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M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation, © An Ge
An Ge 安哥
In Kaiping County of Guangdong 廣東開平
1981
In this black-and-white photograph, a large heap of straw nearly fills a corner formed by two walls. At left, light enters through a window with grills. At right, a row of portraits of five men, printed on the wall, are partially covered by the straw. The profile portraits depict Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Portraits like these are typical of propaganda art produced in China during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and they present Mao as the continuing leader of Marxism. The photograph shows traces of this era, and the straw, obscuring the portraits, suggests that the reverence these portraits once commanded has receded. A documentary photographer, An Ge was struck by the atmosphere of change he encountered in Guangdong Province. He developed a series of photographs that were eventually published under the theme of living in the age of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who brought extensive economic reforms to China beginning in the late 1970s. The series captures a disappearing era in Guangdong, and photographs showing fashion, cinema, and leisure and commercial activities reveal China’s transformation during the period.
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