In her thirty years of work in China, photographer Lois Conner's vision and creative method bring to sites both modern and ancient the sense of an eternity captured in a moment. Her work illuminates a Chinese world in which the living past pulses through a vibrant contemporary reality.
This exhibition offers vignettes of the Chinese capital that capture in brief the titanic ambitions, and evanescent power, of its incumbent political and economic masters.
This photography exhibition by Lois Conner was opened by Gael Newton, the National Gallery of Australia’s Senior Curator of Australian and International Photography. The opening was preceded by an illustrated lecture by the artist and launch of a new collaborative book by Lois Conner and CIW Director Professor Geremie R. Barmé, Beijing: Contemporary and Imperial.
About the Photographer
Lois Conner first went to photograph China in 1984, for eight months, on a Guggenheim Foundation grant. Her large-scale panoramic photographs are characterized by their narrative sweep, and implicit attention to history and culture. Conner’s works are now in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library, London. In 1993, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington DC, presented a retrospective of her work titled Landscape as Culture. Conner has also been teaching for three decades, at institutions such as Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the New School, among others, and currently teaches at Bard College. Her books include Beijing: Contemporary and Imperial (2014), Beijing Building (2012), Life in a Box (2010), Twirling the Lotus(2007) and China: The Photographs of Lois Conner(2000).
The exhibition will run until the end of August at the Australian Centre for China in the World.
The Gallery is open weekdays 9am – 5pm.