Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China

Nicole Huang

positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 18, Number 3, Winter

2010, pp. 671-693 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

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Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China

Nicole Huang

Contemporary Chinese artists have used family portraits from the 1960s
and 1970s to create experimental works that reinvent the very ideas of the
camera, the album, and the familial gaze as vehicles of longing, remember-
ing, and contesting. For example, the new media artist Feng Mengbo, in an
interactive mixed-media installation titled My Private Album (1996), invites
gallery visitors to take a virtual journey through a familial past, placing
black-­and-­white images alongside artifacts from the same period.1 Zhang
Xiaogang uses his Bloodlines: The Big Family (1993 – 2000), a series of oil-
­on-­canvas paintings in opaque shades of red, gray, and yellow, to outline the
myriad of faces of conformity and to comment directly on the place of family
portraits in personal and collective memories.2 In 2000 the artist couple Shao
Yinong and Mu Chen took a month-­long ethnographic journey to Shao’s
hometown in Zhejiang province and constructed a computer-­manipulated,

positions 18:3  doi 10.1215/10679847-2010-018

Copyright 2010 by Duke University Press
positions 18:3  Winter 2010 672

photographic genealogy of the Shao clan called Family Register, framed by

panoramic scrolls of Chinese painting.3
These artists adopt varying styles, using media that cover a wide spec-
trum and producing, exhibiting, and staging their works in diverse ways.
Nonetheless, the unmistakable common thread that runs through these
experiments is their expression of a relationship with a reconstructed past.
This past often travels into the present as black-­and-­white photographic
images capturing the faces, gestures, costumes, bodies, and flesh of fathers,
mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, lovers, husbands, and wives — ­that
is, of the family.
Scholars and art critics alike have identified these faces of the past as
memories from the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1964 – 78). In recent
decades, a fascinated international art circle has sought to pin down the
connections between the Chinese avant-­garde and productions of political
symbolism from the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. One recurring argument is
that memories of the Cultural Revolution were the most important histori-
cal and personal legacy with which the generation of defiant artists in China
had to come to terms.4
In this article, I pursue the prehistory of these images to critically address
the recollection and reinvention of familial ties and bloodlines in contempo-
rary Chinese art. In the visual culture of the 1960s and 1970s, the genre of
family portraits can be viewed as a key to unraveling these historical under-
currents. My material is a group of photographs taken during the second
half of the Cultural Revolution, the early and mid-­1970s, that define the
“family portrait [quanjiafu]” as an important cultural genre, in dynamic con-
trast to photographic propaganda of the same period. Prior to the entrance
of contemporary experimental artists, there was a subtle attempt to turn the
photographic medium into narratives of personal histories, to locate and
reinvent a “past” that was still very much the present. While recent studies
of visual culture in postsocialist or post-­Holocaust societies focus on “post-
memory,”5 I examine the mechanisms of materializing and restructuring
personal memory that were in place before the Cultural Revolution drew
to an end.
Huang ❘ Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China 673

The Centrality of Photographic Propaganda

Contemporary art works often shed light on the rather peculiar, Janus-­faced
position that photography occupied in the daily life of Mao Zedong’s China.
On the most visible level were the publications and exhibitions of photo-
graphs that served exclusively as political propaganda. The public bom-
bardment of images of revolution, mass mobilization, and absolute devotion
contrasted with the everyday use of photography in family rituals. The lat-
ter sustained urban fabric and familial ties in spite of political turmoil and
marked a realm that was mostly discreet and distinctively private in an era
when the private was inevitably politicized.
The importance of family portraits in 1970s China is thus defined against
the centrality of photographic propaganda. The monthly pictorial Renmin
huabao (People’s Pictorial), whose English-­language edition is titled China
Pictorial, provides examples of some of the most technically accomplished
propaganda produced in China at the time. Launched in 1950, the pictorial
was modeled after the Soviet publication USSR in Construction. As the Chi-
nese Communist Party’s official pictorial magazine, it has delivered meticu-
lously engineered, glossy pictures of China for decades to both domestic and
overseas audiences. The overseas audience became more significant after
U.S. President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, which launched an
era of “ping-­pong diplomacy.”6 Following the crash of Lin Biao’s plane in
1971 and the collective questioning of Mao’s legacy that followed, the Chi-
nese revolutionary mass culture gradually collapsed. Pictorial representa-
tions displayed a subtle transformation, beginning in the early 1970s.
In his waning years, Mao was often pictured in media photographs
receiving a foreign dignitary. Figure 1, for example, is a photo (originally
in color) that shows Mao receiving former British Prime Minister Edward
Heath in 1974. These meticulously doctored images of Mao presented him
with perfectly smooth, almost childlike skin and wearing a distinctive and
meaningful smile, his trademark mole clearly visible on his chin. People
who were used to seeing Mao in polished images like this were often sur-
prised by other documentary footage from the time, in which he appeared
a frail and wrinkled octogenarian, his hand often shaking violently as he
shook hands with foreign dignitaries.
positions 18:3  Winter 2010 674

