“The Moonlight, Full Moon.” Courtesy Galerie Paris-Beijing. © Yang Yongliang

Photographer Yang Yongliang studied traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy with the great master Yang Yang in Shanghai. Today, Yongliang cleverly combines this ancient art with photography and new medias to create both a futuristic and age-old world. His pictures represent the contemporary Shanshui, a style of Chinese painting that depicts scenery or natural landscapes, using a brush and ink rather than more conventional paints. “The Silent Valley”, a solo exhibition of photography and video, opens today at Galerie Paris-Beijing in Paris, France, and runs through April 27th. Yongliang was born in Shanghai, and currently teaches at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art.

“The Moonlight, New Moon,” 2012. Courtesy Galerie Paris-Beijing. © Yang Yongliang

“A Bowl of Taipei, n. 2,” 2012. Courtesy Galerie Paris-Beijing. © Yang Yongliang

“A Bowl of Taipei n. 5,” 2012. Courtesy Galerie Paris-Beijing. © Yang Yongliang

“The Silent Valley, Scorpion and Missle,” 2012. Courtesy Galerie Paris-Beijing. © Yang Yongliang

“The Silent Valley, Crocodile and Shotgun,” 2012. Courtesy Galerie Paris-Beijing. © Yang Yongliang

©Hai Zhang

“Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost” is a series about photographer Hai Zhang‘s unsettling journey through the “new” China, with its accelerated economic and urban development, cultural change, and social upheaval brought on by mass internal migration. Zhang shot the images between 2008 and 2012, and says they reflect his raw anxiety about a future with no certainty beyond the acute metaphysical awareness of one’s own fragility. “To me, it has become impossible to take a shot of today’s China without capturing contrast” on the fault line between China’s past and present, he says. “But what does it really mean?…Can I grasp a sense of today’s ‘Chinese-ness’ through a composite portraiture of my own society? Perhaps this is an impossible ambition. Looking at the pictures I have taken so far, I hate to realize that I am still dealing with illusions and fantasies.”

An exhibition of the work is on view at the Chobi Mela VII International Photography Festival in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is also showing at Gallery Voies Off in Arles, France through March 3, 2013. (more…)

Beijing China, 1965. © Marc Riboud.

Throughout time, many Western photographers have been fascinated with photographing Eastern culture. French photographer Marc Riboud is no exception. The former Magnum photographer has been training his lens on cultures around the world during his travels throughout the past six decades. An exhibition of his work, which opened January 13 in Dubai, features 27 images from his travel portfolio taken between the western border of the “Far East,” Morocco, and the eastern border, China. The exhibition is on display at The Empty Quarter gallery through February 13.

– Lindsay Comstock

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All photos © Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos. Above: Gleaning Coal from the Trains, West of Datong

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All Photos unless otherwise noted © Q Sakamaki/Redux

Q Sakamaki photographed throughout China’s Northeast which was once called Manchuria. The region was a crossroads, transformed by history through migration, resource exploitation, occupation and war. And now the area is facing new upheaval due to globalization and China’s rapid economic growth, creating a gap between the rich and poor, as well as contributing to a rise in unemployment.

Above: An unemployed man at a memorial park of Tiexi District in Shen Yang in China’s North East that used to have many of the government owned iron factories and houses for workers. Many of the factories were closed, creating high unemployment. Now the area has been turning into high rise residential buildings with often unfair land grabs.

- courtesy of Redux (more…)