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Zeng Yi
Zeng Yi was born in 1949 in the Jinan in Eastern China and now plays a leading role in the photographic community, as an artist, educator and advocate for the medium. His list of titles and achievements includes that of curator, professor and research supervisor at Shandong College of Art and Design, member of the curatorial committee of the China Photographers Association and President of the Eastern International Photographic Art Association.
For the past twenty years, he has successfully planned and organized the National Youth Photography Festival in the International Year of Peace, Chinese Confucius Culture Photography Exhibition, First National Top Ten Young Photo-graphers Award and many other festivals and events. In 2013, he was selected by the Chinese Minister of Culture as planning director of the Beijing International Photography Week. He is will also take the lead role in conducting Photo Beijing later this year.
The United States, Germany, Italy, France, South Korea, Taiwan and Cyprus are among the many countries that have exhibited his work. Zeng has also been instrumental in bringing legendary international photographers to China through his writings and curatorial efforts.
The work of Zeng Yi is featured in this exhibition.
(Select the image to view the exhibition page)
Chinese Village Life
The work of Zeng Yi is featured in these Theme Collections.
(Select the image to view the theme page)
Asia
Portraiture – Male
Portraiture – Female
WABE Featured Master Photographer: Zeng Yi
WABE’s Kate Sweeney interviews Bing Zeng
The exhibition entitled, The People’s China ~ Village Life, features the work of Zeng Yi, it offers an emotional insight into the everyday life and culture of millions of people in non-urban China. This view of Chinese life ties directly to work done by The Carter Center in China, supporting village elections and the democratization process.
Zeng Yi is curator and professor at Shandong College of Art and Design and one of the most recognized arts leaders in China. The Master Photographer has been recognized with numerous awards. His photography has been exhibited throughout the globe.
Zeng Yi - The Love of Father and Daughter
Private Enterprise in Communist China
Zeng Yi’s iconic 1982 image, The Love of Father and Daughter, depicts a tender moment between a man and his young daughter as he weaves baskets in the Shandong province of China. The girl and her dog snuggle against her father as he constructs a basket with reeds. Finished baskets line the background in a pleasing pattern of repetition that forms a kind of wall sheltering this happy trio from the rest of the world. A teapot and thermos wait on the left side of the frame, making the workplace seem even more domestic.READ ENTIRE ARTICLE
By choosing to focus tightly on the interchange between the three characters and eliminating the horizon and sky, Zeng creates a cozy, private world. The photographer seems to imply that at this moment, the family has all they need.
© Zeng Yi – The Love of Father & Daughter, 1982
Changes in Chinese government policy were beginning to affect timeless pursuits, such as the creation and sale of local crafts. Under Communist rule, private business had long been outlawed, but beginning with Richard Nixon’s historic visit to china in 1972, the country began to slowly open to the outside world. President Jimmy Carter granted China formal diplomatic recognition on January 1, 1979.
In 1978, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping led governmental reforms, which allowed for private enterprise and foreign corporations to begin operating in China. Before these important reforms, private business activity was considered to be the root of evil behavior—the so called “Capitalist tail”—which should be cut down by “revolutionary thought,” according to scholar Yingqui Liu, writing in her thesis, Development of Private Entrepreneurship in China.
Zeng Yi was aware of this political shift, when he made the photograph. In a recent lecture at The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, he spoke of the change this picture represents. “In 1980s most peasants in the rural area began to benefit from the nation’s economic reforms. Peasants were free to sell their products freely in the market. This activity had been forbidden for many years and punishable before.”
The Love of Father and Daughter won a UNESCO Asian culture award in 1985, which generated some economic development for the region, as tourists and photographers came to the area, Zeng said.
More than 50 photographs by Zeng Yi were were exhibited from October 1, 2015 thru January 17, 2016 at the Carter Library and Museum. The People’s China: Village Life by Master Photographer Zeng Yi took viewers on a journey into the villages of China for a personal look at the people and how they live. Zeng Yi has spent a lifetime telling the story of the common people of China through his photography.
Now on view at Lumière is thoughtfully curated selection of these Chinese Village Life images
Additional information about Yi’s work, can be found on his Artist Page.
Zeng Yi - Our Classroom
Universal Education: Key to China’s Economic Success
Zeng Yi’s classic photograph, Our Classroom, 1982, shows several rows of small Chinese children lined up at narrow primitive tables listening to a teacher who is off camera. A few students have stone tablets and pencils; others have nothing to write with. Holes can be seen in the shoes of some of the children. Most of the children are paying attention, but some are obviously tired and struggling to stay alert in the dimly lit room.
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© Zeng Yi – Our Classroom, 1982
The photograph could just have easily have been taken in 1882, as evidenced by the timelessness of their clothing and utensils, as well as the impoverished conditions.
Bing Zeng, Yi’s daughter, who often works as her father’s interpreter, described the image last month during an interview on Atlanta’s public radio station, WABE. “In the early 80s, China had just opened up, and in order to get out of poverty the only way, is to get universal education in every corner of China, not just in the cities. In this village, the families are still living in a relatively poor situation.” She noted that one child had to bring his younger sibling to class because the parents were working in the fields. Still she said, “They are very eager to learn.”
Another by product of the opening of China to outsiders in the 1970s has been the Chinese government’s renewed effort to educate its people. Competing in the global economy requires an educated populace. Though the children shown in Zeng Yi’s 1982 photograph had few resources, according to remarks made by the photographer at a recent Carter Center event, these students went on to receive a quality education.
“This situation was typical of the rural education of China in the 1970s. This paved the way for the prosperity and achievement we witness in China today. Those kids have become very talented and artists, scientist and business people in China, some are engineers or teachers. Their descendants are able to attend Kindergarten, high school and colleges. Some of them are even studying abroad.”