Figure 1  Chairman Mao receives former British Prime Minister Edward Heath, color photo,
China Pictorial, August 1974. Author’s personal collection

The visual style of China Pictorial during this period was more colorful
and vibrant than in the 1950s and 1960s, and a wider variety of subjects was
covered, including staged illustrations of “everyday life,” idealized workers
and peasants, sports, parades, and massive building projects. The magazine
employed a range of photographic styles, from straightforward and seem-
ingly factual representations of people and events to extreme close-­ups and
sweeping panoramas of natural wonders. Images of children and ethnic
minorities wearing vibrantly colored clothing adorned many covers and
pages. In an originally color photo depicting Tai children in Yunan prov-
Huang ❘ Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China 675

Figure 2  Tai children of Yunan Province celebrate the new year with the annual Water-
­S plashing Festival. Color photo by Li Chenting and Yu Pengfei, China Pictorial, August 1974.
Author’s personal collection

ince celebrating the new year with the annual Thingyan (Water-­Splashing)
Festival, every child displays a brilliant smile, pink cheeks, white teeth, and
colorful clothes, all set against a crystal blue sky (fig. 2). This cheerful visual
style is consistent with that of political posters from the same period. Jour-
nalistic photos like this were miniature posters, a form of stylized public dis-
play. As in other forms of political propaganda, the photographs printed in
the glossy pages of China Pictorial were a concerted effort to secure complete
faith in Mao’s revolutionary China. Socialist visual culture continuously per-
petuated the myth that no adult or child would be left behind.
The photographs published in China Pictorial are thus part of a larger
Chinese political spectacle, which involved the orchestration of many modes
positions 18:3  Winter 2010 676

Figure 3  Preschool children line up to wash hands. Color photo by Wang Fuzun and Zeng
Xiangmin, China Pictorial, July 1974. Author’s personal collection

of representation and the cross-­reference and repetition of political mes-

sages. A 1974 image, originally in color, of a preschool scene (fig. 3), also
from China Pictorial, is a case in point. Here, a group of children line up in
front of a row of washbasins. A woman teacher, dressed in grey (which sug-
gests that she is Han, as only ethnic minorities and children wore colorful
clothes in the visual propaganda of the period), is pouring water into each
basin. With broad smiles on their faces, the children diligently wash their
hands. Two posters adorn the walls behind them, with images that would
Huang ❘ Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China 677

have been very familiar to viewers at the time. One features a soldier of the
People’s Liberation Army giving a little boy a haircut, and the other depicts
three small children engaged in after-­school activities. This photograph
is one of numerous “metapictures” appearing in the pages of China Picto-
rial. Pictures refer to other pictures and familiar images are retextualized
within a new frame.7 The composition is indicative of how political mes-
sages circulated from one text to another, one image to another, rearticulat-
ing key themes and imperatives through a particular form of pedagogical
intertextuality.
Most striking in the pages of China Pictorial is the array of idealized
images of “family,” all bearing a distinctive 1970s trademark. Though the
one-­child policy was not formally adopted until 1979, ensuring the “qual-
ity [suzhi]” of the population through birth control had already become an
imperative by the early 1970s. “Carry out birth control for the revolutionary
cause [wei geming shixing jihua shengyu]” and “Protect the legal rights of
women and children [weihu funü ertong hefa quanyi]” were frequent slogans
in visual propaganda of the time. In posters promoting birth-­control poli-
cies, children were often featured together with women.8 Accordingly, in
the journalistic photos published in China Pictorial, an idealized nuclear
family often took center stage. In an originally color photo depicting a
Tibetan family (fig. 4), the young parents and their two small children — ­a
girl and a boy — ­sit together in a cozy corner of their rural dwelling. The
center of the photo is a radio held in the hands of the father. Their happy
faces cast toward the left, as if they were gravitating toward an imaginary
“center” located away from the picture and embodied in the omnipresence
of the broadcast waves. The idealized size of the family, their healthy phy-
sique, sound dental hygiene, and neat surroundings, as well as the imagi-
nary sound waves transmitted from the small wireless, have admitted them
into a socialist visual culture in which everyone is encouraged to be an active
participant.
The picture-­perfect family of the 1970s — ­a nuclear family of father,
mother, and two children, preferably a boy and a girl — ­is again visualized
in a black-­and-­white photo set in Tiananmen Square (fig. 5). Standing on
the bridge, the family of four looks toward the rostrum, perhaps at Mao’s
positions 18:3  Winter 2010 678

