Across the West of China: Collection of Zhuang Xueben’s Photography from Guangdong Museum of Art

广东美术馆新馆5楼19号厅

2024-12-14—— 2025-05-31

Date: December 14th, 2024 to May 31st, 2025

Venue: Hall 19, 5/F,

Guangdong Museum of Art (BAIETAN)

Organizer：Guangdong Museum of Art

Zhuang Xueben (1909-1984) was a native of Shanghai. He worked as a special photographer for the Shanghai pictorials The Young Companion (《良友》), Zhonghua（《中华》）, and Shun Pao ( 《申报》; Shen Bao）. He was an outstanding pioneer of modern Chinese visual anthropology and an excellent photographic artist, and his photographs’ historical significance and cultural quality are undoubtedly something to be truly proud of in the history of Chinese photography. During the period of 1934-1942, Zhuang set off for multiple field trips to ethnic minorities’ habitation in Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu and Qinghai province, and took more than ten thousand photographs and wrote nearly a million words of research reports, travelogues and diaries, leaving us a credible visual archive and survey for the history of China's ethnic minorities.

In 2009, thanks to his son, Mr. Zhuang Wenjun's generous donation, the Guangdong Museum of Art made an integrate collection of Zhuang Xueben's photographic works during the 1930s and 1940s, totaling more than 250 pieces. In this exhibition, more than 70 of pictures from this collection are carefully selected, guiding us to enter the narrative of the primitive lands where the ancient energy of life flows, to feel his concern for nature, life and human dignity, and to gain insights into the light of humanity that shines in the specific time and space.