A young mountain girl dances for her grandmother in a village in China.
The Dancing Dreams of a Mountain Girl by Huaifeng Li, was the winning photograph of the Global SinoPhoto Awards (GSPA), an international photo competition celebrating Chinese culture, in 2020.
The picture now stands in Christie’s in King Street, St James’s, as part of an exhibition to mark the awards fifth year.
Open to the public from this week, in celebration of the Chinese New Year, the exhibition will run until January 31.
Culture Identified: Global SinoPhoto Awards Revisited 2020 – 2024, features 62 selected images from 32 photographers worldwide who have entered their photographs into the Awards since it launched in 2020.
21st Century Types, 2023, by Grace Lau (Picture: Grace Lau)
Curated by international producer and curator Sebah Chaudhry, each image tells a story, which imagines and interprets connections between Chinese culture and the rest of the world.
Featured artists include Grace Lau, whose image, 21st Century Types, 2023, critiques imperialist depictions of the ‘exotic’ Chinese.
Using a 30-year-old Hasselblad camera, she created a studio in the ‘Port’ of Hastings, with Victorian-style props: a patterned carpet, a vase with fake peonies, a Chinese stool, a faux panda skin rug, and a painted Oriental backdrop.
Against the set, Ms Lau photographed Hasting’s residents and their everyday items – coke bottles, chips, ice-cream, and sunglasses – to highlight the tension between historical cultural representation and modern subjects.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, a worker takes a nap, balanced across his bike in the middle of the street. The image, Day Dreamers, was taken by Eric Leleu in 2010.
In China, street traders, workers, employees, or waiters are often seen falling asleep for a few minutes at their place of work, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the street.
Day Dreamers, China, 2010, by Eric Leleu (Picture: Eric Leleu)
Between 2005 and 2010, Mr Leleu photographed them all over the country.
For him, it is a social phenomenon which reveals a little-known side of contemporary China where private life spills over onto the sidewalk and intimacy is exposed to the community.
The sleepers bear witness to a China in which workers get up early, go to bed late, but recover with these short naps – symbols of a certain respect for knowledge of the body and its balance.
In another photograph, Resisting, a barber shop stands in the middle of a demolished ground.
The image, captured by Aurelien Chen in 2021, shows life surrounded by destruction.
Resisting, China, 2021, by Aurelien Chen (Picture: Aurelien Chen)
Clients and barbers remain busy at work; they will keep going as long as the shop still stands.
Even after demolition, the memory of the place will remain along with the stories that happened within it.
Over the last four years, the GSPA has collected thousands of images by hundreds of photographers from more than 40 countries.
Now in its fifth year, the Awards will introduce a People’s Award for the first time. This special Award will be chosen by visitors to the exhibition at Christie’s.
The GSPA, founded by Yintong Betser and Lynne Bryant, was inspired by the exhibition the Family of Man curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955.
It celebrated the universal human experience through 503 powerful photographs from around the world, promoting the shared values that connect all people.
Pictured top: The Dancing Dreams of a Mountain Girl by Huaifeng Li, the winning photograph of the GSPA 2020 (Picture: Huaifeng Li)