Figure 4  A Tibetan nuclear family. Color photo by Ru Suichu, China Pictorial, June 1973.
Author’s personal collection

portrait hanging high above. Once again, the father figure, with his index
finger pointing upward, seems to lead the direction of the family’s collec-
tive gaze. Dressed in neat shirt, vest, and slacks, he has the air of a rising
party cadre. The mother, standing in back, wears loosely cut pants and
blouse, out of sync with the increasingly fashion-­conscious society of the
mid-­1970s. The children are apparently the most “fashionable” elements of
the image: the girl is festively dressed in a white shirt, knit vest, and pat-
terned skirt, while the toddler boy is securely positioned in a metal-­framed
stroller, a rare commodity in China at the time. Here is happiness, and a
hint of urban affluence. This image of an idealized nuclear family repre-
sents the newly revamped face of China, set in a rapidly changing domestic
and global environment.
Huang ❘ Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China 679

Figure 5  A nuclear family in Tian’anmen Square. Black and white photo by Yang Xiuyun,
China Pictorial, July 1974. Author’s personal collection

The Place of Family Portraits

The engineered images of idealized families of the 1970s are meaningful

in and of themselves, but their importance is thrown into high relief when
viewed alongside a different set of family images: mundane and seemingly
banal, privately commissioned portraits in black and white. The family por-
traits in figures 6 – 9 were produced in commercial photo studios and have
been preserved as private artifacts. The concurrent and somewhat isolated
practices of photography — ­as a public mechanism of, on the one hand, power
positions 18:3  Winter 2010 680

and control and, on the other, family ritual and private documentation — ­
highlight the strikingly different faces of the medium. I use this juxtaposi-
tion to center what is marginal to the grand narratives of recent Chinese his-
tory: attitudes toward ordinary life, along with ideas about home, emotional
expression, and the production and circulation of material objects. Only by
contrasting these images, of people close to the bottom of the social and eco-
nomic hierarchy, with the visual spectacle of photographic propaganda can
we understand the significance of family portraits as both everyday artifacts
and artistic creations, and define the degree of human agency involved in
their production. The discussion of human agency here does not change the
fact that these images were permissible only within the boundaries of the
prevailing political code and under the socialist state’s omnipresent surveil-
lance of their production. My reading of these images, however, suggests an
erosion at the edges of this perimeter, as I read a tacit rejection of the state’s
presence in the daily lives of urban Chinese in the quiet, solemn displays of
togetherness and familial ties.
I encountered the genre of family portraits years ago when I began field
research in the city of Hangzhou, a provincial capital about one hundred
miles southeast of Shanghai. A midsize city by Chinese standards, Hang-
zhou is representative of the many urban communities in southern China
that boast a long and illustrious history, but that are currently undergoing
massive demolition, rebuilding, and expansion.9 For two years I engaged in
an ongoing conversation with a number of women in their seventies and
eighties who played leadership roles on neighborhood committees during
the 1960s and 1970s. These women were witnesses to and participants in the
era’s mass cultural movements, in and around the space of the communal
courtyard. While my primary interest at the time did not concern photo-
graphic productions, a by-­product of my research was a collection of family
photographs, acquired through these women, many of which are studio por-
traits that depict family reunions, captured solemnly in local photo shops.
My conversations with the women prompted me to locate the “creators”
of these artifacts. Between 2004 and 2006, I interviewed a group of retired
studio photographers, now also in their seventies and eighties, who gradu-
ated from their apprenticeship in the 1940s and worked in local photo shops
Huang ❘ Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China 681

throughout the three decades of Mao’s China. Most of the photographers

considered themselves to be artisans and only rarely artists, since standard
portraiture was seen as a factory-­line commercial operation rather than an
artistic creation. Some, however, did highlight the connections between their
line of business and the art of portraiture. I see these 1970s studio photogra-
phers as playing many roles: artists, artisans, men and women “dedicated to
serving the people,” and, perhaps most important, local ethnographers.
While I was conducting interviews and requesting visual evidence to sub-
stantiate individual accounts, I observed families in the process of reread-
ing family photographs; from these observations, I began to understand the
centrality of visual experiences in shaping personal histories. I noticed that
family portraits played an important role when they were made, but that
they also retained an active social function in the present.
To be sure, few families displayed their black-­and-­white photographs,
then or now; these bland images would seem out of place in the revamped
and modernized domestic setting of contemporary China. If families dis-
played any family photograph at all, it was an enlarged color portrait taken
in recent years against a more current backdrop. Many families I visited told
me that it would not be easy to locate that one studio portrait I wanted to
see. Sometimes they would feel sure that it no longer existed, or that one of
the children who had moved far away possessed the sole copy. But on every
occasion, this important portrait eventually turned up among other artifacts
that the family had also believed lost, such as old address books, a 1950s
stamp collection, letters, and Mao badges. I observed from time to time how
such familiar images became both alien and intimate during this process
of retrieval. For most Chinese families in the 1960s and 1970s, to gather the
entire family together in a local photo shop to record an important occasion
was very expensive. For many, one or two studio portraits a year comprised
their entire personal documentation of the era. This explains the absence of
photo albums in most cases. And, as I will argue, it is precisely this scarcity
of the product that makes it such a weighty subject.
As my collection of family portraits grew, the importance of the genre
became increasingly apparent. As a researcher, my foremost challenge was
to find the language to define the prominent position occupied by family
positions 18:3  Winter 2010 682

