Documentary photography forum:
19. January 2011 – 31. March 2011
Liu Heung Shing
China after Mao
“China after Mao” shows China’s rise to become a leading economic power as seen by a contemporary Chinese witness: young photojournalist Liu Heung Shing, who later won the Pulitzer Prize, documented the first signs of modernisation following Mao’s death in 1976, and his images captured the impact of the 1978 economic reform on the everyday lives of people in China. Taken between 1976 and 1983, in 2009 the photographs were exhibited for the first time in Beijing: photography as part of a nation’s collective memory. With the right background information, we can also understand these touching images.
Liu Heung Shing was born in Hong Kong in 1951. Between 1954 to 1960 he lived in Fuzhou in the Chinese province of Fujian, before returning to Hong Kong. From 1971 to 1975 he studied political science at Hunter College at the City University of New York. He completed his photographic training as assistant to Gjon Mili at Life magazine. In 1976 he returned to China to take photographs for Time Magazine. In 1981 he moved to Associated Press as a press photographer in Beijing, and between 1984 and 1994 worked for AP in the United States, India, South Korea and the former Soviet Union. In 1992, he and his colleagues at the AP bureau in Moscow received the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the decline of the Soviet Union. Liu, who lives in Beijing, has published a number of books, including the illustrated volume “China, Portrait of a Country” (Taschen, 2008), and, with Karen Smith, “Shanghai: a History in Photographs 1842 to Today” (Shi Tu/Penguin 2010).
Introduction Karen Smith ENEinführung Karen Smith DE