These children and their parents were able to take their place in the twenty first century marketplace because of the careful maneuverings of Deng Xiaoping, who emerged from two periods of exile following Mao Zedong’s death to lead China towards modernization, according to Henry Kissinger’s 2011 book, On China.
Deng skillfully maneuvered his way through the Chinese Communist Party leadership and was able through carefully worded statements, to suggest that China must embark on an economic revitalization program that would rival the Japanese.
Deng recognized that science and technology, which would require vast improvements in the country’s education system, would partly drive this new economy, as would the easing of restrictions on private and individual business endeavors.
“Mao had governed by counting on the endurance of the Chinese people to sustain the suffering his personal visions would impose on them. Deng governed by liberating the creativeness of the Chinese people to bring about their own vision of the future,” wrote Kissinger.
President Jimmy Carter granted China formal diplomatic recognition on January 1, 1979. This recognition was a formal acknowledgment that China was entering the world stage.
More than 50 photographs by Zeng Yi were were exhibited from October 1, 2015 thru January 17, 2016 at the Carter Library and Museum. The People’s China: Village Life by Master Photographer Zeng Yi took viewers on a journey into the villages of China for a personal look at the people and how they live. Zeng Yi has spent a lifetime telling the story of the common people of China through his photography.
Now on view at Lumière is thoughtfully curated selection of these Chinese Village Life images
Additional information about Yi’s work, can be found on his Artist Page.
Zeng Yi "Connects" With Carter Center Efforts
Master Chinese photographer Zeng Yi’s, The People’s China, an in-depth look at rural life in his country has a thematic link to the Carter Center’s 10-year efforts to foster democracy around the globe, said curator Sylvia Mansour Naguib, of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.
Though Zeng’s project grew out of his own interests, and he worked independently of the Carter Center, Ms. Naguib said in a recent interview that she was drawn to his sensitive depiction of the villagers and their surroundings when Zeng’s work was brought to her attention.
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Priceless Wellness, Shandong Province 2009
“Zeng Yi’s work has a quiet reverence about it. He finds a way to invite us in to the image and to come face to face with each subject’s dignity. Even though he is documenting a way of life and people’s surroundings, he provides us a way to sense the atmosphere whether it is a couple smiling about memories, children playing in the street, a woman frustrated at missing her bus, or a group of village sweethearts now in their seventies talking together.”
Woman Who Missed The Bus, 1984
By 1992, The Carter Center and Global 2000 had completed two projects – training 300 special education teachers and administrators and fostering considerable growth in Chinese prothesis production.
In a quote from a 2013 speech by President Carter to the U.S.-China Relations Forum in Atlanta, President Carter says, “Being a keen observer of China and invited by the Chinese government to observe village elections since the 1990s, my staff and I believe in what Deng Xiaoping once said that all reforms will eventually lead to political reform. We also are convinced it is the decision of the Chinese people and their leaders when and how to expand and deepen political reform.”
Kids From Old Street, Guangxi, 2006
In that same speech, President Carter remembers, “I had been in China as a young naval officer, and I had fallen in love with the country and with its people.”
Because this exhibition really looks at the people of China in more traditional settings, it seemed to capture a China that we don’t see as much. The current media shows us more about the changes, the modernization, the big cities, the economic engine that is China today.
These classic images capture a life that is quickly disappearing. More information can be found on Zeng Yi’s artist page.
Meet Zeng Yi
Like a door that swings rapidly open and shut, the world has caught infrequent and fleeting glimpses of the daily lives of the Chinese people. Fortunately, renowned photographer Zeng Yi has been documenting village life, among other subjects, in the world’s most populous nation, for decades. Now more than 50 of those images will be on display in The People’s China: Village Life by Master Photographer Zeng Yi at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum from Thursday, October 1, 2015 until January 27, 2016.READ ENTIRE ARTICLE
Our Classroom, 1982, by Zeng Yi
These images provide context for the still evolving country envisioned by Mao’s word in 1949, and they also serve as emblems of China’s rural past as it converges with contemporary urban life in the world’s second largest economy.
While Zeng’s primary motivation is to record the lives of ordinary people, he is equally fascinated by the ability of photography to change history. “For me, the task of a photographer is to capture events on film and record things that happen in the present time, as these events may end up leaving an indelible mark on history. For this reason, every photographer shoulders a certain amount of responsibility. This responsibility is something that I personally take very seriously,” Zeng said before an audience while exhibiting his work in Brussels.
Election Meeting at Village, 2007
“I am most interested in the lives of the masses — of the ordinary people . . . These photographs show what the daily life of people was like back then. They are also testimony of the period of time when China was just beginning to open up to the outside world, which is now regarded as a significant point in history. These pictures are a souvenir of this period of time… of this part of history,” Zeng is quoted as saying in GB Times, a global network that explores China from an international perspective.
Zeng Yi was born in 1949 in the Jinan in Eastern China and now plays a leading role in the photographic community, as an artist, educator and advocate for the medium. His list of titles and achievements includes that of curator, professor and research supervisor at Shandong College of Art and Design, member of the curatorial committee of the China Photographers Association and President of the Eastern International Photographic Art Association.
Playing the So-na, 1987
For the past twenty years, he has successfully planned and organized the National Youth Photography Festival in the International Year of Peace, Chinese Confucius Culture Photography Exhibition, First National Top Ten Young Photo-graphers Award and many other festivals and events. In 2013, he was selected by the Chinese Minister of Culture as planning director of the Beijing International Photography Week. He is will also take the lead role in conducting Photo Beijing later this year.
The United States, Germany, Italy, France, South Korea, Taiwan and Cyprus are among the many countries that have exhibited his work. Zeng has also been instrumental in bringing legendary international photographers to China through his writings and curatorial efforts.