portraits, as opposed to the other, more everyday use of the photographic

medium — ­namely, the snapshot. Portable cameras were widely available in
the first decades of the People’s Republic of China. Though few could afford
to own them, daily or weekly rentals of the more popular models, such as
the Seagull TLR (Twin Lens Reflex), were possible at local photo shops
and tourism stores at a fraction of the cost of actually buying the camera.10
This is not to suggest that popular models such as the Seagull TLR were
manufactured for everyday consumption. The devices were used to photo-
graph terror, death, and tyranny, documenting history as it had never been
seen before. Some striking examples were presented in an exhibition called
Facing Death: Portraits at Cambodia’s Killing Fields, which was an array
of photographs of prisoners before they were put to death in Tuol Sleng,
Cambodia. All these images were created with the Shanghai-­made Seagull
TLR, according to the curator at the California Museum of Photography at
the University of California Riverside, which housed the exhibition in 1998.
“Over 14,000 men, women, and children were taken to Tuol Sleng, Prison
S-­21,” the curator wrote in the exhibition’s online catalog, “where all but
seven were executed or died from the effects of torture and maltreatment. . . .
Prisoners were photographed to document the presence of such ‘microbes’
who were ‘infecting’ society, thus justifying their extermination.”11 Like the
Janus-­faced photographic medium itself, the camera was a tool of power
and control, often complicit in state-­sanctioned violence and tyranny, as well
as a crucial means of recording a very hidden personal past.
Despite the importance of snapshots and the portable camera, which are
a realm of study unto themselves, the family portrait was the predominant
method of documenting personal histories in the 1970s. This assertion of
family unity in the face of adversity was by no means particular to China,
nor was it unique to the 1970s. The ritual of taking family portraits dates to
the late nineteenth century, when photography became integral to a modern
way of life, and photographic portraiture replaced traditional portraiture as
the sought-­after commodity of the leisure class. In her pioneering work on
this topic, Regine Thiriez defines studio portraits as the dominant form of
commercial photography in the decades following the medium’s introduc-
tion to China, in the second half of the nineteenth century. She considers
the year 1900 as a dividing point, since at the turn of the twentieth century
Huang ❘ Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China 683

cameras became portable, snapshots emerged, and the role of photography

in everyday consumption was significantly transformed.12
Why, then, did the photo portrait return as the preferred document
of personal history in 1970s China? One argument is that in a politically
oppressive era, the family’s very journey to the local photo studio was a quiet
gesture of defiance. The space of urban commerce (a small local photo shop,
for instance) housed a tactful form of resistance against the omnipresent and
penetrating lens of the state into individual lives.
Ritualistic experiences associated with the making of quanjiafu began to
carry more weight in the daily lives of urban Chinese in the 1970s. Starting
in the late 1960s, in the aftermath of the Red Guard Movement, a generation
of junior high and high school graduates — ­30 million by some estimates — ­
were uprooted from cities and relocated to remote rural regions. This mas-
sive urban migration meant that separation, distance, displacement, long-
ing, homecoming, and reunion were the themes of everyday life for affected
families. Over the next ten years, when children returned home from the
countryside, gathering the entire family to venture to a local photo shop to
properly record the event became a ritual and an essential means of celebrat-
ing the family’s togetherness, however briefly.13
By the early 1980s, personal cameras had become more affordable. Pop-
ular models shifted from the 120 – millimeter to the 35 – millimeter lens,
making them more compact and easier to use. Color photos, those para-
dise images of a world in different hues that were once the stuff of dreams,
became available for daily consumption. Local photo shops gradually lost
their prominence. As the 1990s approached, old photo shops transformed
themselves into wedding parlors that catered to an emerging bourgeois class,
which demanded the production of fantasy images to celebrate their grow-
ing material needs.14 The golden age of old-­style photo shops had come to
an end. These old family photo portraits predominated for as long as they
did in the 1970s precisely because of the ritualistic experiences involved in
arriving at the final product, a portrait.
The many subnarratives of photography lure us in new analytical direc-
tions; the transformation of the photo backdrop in the last hundred years
is one such path. Thiriez describes the fantasy setting that characterized
earlier studio photographs. Elaborate backdrops remained an important
positions 18:3  Winter 2010 684

