Mark Henley

Examining with a certain irony the basic questions confronted by the Chinese during their last great – capitalist – revolution. Drawing on 18 years of journeys through China, and concerned with the lives of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary period of transformation – of four generations of change in a single generation, the book, edited and printed in Beijing has been allowed a limited distribution within China itself, and is now available worldwide.

The China [sur]real exhibition is currently coming to the end of year long tour through China, returnng to Beijing for a second showing in January 2008. Having shown in the Dashanzi art district of Beijing it has visited Guangzhou, Macau, Chengdu, Xian, Wuhan, Nanjing, Shanghai, supported by the Swiss Embassy in China and the Alliance Française. The show was recently banned in Jinan and Dalian, a possible sign of increasingly tight restrictions in the build up to the 2008 Olympic Games.

The exhibition was first shown at the Media Nord-Sud festival in Geneva at the end of 2005, and was shown in projection at Perpignan Visa pour l’image festival in 2006.

China [sur]real Contects:

This project started eighteen years ago, when I stepped off a night boat from Hong Kong into a grey January morning in Guangzhou in 1989, into a city, and a country very different from what they are now. I had a head full of words, from studying literature, and a camera in my hand that I was still learning to use. What I encountered then however made such a strong impression, being so very different from what I had expected from my own preconceived ideas and the visual references that I had from books or magazines, that I quickly became determined to document the unexpected reality that I discovered, to try and provide a true record of what was passing around me. I stayed six weeks that time, and returned four months later for six weeks again, with the Chinese world beginning to unfurl before me. It was from these experiences that I chose to become a photographer, and although I have now worked in more than fifty countries, it is to China that I have repeatedly returned over the years.

Fairly quickly I understood that I was attempting to document a people and a place that was in the middle of a massive and overwhelming transition. It is easy to look back now, surrounded by skyscrapers almost as high as the latest economic figures and think of it all as inevitable, but no other society on earth has undergone such rapid peacetime change in such a short period of time. In all of this, what I have always found incredible is the resilience of Chinese people when confronted by such speed of change, from iron rice bowls to a mass consumer culture, from uniform blue suits to electric-pink hairstyles, from old certainties to the opportunities and potential insecurities of this new Chinese world changing and developing still as I write this.

‘You are center’ shouts out from a billboard in one photograph taken on the street in Shenzhen, with a man, small in perspective, looking up at this new real-estate advertising slogan as he passes by. On one level it sums up for me the challenge that every Chinese person has had to face – you are center, whether you want to be or not – you must embrace change or live with the consequences. The old values no longer apply, the old structures have gone – so now its up to you to embrace the opportunities and the challenges of this new Chinese world. Such has clearly been the case for the hundreds of millions of migrants that seek work in the cities, but I think it is what everyone in China confronts in their daily life as society changes and mutates around them – who to be, where to be, how to be. A child born the same day I first arrived would now, at eighteen, have a range of choices and possibilities, as well as face a set of challenges, unimaginable when I first stepped off that boat. Everyone in fact has had to go ‘Down Ocean’ as the saying goes. I have always been amazed at the ability of Chinese people not only to keep their heads above the water, but also to swim, and even to surf on this ocean’s waves. Western observers of the same photograph however generally immediately jump to an interpretation of it in terms of China and the West – as China, with its economic growth, becomes much more central to global attention. Now the world is watching China, and foreign writers, commentators and photographers competing to explain China, with each latest arrival noisier than the last.

However, despite all this increased coverage and interpretation, I still feel that the way China is represented in the west it remains in some ways as far from daily reality on the ground as it was when I first came to China. It is from a sense of frustration at this, and a growing sense of obligation, that China [sur]real first evolved. The west tends to see China as a strange mix of ancient cultural relics and an abstract mass of either factory workers or a billion potential consumers of western goods – as individuals they tend to be considered enigmatic and unreadable except at the fringes – the excluded and the damaged which photo-journalism traditionally tends to concentrate on. For me however, the central Chinese story, my narrative of the last years in China is of the transformation of millions of ordinary lives – of ordinary people, but living through what are simply extraordinary times, of four generations of change thrown up in a single generation. My work is laced with a certain amount of irony and humour – in part perhaps drawn from my British roots, but more so from the extraordinary circumstances of China’s rapid transformations, and with Chinese responses to these same circumstances – often finding humour in difficult or the most unlikely situations.

I have been lucky to have been able to photograph in China with few obligations – although my work appears in publications round the world, I rarely work with journalists – I have traveled more often alone or with academics doing their research, whether into rural folk memories of old gods, or the transformation of urban economies. In part, because of this, I have had more space to photograph what I see, rather than what is expected or commissioned. Just as many of the people and situations I have photographed in China are in a process of becoming, this is also an ongoing project.

The book was produced, edited and printed in Beijing, complicating further my relationship with China – in a sense passing from being an observer, to being a producer working with Chinese people to make a product. When the last of the pages of the book rolled off the presses in Beijing, and the printers – who usually spend their time examining the colours and the paper and inks rather than the contents of what they print – gathered round to ask me to photograph their lives along with the lives captured in the book, it made me realize that rather being at the completion of something, it was actually another step on a longer journey. I created China [sur]real in response to circumstances, to western perceptions, but to have my work shown in China, and to find a Chinese audience – an audience that even a few years ago, I never imagined that I could have – is as humbling as it is energizing, bringing with it all sorts of new observations, surprises and obligations. It’s also a great pleasure, and sometimes, not a little [sur]real.

Mark Henley, London – Zurich April 2007

Biographic info:
Mark Henley is a British-born documentary photographer with many years spent in Asia, concentrating on the economic and social changes that have been sweeping through the continent and beyond. Although his body of work spans more than fifty countries, his central concern is with China, to which he has returned repeatedly since 1989. Choosing to work independently, he is published regularly worldwide in major newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as in the publications of many international organisations, from Newsweek, Time and the Economist, to the World Bank, the United Nations, and Greenpeace. Having previously lived in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Beijing, he is now based in Zurich and Geneva.