M HKA Ensembles

Photography

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. S0296).

Between 1993 and 1998, Rong Rong shot photographs that one way or another had something to do with the (inhabitants of the) East Village. The East Village is a suburb of Beijing that in the first-half of the Nineties was home to young artists. Poor, for sure, but rich in energy and innovation. From these East Village photos a selection of 40 photographs was grouped in a portfolio with the title Rong Rong’s East Village. This portfolio, in a handsigned edition of 780 examples, is a collector’s item in China and abroad. Rong Rong moved to the East Village shortly after his arrival in Beijing in 1992. Many beginning artists from the provinces flocked there at that time. Rong Rong seized the occasion to document the sizzling artistic activity of this community in a series of raw black & white photographs. His East Village series can be divided into three groups. The first consists of photographs of activities of the East Village art community itself, from 1993 to the first-half of 1994. A second group shows performances of artists who lived in the East Village, shot from the end of 1994, the time when the community was forced to dissolve due to police intervention. The third group is made up of self-portraits taken by Rong Rong during his East Village period. East Village photos were first shown in Rong’s exhibition The Witness of Contemporary Art in China, in the Tokyo Gallery, Japan in 1995.