component of studio portraits until the 1950s. But such settings are categori-
cally absent in the 1970s portraits. In 1966 the Red Guards had ransacked
photo studios across the country, which were considered sites of bourgeois
lifestyle, destroying stage settings (daoju) and costumes (lifu). Backdrop was
done away with overnight.
With decorations gone, the background was reduced to either gray (hui
beijing) or black (hei beijing). When expressions appeared contrived, com-
mercial photographers in fact had to pay closer attention to lighting, to
enhance the artful use of both ambient and artificial light.15 Fantasy back-
drops would return to studio photography by the 1980s, when local photo
shops began to take wedding photos as their primary business. But in the
1970s, the importance of picturing an occasion surpassed any interest in
picturing a setting, social status, fantasy, or fashion. The goal of the studio
journey was to capture an occasion. These were not portraits to sell, nor
were they vanity portraits; they were strictly to keep as personal testament.
Some Chinese used the portraits as a highly personalized display in the
home, but most tucked them away until years later, when memories of an
event prompted retrieval of the portraits as visual evidence that it had in fact
happened.
The blank backdrop in most family portraits of the 1970s also suggests
that the meaning of the material environment lies outside of the picture
frame. The relevance of the era’s photographic propaganda is limited to its
service as a backdrop for family photographs. But with the genre of photo-
graphic propaganda in mind, we can see that the blank backdrop in family
portraits is not blank after all. Choosing to leave it blank had economic
reasons, of course: an elaborate backdrop would be too expensive for a small
photo shop with limited revenue and for clients with only a few yuan to
spare. But this choice can also be read as an understated effort to keep politi-
cal symbolism of the time as far away as possible from personalized images,
made for private consumption and future recollection.
A photo portrait registers its own immediacy and generates the illusion
of recording a real event in family history. It testifies to the solidarity of the
family and is an instrument holding the family in place, sustaining its togeth-
erness against all odds. It both chronicles family rituals and is itself the prod-
uct of ritual. To be sure, a photographic image does not convey truths about
Huang ❘ Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China 685

individual people. Poststructuralism has taught us only too well to distrust

interiors, or hidden “truth.” But we do a disservice to these photographs if
we do not allow the narrative to extend from the picture frame, and if we do
not seek to understand the occasions that give rise to these highly personal-
ized expressions. Signs of their constructedness, I contend, open a view into
the terrain of everyday life that has been concealed by political and social
histories of the era. A quanjiafu photo must be read as a picture with a story
to tell. It does not simply capture family members in the same photograph, it
also entails a collective journey into a local shop and the preparations that led
to the picture-­taking occasion. It also hints at separation, distance — ­at the
physical, social, political, psychological, and emotional obstacles that had to
be overcome to bring all those faces into the same picture frame. These black-
­and-­white images of staged dignity and happiness might seem banal at first,
but they become artistically and historically meaningful when they are read
as personal testimonies, imprinted with the political symbolism and popular
culture of their time, providing rare glimpses into the depths of private life
that would otherwise remain obscure.
Another subnarrative deals with the functions of these portraits in daily life
at the time they were taken. They were preserved, tucked away rather than
displayed. Families stored or hid these precious objects in unique and most
meaningful efforts of collecting, memorializing, and album making. Photo-
graphs were often placed in worn manila envelopes that bore the red printed
characters of work units. Larger envelopes were salvaged from official mail-
ings; what used to hold official documents and newspaper clippings would be
employed to safeguard a family’s few material connections to a personal past.
Some of the smaller envelopes were so-­called gongzi dai (wage-­sacks). Meager
allowances for the month would be kept in these inconspicuous wrappers,
which were then reused to preserve a short stack of black-­and-­white portraits
and snapshots. Sometimes photographs were sent to distant family members
and friends as gifts or mementos. Recipients would store and preserve these
rare images in a similarly discreet and solemn fashion. Such was the method
of personal memorialization in 1970s China.
Family portraits were made and tucked away in corners. While photo-
graphic propaganda would domineer the daily lives of urban Chinese in the
1960s and 1970s, family portraits from the era show us a strikingly different
positions 18:3  Winter 2010 686

face of the medium, compelling us to enter uncharted terrain. They urge

us to question how a strong arm of visual propaganda was transformed for
personal use, how it became a tool to organize domestic life, how it assisted
and witnessed everyday tactics of survival and defiance, how it has occupied
a discreet and yet irreplaceable position in visual memories of the period. A
history of contemporary Chinese visual cultures will have to come to terms
with this body of private artifacts. The key is to move beyond a discussion of
how visual propaganda conveyed political messages and to focus instead on
how individuals lived with and made use of words, images, and the mecha-
nisms that created them.

