin, 70, a bespectacled retiree who dabbles in photography himself. “The human body is an object of beauty. . . . In other countries, this is an ordinary thing.”

Two decades ago, zealous customs officers confiscated a Japanese swimsuit calendar from Xu because they deemed it obscene. “Now it’s not the same,” he said, pausing before a blown-up photo of a naked woman sunning herself on the beach.

Official prudishness, however, is still common. Traditional attitudes prevail at Chinese arts institutions, a conservatism that hit She full force when he first broached the idea of a nude photo exhibition. Friends and co-workers told him to reconsider. His bosses at the Fujian Art Gallery in southern China, where he heads the photo division, advised him to abandon the project.

“When I started out, I was very nervous at taking such a big risk,” She said. “Nude photography in China is not forbidden, but it’s a sensitive area that can cause you a lot of trouble.”

The last time something similar was attempted, in 1988, controversy dogged an exhibition of relatively chaste nude oil paintings in Beijing. Rumors swirled later that Chinese officials even singled out the exhibition as a sign of the Western decadence that prompted students to march for democracy in 1989, which ended in the Tiananmen Square massacre that year.

This time She worried that the immediacy and realism of photography might cause just as much, if not more, trouble with the government.

To prevent it, he immersed himself in research to find out what rules governed depictions of naked bodies--and discovered only vagueness. Although pornography is banned in China, it was unclear exactly what constituted pornography, a debate that still crops up in the U.S.

“There was no clear definition about nudity,” he said. “If something is clearly titillating, then that’s pornographic. But it’s tough to determine.”

In the end, She and his panel of judges wound up applying a standard familiar to Americans: They might not be able to define obscenity, but they knew it when they saw it.

“If you juxtaposed pornography with the artistic shots, it was obvious which things were of artistic value,” he said.

She received 5,000 submissions from across China from November 1999 to last July. A few reached him only after some difficulty. An elderly photographer from Guizhou province was beaten up by outraged relatives of the model who posed for him; he sent in several offerings anyway. In another case, postal workers confiscated a packet addressed to She because the writing on the envelope said what was inside.

The entries were whittled down to the 117 finalists in the show. First prize--worth 50,000 yuan (about $6,050), a large sum in China--went to a shot of a woman standing outdoors before a wind-swept cliff, her face demurely turned away from the camera and her hands crossed strategically in front of her.

Although She hails from Fujian province, he chose to kick off the show in Guangzhou, a boomtown near Hong Kong famous for its go-go nature after 20 years of breakneck development. The New China News Agency described Guangzhou residents as nonchalant about nudity, with local studios offering services for people who want naked portraits taken of themselves.

At 30 yuan (about $3.60) a pop, tickets were expensive by Chinese standards.

But word of mouth spread quickly until the exhibition drew as many as 1,000 visitors a day--far more than She had expected. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the visitors have been men.

She hadn’t planned on taking the show on the road, but invitations came pouring in from other cities. From Guangzhou the exhibition hopped over to nearby Hainan Island, then came to Hangzhou, a lakeside resort town that is one of China’s most popular tourist destinations.

Large crowds have turned out at every location, and an initial print run of 5,000 books containing the photos on display has nearly sold out. The show is set to appear in Shanghai and provincial capitals around the country.

Local officials have proved surprisingly supportive, with few voices sounding any protest.

The relatively smooth path his show has taken stands in stark contrast to the 1988 oil painting exhibition in Beijing.

That show too reeled in thousands of visitors--up to 11,000 a day, official media reported at the time.

Problems for Paintings

But on the day after it opened, a handful of models in the paintings sued for invasion of privacy and image piracy. Some students protested outside the gallery over the cost of tickets. Published essays debated the need for breaking boundaries in the world of art and creative endeavor.

Soon the exhibition became emblematic of larger social questions.

“I was very naive,” said the exhibition’s organizer, Ge Pengren, now a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. “I focused only on the paintings themselves. I didn’t think it would arouse so many social problems.”

Within weeks of the show’s close in Shanghai, the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred. China’s flowering arts scene lurched violently toward Communist orthodoxy, and the reformist culture minister was forced to step down.

Twelve years later, Ge, 60, is encouraged by the success of the nude photo exhibition.

“As far as I know, nude photographs sprang up in Western societies in the 1930s and reached their peak in the ‘50s. China is 50 years behind” but finally catching up, he said.

Here in Hangzhou, Shi Yingying enjoyed the show, even though she was one of only a handful of women out of more than a hundred visitors on a recent afternoon. Shi, 26, had no problem with the overwhelmingly male crowd, or the fact that all but a few of the 117 photos were of women.

“I’m very proud. The female body is just so beautiful,” said Shi, a doctor.

“The photographs are very artistic,” she added, as she strolled around the exhibition hall with her girlfriend Li Ying. “We can easily accept it. Society is open now.”