Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China / Emeka Ogboh: The Song of the Germans – Bulletins

On February 27, 2026, the Kemper Art Museum at WashU will open two thought-provoking exhibitions that critically study the results of our interconnected international world. 

Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China represents a large cross part of the so-called new conceptual images that flourished there within the a long time following 1989—a 12 months marked by the federal government suppression of scholars protesting social injustices and antidemocratic actions on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. On view for the primary time on the Kemper Art Museum, these shiny pictures—usually past human scale—represent a major latest addition to the establishment’s holdings of modern Chinese artwork donated by editor, writer, and artwork collector Larry Warsh.  

The exhibition is split into three interrelated thematic sections which collectively discover how artists used efficiency and distinct photographic and aesthetic strategies to seize, freeze, and criticize the brand new sociopolitical, financial, and cultural setting of China publish 1989.   

The first part, The Presence of the Past, visualizes artists’ usually ambiguous efforts to keep in mind China’s distinctive cultural heritage amid speedy erasures of the nation’s histories and the rise of a globalized, ultramodern constructed setting. Artists together with Hai Bo, Zhang Dali, and Wang Jinsong engaged with images’s conceptual potential to file adjustments within the lived experiences of people and households, imaginatively joining previous and current—Hai Bo via household portraits composed of previous and new pictures and Zhang Dali and Wang Jinsong via their chronicling of China’s mass city transformations. 

East and West explores how photographers contested the permeation of Western cultural and consumerist values. Wang Qingsong created extremely composed, cinematic tableaus that steadily resemble futuristic stage performances, utilizing them as platforms to criticize the capitalist market financial system. Other artists had been equally attentive to digital codecs and futuristic imagery: Hong Hao, for instance, repeatedly staged himself as a considerably displaced shopper of Western tradition in self-portraits resembling Hello Mr. Hong (1998). 

The third and remaining part, Performance and the Body demonstrates how artists employed experimental images as a device of self-expression. Rather than foregrounding the medium’s indexical and optical qualities that freeze the previous, artists engaged their different senses resembling style and contact to give attention to lived, bodily experiences. The artist Cang Xin took pictures of himself whereas tasting bodily objects, a few of which function specific references to China, like {a photograph} of Mao. Other photographers resembling Huang Yan sought to make use of their very own physique to bodily hook up with conventional Chinese high quality arts practices, resembling in his 1999 Chinese Landscape Series. 

Also on view on the Kemper Art Museum this spring is The Song of the Germans, a sound set up produced by the internationally famend Berlin-based Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh. First premiered on the 2015 Venice Biennale, it includes a recording of ten African immigrants singing the German nationwide anthem of their native languages (Bamum, Duala, Ewondo, Igbo, Kongo, Lingala, Moore, Sango, Twi, and Yoruba). The sound composition is performed repeatedly, unfolding in a different way every time as one singer begins, and particular person voices enter, progressively constructing into a full refrain. Created throughout a second of peak immigration to Germany, Ogboh’s piece invitations listeners to contemplate how sound shapes our emotional experiences and frames and reframes our understanding of nationwide identification, multiculturalism, and (publish)colonialism. 

Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China is curated by Sabine Eckmann, the William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator on the Kemper Art Museum, with Elizabeth Mangone and Stephanie Nebenfuehr as curatorial analysis assistants. 

The Song of the Germans is featured at the side of the symposium Archiving the Sounds of German Culture: A Century of Collection, Curation, and Creative Practice, organized by Associate Professor Caroline Kita and Assistant Professor Sarah Koellner within the Department of Comparative Literature and Thought in Arts & Sciences at WashU.