Traces, Shadows, and Scribbles

Many family portraits from the 1970s convey a strong theme of absence or
displacement. Reunions are of course underwritten by departure and alien-
ation. And yet some of the photographs speak explicitly of absence and void.
Four family portraits taken by the Qian family over the course of five years
are a case in point (figs. 6 – 9).16
The Qian family collection from the Cultural Revolution years consisted
of just three small studio portraits. The first was taken in April 1969, on
the eve of the eldest son’s departure for Tieli County in Heilongjiang prov-
ince, one of the harshest environments for the generation of educated youth
(fig. 6). The family had a questionable background — ­the maternal grand-
parents were classified as “capitalists.” As a result, Yilin did not receive the
same opportunities as his classmates. Like many of his generation who had
similar family backgrounds, he decided to take the matter into his own
hands and reinvent his past. He stole the family registration booklet and
went to the neighborhood committee to have his residency changed from
Hangzhou to a remote corner of the far north. Standing in the middle of the
back row in the photo, the tallest and strongest of the three brothers, Yilin
appears proud, courageous, and full of aspirations. The entire family — ­
father, mother, three sons, and one daughter — ­put on a happy face for the
camera. Ms. Qian, the little girl in the front row seated between her parents
and the youngest of the siblings, was four years old at the time.
Huang ❘ Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China 687

Figure 6  The Qian family portrait, 1969. Figure 7  On the back of the Qian family portrait, 1969.
Courtesy of the Qians Courtesy of the Qians

Figure 8  The Qian siblings portrait, 1971. Figure 9  The Qian siblings portrait, 1973.
Courtesy of the Qians Courtesy of the Qians

The back of this 1969 portrait makes it an even more important historical
document (fig. 7). It shows six lines of scribbles. Ms. Qian told me that Yilin
wrote the darkest line of handwriting, the second line from the top, before
his departure. It reads “A memento taken before Yilin’s departure for Tieli
[Yilin fu Tie linbie liunian].” After Yilin left, his sister, who had yet to learn
to read and write, tried to imitate her brother’s handwriting and copied it
positions 18:3  Winter 2010 688

several times. In the absence of her childhood idol, Ms. Qian would copy the
same line over and over again, reinforcing the theme of absence.
The Qian family portrait comprises several layers of narrative, including
the drastic action taken by the eldest brother to wipe out his identity and
take on a new one, all the preparation preceding his departure, the family’s
journey to the photo shop, the actual moment that was captured there, the
moment Yilin wrote the words on the back of the picture, and of course his
sister’s repeated visits to the scene as recorded in her childish scribble. Ms.
Qian’s childhood memories are thereby constituted by a continuous process
of looking, seeing, writing, recording, and memorializing. She took her first
writing lesson in these visits to the location of the one and only family por-
trait they possessed.
The second photo the family presented to me speaks explicitly of absence.
Two years later, in 1971, the three remaining siblings were captured together
in a typical sibling portrait of the era. The absence of Yilin is startling (fig.
8). This portrait was followed by a third, taken during the Chinese New
Year of 1973 (fig. 9). After four years of displacement, Yilin had come home
for a short visit. This occasion called for a special trip to the local photo
shop. Though the four siblings were together again in the same frame, the
ambitious and proud young Yilin was gone. In his place, a subdued, beaten,
and weathered man occupies the right corner of the photo. Yilin’s sister,
now eight, is in the center. Having grown up with the anticipation of Yilin’s
return, the little girl has come into her own. Her big brother’s return signi-
fies the process of growth in the little girl. Her childhood idol has become a
shadow. The process of remembering, longing, forgetting, and restructuring
is delineated in these family portraits seen in a chronological sequence.
To be sure, themes of absence and displacement become more apparent
when the portraits are read together as a narrative sequence. Some contem-
porary Chinese artists have captured the narrativity of family portraits from
the Mao era, demonstrating that the historical images in family photographs
present narrative structures extending into the present.
A series of oil paintings by Zhang Xiaogang is a powerful revelation of
such narrativity. Born in 1958, Zhang graduated from the Department of
Oil Painting of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1982. His paintings
have been exhibited around China since the late 1980s, and in Europe and
Huang ❘ Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China 689

Figure 10  “The Big Family.” Oil on canvas by Zhang Xiaogang,

featured in Wenyi yanjiu, March 2008. University of Wisconsin
Memorial Library East Asian Collection

America since the 1990s. His works now are bought by art museums and
private collectors around the world.17 Most acclaimed among his paint-
ings is a series titled Bloodline: Big Family. Zhang’s uniqueness, critics have
claimed, lies in his effortless combination of a political pop style with strokes
of photo-­realism, and in his ability to locate a strategic place between paint-
ing and photography. Francesca Dal Lago, Gao Minglu, and others have
interpreted Zhang’s works as questioning the humanism and individuality
shared by avant-­garde artists in the post-­Mao era.18 Zhang himself, how-
ever, cites his fascination with the idealized images captured in old family
portraits and his personal affinity for the ritualistic experiences of portrait
making as the source of his creation (fig. 10).19
positions 18:3  Winter 2010 690

