This major traveling exhibition provides the first comprehensive, interpretive examination of contemporary photography from China produced since the mid-1990s. Ambitious in scale and experimental in nature, the photographic work included in this groundbreaking project offers a range of highly individual responses to the unprecedented changes in China’s economic, social, and cultural life in the past decade. Featuring 130 works by 60 Chinese artists, many of whom will be exhibiting for the first time in the U.S., Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China is divided into four thematic sections: History and Memory, People and Place, Performing the Self, and Reimagining the Body. The exhibition will foster a new understanding of contemporary Chinese photography and video and provide unusual insights into the dynamics of Chinese culture in the 21st century.

In Chicago, the exhibition will be presented at two venues: the MCA (People and Places and Performing the Self), and the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago (History and Memory and Reimagining the Body). The exhibition is co-curated by two distinguished scholars: Wu Hung, consulting curator at the Smart Museum and professor of Chinese art history at the University of Chicago, and Christopher Phillips, curator at the International Center of Photography, New York. The MCA’s presentation will be coordinated by former Associate Curator Staci Boris.