Throughout Zhang’s series of familial images, there appear many scat-

tered traces of light, watermarks, shadows, and thin red lines. Critics tend
to read these subtle marks as bloodlines linking individuals together, and
pointing to a shared history of trauma and victimization. Zhang offers a
different interpretation: “The different color of the child stands for a differ-
ence between the parent and the child. I changed the color to add a sense of
absurdity. The lines and the light are meant to destroy the customary effect
created by these photographs. Posing for a photograph, people already dis-
played a certain formality. It is already something artificial. What I do is to
increase this artificiality and this sense of formalism.”20
For me, Zhang’s close-­in and close-­up images of human faces are remi-
niscent of the negatives of old family portraits. Just as a good author writes
literature with veiled layers of meaning, artists who convey a lost past are
messengers of hidden images, who visualize what is left out of the process
of creating uniformity. Zhang’s work suggests a defamiliarization of the
all-­too-­familiar family images. Looking at old family portraits for a long
time, the artist must have begun to see things that were not there, ties that
were too fragile to maintain, childish scribbles hidden on the backs of photo-
graphs. The traces, lines, and marks are Zhang’s way of accounting for these
ghosts of the past, of secrets deeply hidden. Photo processing, from rough
surface to ironed-­out smoothness, is revealed in Zhang’s none-­too-­smooth
gallery of faces.
In today’s booming industries of nostalgia, old family photographs have
become collectibles, sought after and channeled back into everyday con-
sumption.21 In the midst of this “old photo fever,” Zhang’s paintings teach
his audience how to read that photographed past: how to look for traces
and shadows, how to turn the photo around and look at the back side, how
to dig out the negatives to look at watermarks and check where alterations
have been made, how to decipher why these traces and connections have
remained hidden for so long.
That photography is a powerful tool for representing absence has been
more recently conveyed in Hai Bo’s series of photographic portraits, titled
simply They.22 Each set of Hai Bo’s photos juxtaposes two images taken
decades apart. The first is an old group photo, taken during the 1950s or
1960s, in which men and women in the prime of life are identified by typical
Huang ❘ Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China 691

markers of their time, such as clothes, hair, and accessories; they all subtly
display expressions of beauty, youth, energy, hope, and faith. The second
picture, taken by Hai Bo, shows the same group in the present. With its
juxtaposition of the dead — ­represented by a dark shadow or an unoccupied
chair — ­and the survivors, the image unabashedly represents the passage
of time. Time’s cruelty, coupled with hinted political vicissitudes, evokes
narratives of personal tragedy associated with the calamity that engulfed a
nation and its people. But it is the cruelty of the photographic medium itself,
the fact that it renders not only presence but also absence, void, death, and
the very act of erasure in a shockingly honest manner, that is captured most
effectively in Hai Bo’s art. The efforts of contemporary Chinese artists to
reinvent the familial and intimate gaze are thus a powerful memorial to the
black-­and-­white images of decades past.

Notes

Research for this article began eight years ago. Its earlier versions were presented at the
University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, the Seattle
Art Museum, the University of Washington, and the Association for Asian Studies annual
meeting in 2002. I thank audience members for their feedback and constructive criticism.
Five years ago in Seattle, a conversation with Regine Thiriez proved inspirational. Mad-
eleine Yue Dong offered written comments that helped strengthen the argument. Reports
by the two anonymous readers for positions were equally encouraging. William Schaefer
deserves much gratitude for his critical insights and his work in putting the collection of
essays together. Years ago, William Nienhauser Jr. gave me a batch of the journal China Pic-
torial from the 1970s that had been in his personal collection and told me to put the material
into good use. I hope he finds the results satisfactory.
  1. For an introduction to this and other interactive CD-­ROMs created by Feng, see Gereme
Barmé, “Mb@Game: A Beijing Screensaver,” ART Asia Pacific 15 (1997): 78 – 83. Feng him-
self has often reflected on how his work with new media is related to his experiences grow-
ing up during the Cultural Revolution era. See, e.g., Feng Mengbo, “Luanma shanshui”
(“Landscapes in Gibberish”), Dangdai yishu yu touzi 10 (2009): 50 – 51; and “Changzheng:
Chongqi” (“Long March: Restart”), Dangdai yishu yu touzi 10 (2009): 52 – 53.
  2. See Huang Liaoyuan, “Zhang Xiaogang Da jiating” (“Zhang Xiaogang’s Big Family”),
Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan (July 2000): 14 – 15.
  3. Shao Yinong and Mu Chen’s panoramic Family Register was exhibited in the first Pingyao
International Photography Festival in summer 2000 and toured the country thereafter. In
positions 18:3  Winter 2010 692

2002 the couple republished the work as an album. See Shao Yinong and Mu Chen, Jiazu
tupu (Family Register) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Sheying Chubanshe, 2002). Also see Mu Chen,
“Weishenme pai jiapu” (“Why Photograph Family Register”), Dongfang yishu 2 (2002):
102 – 5.
  4. See, e.g., Francesca Dal Lago, “Images, Words, and Violence: Cultural Revolutionary
Influences on Chinese Avant-­Garde Art,” in Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and
Future, ed. Wu Hung (Hong Kong: New Art Media, 2002), 32 – 39. Also see Yang Xiaobin,
“Zhongguo qianwei yishu zhong de hongse jiyi youling” (“Red Memory Ghost of Chinese
Avant-­Garde Art”), Dongfang yishu 15 (2008): 108 – 13.
  5. See, e.g., Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New
York: Basic, 2001).
  6. See Gu Gu, “Shidai de zuji: Renmin huabao 45 nian” (“Footsteps of the Time: Forty-­Five
Years of China Pictorial”), Duiwai da chuanbo 21 (1995): 56 – 57; and “Renmin huabao 50 nian
zhongda baodao huigu” (“A Look Back at Landmark Events Reported in China Pictorial in
the Past Fifty Years”), Duiwai da chuanbo 7 (2000): 9 – 13.
  7. W. J. Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 35 – 57.
  8. See Nicole Huang, “Sun-­Facing Courtyards: Urban Communal Culture in Mid-­1970s
Shanghai,” East Asian History 25/26 (2003): 161 – 82.
  9. For an urban history of Hangzhou, see Liping Wang, “Paradise for Sale: Urban Space and
Tourism in the Social Transformation of Hangzhou, 1589 – 1937” (PhD diss., University of
California, San Diego, 1997).
10. The first model of the Seagull TLR was produced in 1964 by the Shanghai Camera Factory.
Improvements were made over the years on some of the later models, such as the Seagull-­4A,
4B, and 4C. Though the actual number is unknown, many camera collectors believe that
millions were made between 1964 and the late 1970s, most of which were purchased by work
units and camera rental shops, though individuals bought a small number. A Seagull-­4B
with a hard leather case sold for 120 RMB in the 1970s. For details on these and other cam-
era models in China’s prereform era, see Douglas St. Denny, Cameras of the People’s Republic
of China (Leicester, U.K.: Jessops Specialist, 1989).
11. The exhibition is available on line at www.cmp.ucr.edu/ (accessed May 6, 2010). Since 1998
it has toured many museums around the world.
12. Regine Thiriez, “Photography and Portraiture in Nineteenth-­Century China,” East Asian
History 17/18 (1999): 77.
13. These are often documented in the educated youth literature that has emerged in recent
decades. See, e.g., Xue Yanwen et al., eds., Zhiqing laozhaopian (Old Photos of Educated
Youth) (Tianjin: Baihua Wenyi Chubanshe, 2002).
Huang ❘ Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China 693

14. Yan Liang, “ ‘Kacha’ shengsheng shuo jinxi” (“Past and Present in Sounds of the Shutter”),
Nanfang zhoumo (Southern Weekend), September 4, 1999. Also see Pan Xinhua, “Zhao­
xiangguan li de fengyu rensheng” (“Vicissitudes of Life as Seen in Photo Shops”), Xinmin
wanbao (Xinmin Nightly News), April 15, 2000.
15. Interviews with Zheng Xiaomi and Wang Jun, Hangzhou, May 2004.
16. The family has granted permission for these images to be used here. Their surname has
been altered to protect their anonymity.
17. Zhang Xiaogang has been dubbed “China’s hottest artist,” and his paintings are eagerly
sought after by international art collectors. In March 2006, when the first auction of con-
temporary Chinese art took place in New York, Zhang became the first Chinese artist to
fetch more than 1 million U.S. dollars for a single painting. One year later, he broke his own
record: his Bloodline: Three Comrades sold for $2,112,000 at Sotheby’s in New York.
18. Francesca Dal Lago, “Inside Out: New Chinese Art, a Conversation with Gao Minglu,”
ART AsiaPacific 20 (1998): 42 – 49.
19. See Ouyang Jianghe, “Da jiating: Yu Zhang Xiaogang duihua” (“Big Family: A Conversa-
tion with Zhang Xiaogang”), Dongfang yishu 6 (2007): 114 – 23.
20. Zhang Xiaogang is one of the artists featured in the Legacy Project. The quoted passage is an
excerpt from his “Artist’s Statement” posted at the project’s Web site. See www.legacy-­project
.org/index.php?page=art_detail&artID=871 (accessed May 5, 2010).
21. Wu Hung analyzes the connection between art and visual culture in his “The ‘Old Photo
Craze’ and Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Wu Hung, Making History: Wu Hung on Con-
temporary Art (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2008), 119 – 34.
22. See Hai Bo’s works featured in Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips, eds., Between Past and
Future: New Photography and Video from China (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2004),
56 – 57. Further discussion of Hai Bo’s They can be found in Wu Hung, Making History,
119 – 34. Also see Hai Bo’s own account of how he came to create They in “Hai Bo de shey-
ing zuopin” (“Photographic Works by Hai Bo”), Zhongguo sheyingjia 10 (2002): 49 – 51.